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Comment by skeledrew | Hacker News Reader

This is the first I've ever heard math connected to the spiritual. For all my life it has been this rigorous thing grounded in reality in such a way that only people who think a certain way could even approach. Now those people are having this strange "crisis" because AI is being more rigorous than humans I guess. I find it... wild. My, but how the mighty have fallen.

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The history of mathematics is tightly coupled to spirituality... some more famous examples off the top of my head are Cantor, Euclid, and Euler, but there are probably hundreds of examples of folks who explicitly tied their faith to their research.

I definitely don't think there's anything inconsistent with mathematical and theological thinking. That actually strikes me as a very strange idea?

Ramunajan a particularly notable example.

Would those persons mentioned have found themselves in a state of crisis if they were alive today? And it still doesn't touch on the core question: what does math and spirituality really have in common (beyond the extrinsic connection someone may make because they're emotionally overwhelmed by the "beauty" of the golden ratio appearing in nature, for example)?

Probably they wouldn't be. A lot of this is people catastrophizing. Probably already somewhat unhappy even before.

Regarding spirituality i think it's more about math itself than math as a discipline. Math might be divine. Even if math is divine, i think doing math doesnt make you more spiritual.

In what way could math be divine? What does "divine" even mean in this context?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms

Almost all mathematicians I know admit to feeling spiritual about discovery in the mathematical world. Engineers are taught the rigorous thing but it goes way beyond that. In fact, I bet a lot of people find some satisfaction in their work that goes beyond the practical. Artists, etc. That's what AI threatens because it destroys strong communities of people who value such work.

In what way is it destroying communities? Is AI preventing anyone from doing their own work to discover/rederive whatever it is they're interested in? Or is it just showing them, and eventually everyone else, the truth that nothing humans do is special and many are finding that hard to handle?

Again, people don't just do things in isolation for enjoyment. What humans do is special, and the end result is not the only thing that matters. You don't understand that because you're an aberration.

I do things in isolation for enjoyment, like the various projects I'm working on now (with the help of AI) that I've never shared with anyone and possibly never will. Yeah keep thinking that humans are "special", and love that attempt at a personal attack; at least being an aberration means I'll never have a crisis that may have me contemplating suicide. Y'all have fun jumping off bridges as AI continues to take away all that "special". I'll just have a good laugh.

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