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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

You don’t perform anything it’s just a statement. You’re conflating mathematics and computation.

That's a good distinction, thank you. But how would we have mathematics at all, if we could not compute? How can a statement have any meaning if you cannot 'read' it? Both require time to be intelligible. That is the problem I am wrestling with: it is only from within time that we can make sense of something existing timelessly.

This is one of those philosophy if mathematics things that people have been debating for a very long time[1]. I don’t have much interest in philosophy of mathematics, so that link isn’t much more than a starting point, but there is plenty to read if you do.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_o...

I'd say that an important part of mathematics aims at understanding structures and relations between entities in order to avoid inefficient computations. Maybe a trivial example would be multiplication algorithms that allow to bypass costly iterated sums while preserving confidence in the result.

Complexity (and entropy) have surely a crucial importance and can't be totally avoided but I think that mathematics precisely work at minimizing their impact.

The fact that we can only understand timeless concepts with time is a property of our existence, not a property of the timeless facts. In 0 seconds I can "do" nothing, but that's a property of my existence, not necessarily a universal absolute across the entire Tegmark-ian multiverse.

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