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Mathematics is a human-designed game that involves rearranging symbols.

• MinimalAction 2mo ago
  That view is incredibly reductionist. It really is an efficient encoding of how nature behaves. It might be a human construct, but given how best it allows to understand nature (through principles of physics), it is uncanny to be any different from the language of nature. Reminds me of Wigner's Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
  • weregiraffe 2mo ago
    Nature has no language. Language is a human tool to imperfectly describe nature. Putting language before nature is magical thinking (also known as Platonism).
    • MinimalAction 2mo ago
      Yes, of course mathematics is a tool to model nature as accurately as we could. That still doesn't mean mathematics is as trivial or frivolous as manipulating symbols.
      • weregiraffe 2mo ago
        But what else is there to it? Mathematics has no experiments where you find new knowledge in nature. There are just symbols.
• JustFinishedBSG 2mo ago
  At a very high level mathematics is basically 100% text/symbolic rewriting. You start from some set of postulate assumed true and you do your thing to get a new different set of equivalent assertions in a form that is more useful. I don’t know if LLMs will kill the working-mathematicians but at least seem like that it doesn’t seem absurd to imagine LLMs will be good at math…