Heres a quote from Steven Stogratz - "Mathematics is usually portrayed as exact and impeccably rational. It is rational but not always initially. Creation is intuitive. Reason comes later"
Maxwell would not have come up with his equations of electromagnetism if he said what you are saying to Faraday.
Faraday did not understand differential equations or vector calculus. Leave alone know, how to express anything in that language. But it was his book that inspired Maxwell. It was filled with "verbal and visual" intuition expressed in non mathematical language.
Mathematician of the age did not take it seriously using exactly the kind of arguments you are using.
You cannot force/shame people to be more disciplined with their metaphors. It made Faraday hesitant to even to express his findings publicly for many years.
Faraday was first and foremost an experimentalist, and everything else followed from there. That alone is perhaps a significant difference with the kind of reasoning we were initially talking about.
Additionally, like you point out, others were able to build upon his work and use it to generate new hypotheses and draw new conclusions. That is a fundamental aspect of any good research; that it enables new activity and insights, often in ways not envisioned by the original researchers.
So if you want to say “consciousness can be described as a chaotic attractor”, then you need to say it in a way that lets others make novel predictions, invalidate previous conclusions and establish new ones, about the behavior of consciousness using the established and well understood toolbox of chaotic attractors.
My question was about whether the books had subsequently enabled such inquiries.
Heres a quote from Steven Stogratz - "Mathematics is usually portrayed as exact and impeccably rational. It is rational but not always initially. Creation is intuitive. Reason comes later"
Maxwell would not have come up with his equations of electromagnetism if he said what you are saying to Faraday.
Faraday did not understand differential equations or vector calculus. Leave alone know, how to express anything in that language. But it was his book that inspired Maxwell. It was filled with "verbal and visual" intuition expressed in non mathematical language.
Mathematician of the age did not take it seriously using exactly the kind of arguments you are using.
You cannot force/shame people to be more disciplined with their metaphors. It made Faraday hesitant to even to express his findings publicly for many years.