| ▲ | squidbeak an hour ago | |
I think you have misunderstood the OP's point here. You're arguing that deepening human understanding is an end in itself, and you are right. The OP is arguing that advances don't need to be pegged to human understanding, and they are right too. The two can coexist, superintelligence far ahead of us, pioneering discoveries - and mathematicians catching up at a pace suited to biological minds. I don't see the issue here. Of course, it does mean mathematicians adopt a new role as hobbyists. > A black box oracle that just tells you whether statements are true or false is not the goal of mathematics and would not be particularly interesting to the field This is a crude distortion. The recent breakthroughs have come with proofs, reasoning and verification, and there is no proposal that I'm aware of that would do away with these foundations. There's also some rather ugly solipsism in the idea of keeping what interests the field as a limit. Mathematics has broader relevance to humanity than merely to please and support mathematicians, and if other fields can make practical use of profound well-proven future math, mathematicians will have a hard time making a case that their comprehension must come first. | ||