Comment by fn-mote
8 hours ago
To me the mechanics and the why are closely intertwined. If you feel like self-referentiality is a way to demonstrate a problem (this is the “why”), it is not a long step to the mechanics of encoding.
The work is in creating the theorem / contradiction from that point, but in the big picture, the approach doesn’t have to come from nowhere.
> the mechanics and the why are closely intertwined
But the "why and what" must always be explained first even if it is incomplete; since that is the problem we are trying to solve. With logic it is even more important since you can follow a proof from one step to the next but by the time you reach the conclusion you have lost the connecting thread to the starting point (for most general folks) i.e. "you have missed the forest for the trees". This is why many folks feel lost when doing mathematics as mere symbol-pushing.