The culmination of a long process of reconciling my decision to go to grad school in mathematics with meaning. I didn’t realize it before, but I had not expressly realized that mathematicians did all their work using clusters of adaptations that arose through natural selection. Certainly, I would have asserted “all humans are animals that evolved by natural selection,” and “mathematicians are humans,” but somehow I assigned mathematics privilege. This was somewhat damaging because I didn’t expressly apply things like cognitive science results on expertise and competence, unbeknownst to me treating the enterprise of mathematical thought as somehow not being reducible, or it being a silly question to ask of its reducibility, to a particular expression of a mammalian organ. I suspect this was due largely to mistaken classical exposure to the philosophy of science and mathematics, that is, prior to Darwinism. As a result, I experienced a prolonged period of confusion about why I seemed much more capable of learning certain kinds of mathematics (like abstract algebra) than others (like differential geometry) because my mental representations of these subjects were of abstract algebra and differential geometry being something different than particular clusters of functionally similar neurons in a particular mammalian brain. In effect, I had a belief in belief that learning mathematics is an act which crucially depends on cognitive processes, themselves evolutionary adaptations, but this was not reconciled into a belief prior to the existential crisis. The resolution of the existential crisis was that my reductionism of everything to physical particles and forces, or cognitive processes, was recursively embedded in the very things I was trying to comprehend, not expressly realizing that the mental state of ascribing meaning or feeling like you understand the core of a subject is—despite all intuition—physically embeddable.
Anything in particular that triggered it?
I am interested in reading it too, if you don’t mind to share.
The culmination of a long process of reconciling my decision to go to grad school in mathematics with meaning. I didn’t realize it before, but I had not expressly realized that mathematicians did all their work using clusters of adaptations that arose through natural selection. Certainly, I would have asserted “all humans are animals that evolved by natural selection,” and “mathematicians are humans,” but somehow I assigned mathematics privilege. This was somewhat damaging because I didn’t expressly apply things like cognitive science results on expertise and competence, unbeknownst to me treating the enterprise of mathematical thought as somehow not being reducible, or it being a silly question to ask of its reducibility, to a particular expression of a mammalian organ. I suspect this was due largely to mistaken classical exposure to the philosophy of science and mathematics, that is, prior to Darwinism. As a result, I experienced a prolonged period of confusion about why I seemed much more capable of learning certain kinds of mathematics (like abstract algebra) than others (like differential geometry) because my mental representations of these subjects were of abstract algebra and differential geometry being something different than particular clusters of functionally similar neurons in a particular mammalian brain. In effect, I had a belief in belief that learning mathematics is an act which crucially depends on cognitive processes, themselves evolutionary adaptations, but this was not reconciled into a belief prior to the existential crisis. The resolution of the existential crisis was that my reductionism of everything to physical particles and forces, or cognitive processes, was recursively embedded in the very things I was trying to comprehend, not expressly realizing that the mental state of ascribing meaning or feeling like you understand the core of a subject is—despite all intuition—physically embeddable.