SAVE TIME AND MONEY WITH A ‘PHILOSOPHICAL-MATHEMATICAL’ APPROACH TO BUILDING WEBSITES

Table of contents

Fundaments of mathematical arithmetic

 More than an executive summary by analogy

 Why before how before what: Aristotle`s insight that explicit insight comes after practice

 The theoretical is more practical than practice: explicit insight is found within practice

 Insight within practice: a practical theoretical argument by Wittgenstein

 Bonus chapter: the seduction of superficial mainstream thinking & the fly glass

 The number of words

Translating all of this to the business of making websites

Ideal step 0: begin before you begin. invent your history before you exist

Pragmatic step 1: begin building your first version of your website in short sentences

Step 2: go to step 0: make your website a piece of perfect art

Fundaments of mathematical arithmetic

More than an executive summary by analogy

(14-9-2017, Diemen). This article is about ‘Thinking in doing (is more ‘doing than doing’)’. That sounds rather mystical perhaps, but the content of the article is by no means mystical. I will give an argument on the basis of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) that (perfect) understanding before proceeding with all kinds of (difficult) tasks is not at all necessary in order to successfully complete these (difficult) tasks. We are always already ‘thrown’ into implicit understanding, we always understand something, but perfect explicit understanding will remain is a whole other ball game.

These insights will be translated into an rather more than pragmatical approach in building websites. Best advice: do not aim for a perfect website. Start pragmatically and start before starting: be clear about your mission, core values and vision, that is your core ideology. If you are not clear on the fundaments, the core ideology, you will we writing and rewriting endlessly.

In the scheme below from up till down understanding gets less and less implicit till we utter an explicit ‘Eureka’ and what is implicit, the solution that we already always knew, has become perfectly explicit for us.

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Below you see different visualisation methods or visual expressions of rule following, ‘Do this and this when multiplying’. What is the best way to calculate dependents on memory, practice, large or big numbers etc.. To present children with different visualisation methods at the time when they need to learn how to calculate is the result of the false idea that understanding is necessary in order to successfully calculate. That false picture of the fact is connected to another false picture of the facts that to ‘just’ follow a rule without understanding is reducing a child to a mechanical dead machine that needs to do tedious calculations. It only seems dead and mechanical from the perspective of an adult that already knows how to calculate.

The false picture that to present the young child with different presentation methods (to gain understanding) is false because the child does not only need to learn how to calculate, but also has to learn which presentation method is best to use in every concrete situation. A truthful picture on to form an objective picture on what is happening in the world is projected on calculations for children that need to learn to calculate. A truthful picture is that get a better idea of the objective facts by reading different newspapers, different media etc. from different countries etc.. However if you look at the presentation methods below they can all be translated into each other meaning in essence they are all the same qua rule how to calculate and only in the manner of presentation, picturing, that rule do they differ and thus in the method to calculate fast. It is like a good journalist who writes his article in different styles, but has the same message. Do you get the best picture of the objective facts by reading one journalist? (A good journalist is only good in so far he integrates different perspectives in his perspective).

Can you select the best of these five presentation methods for a young child that has to learn how to calculate and produce the right solutions? Which presentation enables you to understand (how to get to) the solution ‘529’? How context dependent are these questions if they are at all?

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The place value system is what the ‘double or triple word value’ is in scrabble. Or think of your place in society. In society you may be a 9, but you societal ‘power’ may be very low due the place on the societal food chain you have. On the top of a mountain you see further than if you are standing in a valley. 

The location of a number (on your paper) also determines the value of the number. In that way a 1 can be more valuable than a 9 for 1.., that is 100, is a higher number than 9. The place value system is based on the number zero, 0.

