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Comment by randomImmigrant | Hacker News Reader

I believe there’s a reasonable explanation for this effectiveness: mathematics is created by brains. Brains have evolved to track and entrain to various physical phenomena, and the internal dynamics of the brain resonate with the dynamics of the world around that is perceptible through sensory channels.

It hardly seems odd that the mathematics created by the physics and chemistry of the brain is very good at describing the physics and chemistry of the world the brain’s physics and chemistry is evolved to track. It would be unreasonable if human math were somehow complete useless at describing the world. That would indeed be a mystery.

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In pre scientific times people mostly thought it was driven by spirits. God told things to exist, the devil made bad things happen, the rain god made rain and so on. It was a bit of a surprise when experimental investigation found mathematical laws, starting mostly with Newton. Also human brains are pretty bad at some of the maths. I can't figure out renormalization.

> It hardly seems odd that the mathematics created by the physics and chemistry of the brain is very good at describing the physics and chemistry of the world the brain’s physics and chemistry is evolved to track.

You just assigned intent to evolution. Evolutionary theory emphatically avoids, even precludes, intent.

Furthermore, the "mathematics created by the physics and chemistry of the brain" is only our modeled attempt to describe the actual "physics and chemistry of the world". The two ideas are separated by so many layers of complexity that work should be shown to establish that there is, in fact, circularity in the process. (Water molecules are bound by electromagnetism, but this did not cause us to build Maxwell's Laws with our watery brains.)

Where did I assign intent? The brain is good at tracking the physics and chemistry of the world not because it was designed to, but because being able to is an evolutionary advantage. I’m not clear why that needs intent. Good fortune through a random process doesn’t meant there was a teleological purpose to that random process.

I would say a mathematical mind makes a huge difference in natural science whether or not you are doing any equations at the time or not.

Probably since before the cave men or maybe even homo sapiens.

Of course when equations do come up over the course of eons it could be even more helpful.

And whenever there is a shortage of equations there's quite often been a need for somebody to step up to the plate and make some up ;)

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