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].
Nature has no language. Language is a human tool to imperfectly describe nature. Putting language before nature is magical thinking (also known as Platonism).
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.
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…
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...
Nature has no language. Language is a human tool to imperfectly describe nature. Putting language before nature is magical thinking (also known as Platonism).
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.
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…