Why before how before what: Aristotle`s insight that explicit insight comes after practice

(12-9-2017, Diemen). Dutch primary education (till 12 years old) is bewitched by a false picture of how we as embodied beings naturally learn. Insight(ful understanding) should follow practice, but you cannot start with insight (or total understanding). Aristotle expression is very precise: that what is for us later in time is in itself more primary. Disembodied insight occurs later in time than bodily practice, but insight is in itself sooner than time (in eternity). Once you discover that what is more primary your insightful experience of insight always has the structure of ‘Actually now I think of it I already always knew…but for now I know what I always knew even better…I only had to remember’. (That is not strange if your remember eternity is in all times pervasive). What you know is still the same, but how you know, the quality of knowing, what you know is changed and therefore you get more insight in to the why of how you know what you know.

The theoretical is more practical than practice: explicit insight is found within practice

Positive in Dutch primary education is that insight is not identified with theory and theory is identified with having a method. One thinks in having more methods to solve one problem, say a problem in calculations, insight will follow. The picture is that of a dark object that is enlighted via different lights so you can see the whole object in time. You cannot see the object all at once for you cannot use several methods in one moment. So the false picture is that different theoretical methods to solve a practical problem will lead to theoretical insight into that problem, that is the answer.

That seems very reasonable and true, but a subtle illusionary picture is playing with us here. ‘Subtle’ for it almost is true. Insight is not theoretical in the sense that the theoretical stands over and against the practical for insight is more practical than practice. We could certainly call insight theoretical if be the theoretical we mean that what is more practical than practice, thus insight in the practical is more practical than the practical. (Thus: embodied insight is more bodily than the body, eternity is more temporary than time).

Insight within practice: a practical theoretical argument by Wittgenstein 

So why is Dutch primary education, or rather all kind of (commercial) institutes with the best intentions, caught in the picture that insight goes before practice, that one must focus on insight (by practicing with different methods as if the plurality of methods is not a means, but a goal in itself) rather than a lot of practice in solving problems (with one working method)? Emphasis is on learning how to apply which method to which problem as if knowing which method to use to solve a problem is already the insight rather than that the focus should be on to really solve the problem? That emphasis is contradictionary for Dutch primary education does recognize at the same time as believing that insight should precede practice that insight is not identical with having a method.

Say I command someone to get me a yellow ball. In obeying me this is what might have been happened: that someone gives me a yellow ball and that is that. You might object and say once that someone understood my order after hearing the order that someone imagined a yellow ball first and then got the ball. You might summarize: understanding, insight into the order, is necessary in order to obey my order, to follow a rule. Sounds reasonable?

With an extremely more than practical answer Ludwig Wittgenstein (1989-1951) showed that understanding is not at all necessary before following a rule for what if my order would be ‘imagine a yellow ball’? If understanding as imagining proceeds following the order then you must first imagine a yellow ball in order to imagine a yellow ball. That is an unnecessary repetition (and will lead to an infinite regress/regret ? ). So if you need to obey the order ‘get me a yellow ball’ insightful understanding consists in getting a yellow ball (and not in imagining a yellow ball, the ‘theoretical’ part, and then ‘practically’, without any understanding, getting the ball).

Well I would not say understanding, insight, consist in or could be reduced to the practical, but would say that insight shows itself in practice (and is more practical than practice). In subtracting from 3001 the number 273 we can use a certain method (in which the 1 in 3001 will borrow from the 3000 for 1 minus 7 is not allowed, but 11 minus 7 is allowed. To really understand that method, that is the answer, we should break down that method to its essence. That is we go a level more basic, more fundamental, in calculations and would discuss the place value system (meaning that the value of numbers is dependent on the place where the number is located. A 1 can be more than a 9 if the 1 is place on the place of where you place the hundreds. 100 is more than 9). I would make it more practical, more physical, that than applying the method of subtracting by inventing a game. A game for example in which a child must ‘throw’ a number in the least amounts of times by throwing to different places on the wall at which you can earn different point (1,10,100, 1000).

In education that means first of all exercise exercise, from simple to more complicated exercises, till understanding occurs suddenly within exercising and if these exercises have no result get more into the basics of calculations, of numbers and there place in the value place system. It does not mean: show the pupils different methods.

