Eaten by Nature

Math, like any powerful tool, causes much more harm than good when misapplied.

The current paradigm sees a great deal of such misapplication. It puts precision and exactness where it often does not belong.

If your intuitions are misaligned to nature, precise and rigorous-looking symbols will more strongly promote and preserve bad ideas.

Both society and the scientific enterprise must learn to shift their preoccupations toward the emergent. To stop pretending they have figured out the inner workings of what we measure and experience.

This is math’s original destiny. It was never meant for inward mechanical narratives. This must logically be the case, because math reflects abstract thinking, and abstraction aligns to emergence, not deterministic reduction.

It is the mechanics that satisfy intuitive, meta-level properties that matter. The recognizable forms and flows of physical and informational patterns.

It is time we stop misapplying symbols by attaching them to fictions. We must shift up, and use precision to describe with exactness that which is anything but exact.

To be precise only because there is a time and place to be ridiculously simplistic, not in our understanding (that comes from intuition) but in our communication of nature.

We can erect box-like buildings in the middle of forests, as a testament to our stand against nature, using our juvenile and idealized forms. We can enforce straight lines and architected curves, to brutally contrast nature’s fractal and chaotic mess. But these forced structures cannot last. They will get eaten by nature. As they are not nature.

Math, as it currently stands, will be eaten by nature.

Mark my words.