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Comment by macrolocal

19 hours ago

Russell once remarked that all of mathematics would be trivial to a sufficiently intelligent being. It builds conceptual tools for limited minds, that lets them understand far beyond their natural reach.

In a world with ASI, having that capacity is vital.

Ha, are you invoking something he said prior to discovering Russell's paradox? Which came about because he wanted to show that all of mathematics can be derived from logic about sets, but instead he showed that it couldn't be.

  • As someone with a math background, I don't see Russell's paradox as some interesting mathematics beyond set theory. It's just an example showing that one should be careful about defining sets.

    • As someone with a math background, and a logic background, I think Russell's paradox is most interesting, beyond just set theory. It shows us that one should be careful about what exactly a definition is.

I suspect the amount of complexity in mathematics is infinite, so any intelligent being of finite intelligence would be unable to do all of it.

I mean just looking at all the numbers to see which have interesting properties could take a while.