Bonus chapter: the seduction of superficial mainstream thinking & the fly glass

(14-9-2017, Diemen). The fact that you identify profound thinking with superficial thinking is like identifying gold with copper and if you like gold you will stick to copper for you believe it is gold. You have the wrong ‘picture’ of gold. The identification of gold with copper is the idea to go further and further, to progress (progression), go beyond your limits, expand (your business) etc..

This false picture is deeply embedded in our lives especially in Western culture. It is a picture in which ‘spirit’ or ‘awareness’ is identified with something unmoveable abstract and is defined as ‘immaterial’, ‘non-physical’. In a sense it is embedded in arithmetic’s (and thus mathematics) for a numbers ‘1, 2, 3, 4…’ are already an abstraction. You can have 3 apples or 3 mother in laws (O my…) or three bodies etc., but you cannot see 3 anywhere in reality. In this two headed contradictionary picture the real are the apples and the unreal are the numbers, but because at the same time the ‘spirit’ is identified with numbers. From the perspective of the real the physical, the body is, more primary than the number and the number is just a mere abstraction, but from the perspective of the body on the perspective of the‘spirit’ the further removed from reality, the more abstract, the more ‘spiritual’, the more real. This is a phrase that needs an explanation: ‘from the perspective of the body on the perspective of the ‘spirit’’. I translate: from the perspective of the finite on the perspective of the in-finite’. The ‘infinite’ as a word means ‘not finite’ as if the ∞ is reduced to a negation of the finite. Thus ‘spirit’ is not the negation of the ‘material’ body and ‘spirit’ must be defined in itself and should not be defined as immaterial, that is not material. In to trying to reach the spirit by abstraction as removing yourself further and further from reality is like the fly that wants to get out of the fly glass by flying further and further (uhhh…3 inches) and bumping into the glass. (A great metaphor of Wittgenstein).

In the scheme above you see that the body is both valued as something positive and something negative and spirit is valued as well as something both positive and negative.

A fly glass in which the fly flies in from the open bottom of the glass:

A fly glass used as a wasp glass with golden liquid, honey, to lure the wasp by which they drown in their wish to drink honey:

So what is the glass or the impenetrability for flies of the glass? I would say the numbers. I would add that the transparency of the glass, the visible invisible (for what is purely transparent is invisible), is the abstraction from specific numbers and is the number as number that in mathematics is symbolized with letters (A, B, C…). How do you come into the glass? If you want to prove a solution by abstraction, so abstraction is the glass and flying into the glass, abstracting from reality, immediately creates the glass in the metaphor, in this picture of the fly glass.

An example would help. Say I suddenly notice that, that it occurs to me that ‘2 x 3 = 3 x 2’ and ‘17 x 34’ = ’34 x 17’ etc., thus that ‘A x B = B x A’ in which A and B can be all the numbers (but that if A is a certain number B cannot be that number, but can still be all other numbers, for A is not identical with B and B is not identical with A (A ≠ B)). Is ‘A x B = B x A’ the prove that ‘2 x 3 = 3 x 2’ and ‘17 x 34’ = ’34 x 17’ etc.? No it only explicates, expresses, explicates what you suddenly noticed in reflecting on ‘2 x 3 = 3 x 2’ and ‘17 x 34’ = ’34 x 17’ etc., that is reflecting on the symbols of identity ‘=’, times ‘x’ and the sameness of numbers on the left and right sight of the identity symbol.

The real proof is very physical for numbers are not ‘spirits’ are not ‘spiritual’, but what I call are eternal timeless thoughts as zero-dimensional pixels (that cannot make up a picture). In other words what is im-material, non-physical, not-a-body are the numbers. If you confuse spirit with number your confuse copper with gold, you confuse unreal superficial thinking with real profound thinking. Profound thinking is perceptive and is sober clear perception. It is to prove that ‘2 x 3 = 3 x 2’ and ‘17 x 34’ = ’34 x 17’ etc., to prove that ‘A x B = B x A’ by showing a matrix of 2 rows and three columns and than physically turn the paper around in which you see 3 rows and 2 columns:

The proof, as the truth of the truth, could be more visual by using squares instead of rectangles. If you believe in abstraction this is not proof for this proof is less abstract than ‘A x B = B x A’ and even less abstract than ‘2 x 3 = 3 x 2’ for you turn a physical paper 90 degrees around with your physical body. Yet it is a proof.

