Lev,
Let me try and steer this back around to the content of your essay. It does relate in a very straightforward way. You quoted Schrodinger, Von Neumann ... and Einstein. Of these three, it was Einstein who supported, in a practical way, Von Neumann's concept of logic and mathematics residing in the central nervous system. I don't have a reference at my elbow, but Einstein spoke of a _kinesthetic_ sensation toward his theories; he felt it in his bone and muscle in a literal, not metaphorical, sense. When you speak of flesh and blood sensations as characterizing physical love--I am saying that some people really do have the demonstrable capacity to experience love as rational spirituality (Spinoza, Buber, et al) that is accompanied by physical sensation. (Schrodinger was notorious for his romantic liaisons; one wonders about a connection between his intellectual output and his physical appetites.) Perhaps all of us have a latent capacity to combine devotion toward intellectual pursuits with physical sense:
Keith Devlin, the renowned mathematics poularizer with a grandly universalist view, argues that there is no "math gene" that endows one with talent to do mathematics; he even goes further, to point out the mathematical patterns that animals exhibit without apparently conscious effort.
Back to Einstein, I had occasion recently to respond to another participant in this forum rgarding Einstein's doubts (as you mention in your essay) about the ability of continuous functions to describe how the world really works. In the final paragraph to Appendix II, "Relativistic Theory of the Non-Symmetric Field," from [Einstein, 1956, The Meaning of Relativity] Einstein wrote "One can give good reasons why reality cannot at all be represented by a continuous field. From the quantum phenomena it appears to follow with certainty that a finite system of finite energy can be completely described by a finite set of numbers (quantum numbers). This does not seem to be in accordance with a continuum theory, and must lead to an attempt to find a purely algebraic description of reality. But nobody knows how to obtain the basis of such a theory."
As for me, I am in full accord with your thesis as it regards the independence of language and meaning, a subject I have also adressed in several papers since 2002. I am aware that mathematics is what I do, not what I am. Loving what one does, however, is also a sensual, consuming experience.
All best,
Tom
