Responding to an essay on Medium:
Given
trends in AI (machine learning), humans are coming to appreciate that
in constructing and internalizing any Reality Model (the process starts
before birth) one is performing intensely mathematical operations,
updating new “priors” (synthetic a priori judgements) in some Bayesian feedback loop, complete with cybernetic back propagation though many layers of perceptron.
As Kraftwerk so eloquently put it: “we are the [mathematicians]”.
Dr.
Keith Devlin showed biological life is at bottom a form of mathematical
computation. Humans claim to do it consciously, as a brain activity, on
top of a 99% automated metabolism.
Sure,
universities want their name on the bottle, when the math smells and
tastes like the real deal. They’re like wine merchants. However I’m
always willing to accredit the mathematical abilities, properties and
practices I encounter in so many walks of life. Fine wines come with
many labels.
English
majors studying New England Transcendentalism come up against a lot of
architecture and geometry these days. Their PhD may be in American
Literature of the 1900s, but that means knowing what the “isotropic
vector matrix” is all about (1970s metaphysics), and of course
“tetravolumes”. No, this isn’t mathematics necessarily, but when it
comes to Reality Modeling, such concepts have utility.