The proof is the proof that you are in a flying glass. Once you know you are in a flying glass you can turn around and escape to get out of the flying glass. Once you get out, as in the Plato`s (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) picture of the cave or as in the movie the Matrix you get out of the Matrix, you will stand on the earth beneath the heavenly sun and stars and not in heaven. (If you cannot see the glass as glass you think it is an invisible immaterial wall that you name as ‘spiritual’ and will think that to pass that wall will bring you beyond (the immanent) spirit to the ‘heavenly’ transcendent (soul and God)). To be a spiritual human is ‘just’ the awareness of being a mortal body in which spirit is experienced as life force and the soul is experienced as being in the spirit and that it cannot be without spirit to be for itself, but that theme is beyond this article.

However it shows that what is the case, for example that you are like a fly in a fly glass that want to go further and further, can be experienced as more than plain objective facts, but as seemingly irrelevant small riddles, like how to make a website, that once they are really solved the riddle of life is solved. That is why truthful people, like Plato, Aristotle and Wittgenstein (and you probably if you have read till this point), with all their heart and life sacrificed their lives, in negating enjoyment with others and food & drink in order not to lose time, to solve riddles. A little riddle has a ‘religious’ appeal. Objective facts have an absolute appeal for human subjects.

If you solve the riddle and solve the riddle of life, of the living body, you are a king who must be where he is and who can enter the glass and fly through the glass or can become bigger than the glass and destroy the glass. If the glass is destroyed the flies are so used to the wall they even bump into it when there is no wall until they are shown continuously, in order to break their disbelieve, there is no wall. Look at how people repeat their repetitious habits. Look how people literally walk their evening rounds without enter certain neighbouring areas for the difference in ‘class’ is too big. See how people of the same class clutter together in unofficial communities. 

So to really work on the core ideology is working more on the website than working directly on the website. You cannot see this if you do not see the glass and believe something, a temporary writer’s block, is holding you back for the ultimate website. There will not be an ultimate website when you directly work on the website instead of turning back (to basics) and return to the core ideology.

Real thinking is the ability to abide by the beginning, the core ideology (the opening of the closed fly glass), and not be seduced to progress (as both Heidegger (1889-1976) and Wittgenstein would say), but to See is to begin before beginning begins and to be out in the open. So if you really want the ultimate website and progress have the force to swim as a salmon against the mainstream to swim to the source. Be clear (‘clair’) about your beginning and you may distinct (‘distinct’) yourself from mainstream commodity. Be ‘clair et distinct’ Descartes would have said (1596 – 11 February 1650). If you have power you go beyond the source and see. Having said this you may understand that for Wittgenstein clarity was a goal itself rather than progress with further and further scientific explanations. We understand Heidegger`s thought that only the gods can save us from technology and its synthetical ‘progress’.

Look again at all the flies (your colleagues and friends?) flying in a rat race against an invisible wall. Tomorrow I will fly through that wall, tomorrow will be better. Technological utopias are invented to give ‘body’ to that false hope of a better tomorrow and to justify cowardness to first be contented of what you have and what you and to get some piece and quite in order to focus, be silent, and return to the open part in the flying glass that you never saw because it was behind you and beneath you. You oversaw it the whole time.

And finally if you want to let someone understand ‘23 x 23’ first be contented in using one method (= stop flying against the wall) proceed in explaining the place value system (realise you are trapped inside an invisible prison). How to really escape? Be aware that if I write ‘2 x 2’ I say two to the power of two or say two times itself. Be sober in your questioning and ask ‘what is the in itself’, ‘what is the self’. Who am I? The whole of mathematics draws its breath from the word ‘self’.

