David Corfield

@KemtrupTweets @Mark_Solms Yes, I was merely pointing out that Solms in terms of his own theory agrees with you. Then it's a question of how generously to read Freud.

@DavidCorfield8 @Mark_Solms Yeah but LUST is like one drive among others; it is not a (Lord of the Rings allusion incoming): “One drive to rule them all, one drive to find them, one drive to bring them all in and in the darkness bind them,”

“Freud had a very broad understanding of sexuality,” said Solms, a renowned South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist. “For him, any activity that was pleasure seeking in its own right – anything that one does for the purposes of pleasure alone, as opposed to practical

@KemtrupTweets @Mark_Solms “The LUST drive is roughly equivalent to what Freud termed the genital component of the libidinal drive. The equivalents in affective neuroscience of Freud’s oral, anal, and phallic component drives are PANIC-GRIEF, RAGE, and PLAY, respectively.”

@KemtrupTweets @Mark_Solms himself wants a pluralistic notion of drive, embracing as he does Panksepp's 7 systems: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/Grief, and PLAY. Regarding psychosexual stages, he claims in 'A Revision of Freud’s Theory of the Biological Origin of the Oedipus Complex':

@JDHamkins The whole issue of placebos is fraught with confusion. I got to about here (ncatlab.org/davidcorfield/…) when I used to think about such things.

@JDHamkins Ted Kaptchuk studied the effect of different components of the procedure of delivering a treatment, including giving something openly or not. You could have a trial where all are put on a drip, one group receives a placebo unknowingly and the other receives nothing.

What is the established experimental protocol for verifying that a candidate placebo drug is actually a placebo? Presumably this is tested in some way, but what exactly is the nature of the test?

@JZS_Chen I don't know about Maddy's scorecard, but one might take into consideration that category theory and type theory are highly intertwined, ncatlab.org/nlab/show/comp…

Does set theory provide productive guidance like category/model theory? My talk at the Central APA-ASL today will explore this question. Turns out there is a peculiar answer, if one dares to deviate from the familiar story of large cardinals, forcing, and independence...

A new web page for my book! tomasp.net/cultures/ It has all the links you need to get the open access PDF, buy a hardcopy or an ebook, as well as some older talks. If you run a podcast, conference or a user group, I'm always hapy to join & talk about something from the book!

@jackwidman I don't think we're disagreeing in content. I just wouldn't have spoken of "a single subgroup". A single group H injecting along two different maps into G.

@DavidCorfield8 Quotients don’t depend only on the subgroup,they depend on how it sits inside the parent group. Univalence identifies isomorphic objects, not distinct embeddings / subobjects / structure maps. Quotients are not functorial in objects alone; they are functorial in monomorphisms.

To be crystal clear, regarding a former example, it is possible, in Group Theory, to take a single subgroup H of a group G, and embed it in G in two different ways, such that two different quotients are produced. So this approach won't save us from HoTT :)

@andrew_lilico Claudius and Britain all over again. Just needs his war elephants. Then a new triumphal arch in Washington DC.

A thing to grasp re Greenland is that it's nothing to do with international security or defending the Arctic routes (air & sea) against Russia & China. Trump just wants a legacy. He wants history books to say "And in 2026 President Trump acquired Greenland as the 51st state."

@JDHamkins @jackwidman Some of the HoTT practitioners were looking to change the sense of "equal" or "identical". But it was usually done with a warning, as with the HoTT book:

Right, but this was my point. We don't treat isomorphic structures as identical, even in univalent foundations. Rather, it is closer to: isomorphism is homotopic to identity. I have heard the claim that "mathematicians treat isomorphic structures as equal" as somehow supporting univalent foundations, but the problem with this is first, the claim is not true in ordinary mathematical practice; second, univalent foundations doesn't have this feature anyway; and third, structuralism doesn't demand this anyway. So why do we hear this claim so often?

As mathematicians, we treat isomorphic structures as equal. The problem is that set theoretical foundations, ZFC or whatnot, are not consistent with this. We need another foundation. Time to consider Homotopy Type Theory on a large scale? #hott @homotopytypetheory #foundations

@JDHamkins @jackwidman Some types of entity are "contractible" (certainly not the type of unit circles in the plane) and one then tends to say "the X", ncatlab.org/nlab/show/gene…

@JDHamkins @jackwidman A good summary of the position of univalent foundations: "The Univalence Principle is the statement that equivalent mathematical structures are indistinguishable." arxiv.org/abs/2102.06275.

@jackwidman In a similar vein, synthetic category theory: drive.google.com/file/d/1lKaq7w…

@jessemhan "a multiverse of mathematical worlds, each one with its own interface - a type theory which is the syntax of the internal logic of that world." In this direction, topos.institute/blog/2025-07-1…

emily articulates this great idea about how we might end up with a multiverse of mathematical worlds, each one with its own interface - a type theory which is the syntax of the internal logic of that world. what's interesting is that as software becomes infinitely malleable, we might soon be able to synthesize entirely new proof assistants de novo, one for every mathematical world that we can imagine. so much drudgery in higher algebra is simply about simulating those interfaces that this would be utterly transformative.

@JDHamkins This is where I reached on two cultures: ncatlab.org/davidcorfield/…

My new idea for the syllabus next time I teach my core seminar in Philosophy, Science, and Mathematics. Namely, we'll spend a week with: - The two cultures, C. P. Snow - The two cultures of Mathematics, Timothy Gowers - The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isiah Berlin

@TomDWooldridge Gendlin speaks of developing a "non-mathematical logic", e.g., here focusing.org/gendlin/docs/g…. It would be worth seeing whether connections to Bion's formalisms are possible, and to the reason for Bion's later move away from formalism.

@TomDWooldridge Have you seen that connection made elsewhere? I've been reading Gendlin extensively this past year, and have been thinking that a comparison with Bion would be interesting.

I’m not a Bionian, but I think Bion’s attitude was that we need to be able to link up his ideas to our own experience. A “way in” to the ideas of alpha function, containment, etc. for me has been through Eugene Gendlin’s writing (philosopher and psychotherapist).

Looking forward to a happier post-postscript.

@EChatav @khoiiiind This is due to the "miracle" that the tangent infinity-category of an infinity-topos is another infinity-topos.

@khoiiiind Linear logic is captured in the ∞-topos of parametrized spectra. ncatlab.org/nlab/show/para…

Fun fact: topoi can’t capture linear logic