mathematical machinery
For reasons I don’t want to go into yet, though I will at some point, I’ve been thinking through aspects of the machinery that mathematicians use to explore the mathematical landscape.
OK, fine, I’m speculating, as others have done, about how mathematics can be used as the underpinning framework for magic in a story I’m pondering, and in particular whether there’s something nifty and interesting I can bring to that conversation.
There are lots of places to start this speculation; one of them is the humble If Then logical implication. As tempting as I might it to be, I won’t dive into the glorious pool that is mathematical logic, but I will say that the basic structure of this statement is If X Then Y, where X and Y are themselves statements.
We then explore the truth or not of the whole statement ‘If X Then Y’ in terms of the truth of X and Y individually, and this is normally expressed as a table of values. (If you want to know more, you can look at the Logical Implication section of Truth Tables.)
But I want to go in a different direction here. There is an enormous power in being able to decide the scale and scope of consideration in the If statement, the X above, and then to create something in the Then statement, the Y above, so that the world created Y falls within the scale and scope of X. That is, we get something along the lines of If World Then Story.
This is one lens through which to consider fictional worlds and the stories set within those stories, whether the statement If World Then Story works as an internally consistent story.
I don’t want to get into the details of the story I’m working my way through; hopefully, in the not too distant future, I’ll be able to point you to where you might read it.
I’ll admit that I’m not yet persuaded that there is anything nifty or weirdly interesting about what I’m thinking through here, but I view it as a first step in a much longer journey. Who knows, maybe I can smuggle enough things in to make mathematicians of people without then even knowing it. One can dream, after all.
multijimbo 