AIME and mathematics (2)

"Correlations without correlata" is a phrase by David Mermin that captures some of the sense that some people get out of Quantum mechanics. (https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9801057.pdf%3E and then goes on to http://www.nature.com/news/physics-qbism-puts-the-scientist-back-into-science-1.14912) This expression resonates in me when thinking about the modes of existence that the book Inquiry into the Modes of Existence presents. I would try to think of some definite entities, delineated, described, projected in some space of features, flowing along these different lines that [REP] or [REL] or [FIC] present. But then it was like a flow that leaves you with an after-effect. Something passed but one cannot really say what it was. Or perhaps one mode needs to cooperate with another (or others) so that some account of what went on to be felt (felt by whom? By a community of conversants I guess,  a group of people communicating with one another: so the passage of the beings of each mode has similarity with the passage of signs among discussants -these too disappear when one tries to focus straight on them)

How cold is it to do mathematics?

I thought of a story

Somebody comes to a place where civilized people live. There is respect and concern and all this leads to an elaborate protocol (perhpas in a similar sense that the need of maximum generativity leads to the simple forms of Tangram). Being a base person the newcomer finds in these peope the operation of cold and unflinching rationality and uses her intellectual power to make the system bend towards her own base goal setting.

Are the people cold calculators, or is she just projecting whatever she carries in her heart?