Here’s the post that kicked it all off. This is chapter 7 of 12, to give interested readers the chance to take on the free ebook chapter by chapter over the weekend, debate it amongst themselves, or even challenge the author who’s keeping tabs.

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From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

by Greg Swann

Chapter 7. A calculus of morality on a first-grade number line.

Spirit your mind back to your first-grade classroom. Can you see that number line tacked up above the blackboard? In the middle is the number zero – one of the most important inventions in mathematics, incidentally. To the right are the positive integers – 1, 2, 3 – up to 10 or 25 or 100. To the left are the negative integers – and take a moment to salute the incomparable genius of subjunctivity who first thought to count things that are not in evidence to be counted. Your teacher used that number line to demonstrate to you, by moving his hand to the right or to the left, that 3 + 5 = 8 or 9 – 11 = –2. In other classrooms in other times or places, teachers might have used stones or sticks or an abacus, but the essence of the demonstration, whatever form it took, was that arithmetic is an ontologically-consonant notation system: The map is not the territory, but the map is demonstrably correspondent to the territory. That sort of demonstrable one-to-one correspondence is present in every practically-useful Fathertongue notation system, obviously, and absent from all the useless ones. This is what it means for an idea to be ontologically-consonant.