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more: math take on metropolis and question for the class

2009 March 16
by aaclh

I want to build a little more off of what Eva (sp?) said in class today.

Metropolis seemed to set up or suggest a lot of dichotomies, for example above and below ground, head and hand(s), ladylike and unladylike behavior, human and robot, good and evil, etc. The moral (stated at least three times) of the movie was that the head and the hand(s) need a mediator. I am not really sure how this was supposed to work. Was the mediator another thing? Was the mediator a head and a hand? Or, what seems more plausible from the movie, was the mediator a relationship between the head and the hand? (Thinking in terms of math (category theory in particular) – head and hands are objects and mediator is a morphism).

Supposing this is the case, that the mediator relates the head and hands together – why were the other dichotomies not similarly resolved with appropriate relationships? Were they, and I just missed it? Why this particular dichotomy?

2 Responses
  1. Anne Dalke permalink*
    March 16, 2009

    what’s a “morphism”?
    still waiting also for an explanation of “the ultimate answer is 42”…?

  2. aaclh permalink
    March 16, 2009

    “The ultimate answer is 42” is a reference to the radio program (or series of books if you like) The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. (NB: the following might spoil the storyline.)

    In the story: Earth is a computer program so complicated it requires organic matter. The program was set in motion to find the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe and Everything. Basically, mice wanted an answer to Life, the Universe and Everything and so they made a computer who would compute this. The computer (called Deep Thought), did so and found the Ultimate Answer to be 42. Everyone was so upset about this answer (because it didn’t make sense), until Deep Thought told them that it could make a computer that could compute the Ultimate Question so that they could understand the Ultimate Answer. (Ironically Earth was destroyed shortly before it finished running to create a hyperspace bypass – so they never got the Ultimate Question).

    The reason I brought this up was because I was thinking that perhaps we are too fixated on understanding things – so then having the Ultimate Answer be 42 (ie incomprehensible) could really be telling us to worry about something besides understanding life.

    A morphism is a bit harder to explain. Perhaps it would be easier to explain in terms of functions. (So just pretend I said function instead of morphism) So, in this case you can just think of a function (called the mediator) whose domain, is just the one thing: a head, and whose range (or image) is all of the hands. In this sense, a function might relate a head to the hands (or things it its domain to things in its range). Thus you can think of a function as a relation between objects. Is that clear?

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