Let me close off with a poem that opens worlds. This poem is so powerful if you know what effect it had and still has. It even enabled lives to come into existence. Power will give both live and death.

The number of words

(2007, Amsterdam)

To love words more than the number

is a sign not to be in total slumber

or like waking a little in your sleep

laughing when you actually weep

No number knows of ambiguity

only zero may embrace variety

It can be even or uneven, not even existing

the zero is strong in resisting,

so zer0 is a word in disguise!

Without the zero no mathematical paradise

No double it has like -2 and 2 are twined

Only infinity approximately to zero aligned

There are words for every number and infinity

yet not all words have in number their destiny

The word four has four letters wedded

but three in ten is clearly embedded

Phrases are not mechanical calculations

neither logarithms nor permutations

Letters can be counted in the alphabet

yet we are able to speak before counting is met

For numbers as numbers on ourselves we reed

With and in words we express, “Yes indeed!”

We whisper, mumble or shout words out loud

Words comfort, make Free or make 1 doubt

Doubt one for with one counting started

From words, expressions our soul, we, departed

Dividing or other calculus on 1 makes no avail

Only zero can de-imprison one from a false infinite jail

Calculus is like masturbating

without for an Other One waiting

Calculus is applying the same thing old

Words are daring, beautiful and bold

They can impregnate those who hear

“I love you, I love you my dear!”

To listen to this poem go to   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flNBTB8cfG4

Translating all of this to the business of making websites

This list is very basic and can be refined into many details, but that is out of the scope of this article. The ‘you’ beneath is someone with a mandate to build the website.

IDEAL STEP 0: BEGIN BEFORE YOU BEGIN. INVENT YOUR HISTORY BEFORE YOU EXIST

? You may skip this ‘step’ at ‘first’ if you want. A reason can be that you are not able to express your core ideology or that the ‘management team of directors’ do not agree on what the core ideology is.

? Formulate a core ideology, which is a mission, core values and a vision (or visions when you operate on different markets).

? Write down how the mission, core values and vision are integrated. It must be clear how they all connect. Core values should not be made up on a rainy Sunday afternoon to ‘kill time’ or because it is very ‘hip’ to have a core ideology. Some start-ups need to develop their identity and to ask them to write down their core values may hinder their business if too much emphasis it put on expressing those core values.

? Start with the mission and after that with the vision. Core values are the values how to translate the mission and vision on the level of the employees who make up your organisation. So core values can realize the mission and vision.

PRAGMATIC STEP 1: BEGIN BUILDING YOUR FIRST VERSION OF YOUR WEBSITE IN SHORT SENTENCES

? Make an easy to understand home page

? Write down advantages for your prospects/customers and answer their justified question: ‘what is in it for me’. (No one (from the perspective of business wisdom) is interested in how enthusiastic you are about you organization so do not force all kinds of texts on your prospects).

o Include different internal stakeholders (marketing, sales, service, IT) to sum up advantages so everyone is heard.

o Categories and prioritize different advantages for different prospects.

o Categories and prioritize different advantages from the perspective of the prospect, his customers, the actual buyer and what he can do for his organization etc..

? Describe the product or service, that is what you are offering. What is the product or service?

? Describe the unique selling proposition (not ‘point’) of your organization as organization. Why should I buy from your organization? Why is your organization unique? It is important to pitch your organization because it is better to have an A-team (organization) with a B-product (or service) than a B-team with an A-product.

? Last but not least your contact details.

? Step 1 enables you to start and test what prospects think of it and thus gain valuable external feedback. If by this time you are still aiming for the perfect website you will miss out on the best advisors in the business: your prospects and customer. And their advice is more or less for free! (Yet try to always give something back when you get valuable advice).

STEP 2: GO TO STEP 0: MAKE YOUR WEBSITE A PIECE OF PERFECT ART

? Now you can fine tune and transform short sentences into texts and transform texts into stories.

? The possibilities are endless from describing everything in use cases or whole customer journey`s, make visuals, write white papers etc..

Kind regards,

James Roolvink of Zenomore   Change imagination . discover treasureS