What happens in history is not always easy to grasp philosophically at once. There are 'prophets' (like, to a certain extent, the French postmodernists) but only later can we begin to understand what happened or the paradox of what did not happen yet could have. The emergence of the World Wide Web was a monumental happening in the history of mankind. Theoretically this meant that advanced knowledge and higher education (in all humanistic and theoretical disciplines as well as many technological and applied disciplines) was potentially made accessible to every human being having the leisure, patience, inclination and dedication for study and learning. This implied a potential complete overhaul of traditional social, educational and knowledge-guarding institutions, professions and hierarchies (both in their worthless, plutocratic, nepotic, dogmatic aspect but also in their good humanistic aspects). But this is not what happened. This potential universal diffusion of knowledge had apparently to wait for a 'dumbed down' version based on LLMs for such questions to be even seriously asked. And yet the World Wide Web became ultimately a tool not of liberation, reform and revolution but a horrific tool for deception and global control by traditional power structures. Language ceased to be means of communication and conveying knowledge morphing instead into a global power tool for psychological and cultural formatting, uniformization, manipulation and cognitive-semantic degeneration. This monstrous pseudo-culture, pseudo-communication, pseudo-knowledge (engineered and directed and financed by traditional powers) is collected together into vast curated datasets which are then processed to produce bland blends of empty linguistic mimicry. Thus the semblance of language and knowledge have become the enemy of mankind Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens - and the irony of the fulfillment of the French postmodernists' prophecies. People nowadays (we could coin the term digitanttes) have all the arrogance and conceit and mindset of the worst kind of 'intellectual' while having rarely any authentic knowledge or expertise. The salvation of mankind can only come through
i) systematic, thorough and profound doubt, questioning and skepticism of all alleged knowledge and information and most specially of the alleged knowledge and information offered by LLMs, internet encyclopedias and government, religion and corporate controlled media. The 'dialectic' method of Socrates, Pyrrho and Sextus.
-Develop a stable minimal and optimal software for the logical representation of knowledge and the automatic checking of proofs (such as employing minimal subsystems of Coq or Agda as in the links on the right). Continue the work of Vladimir Voevodsky and his original approach to computer assisted proof verification.
Restore the scientific method and the original meaning of positivism and empiricism. The analytic-scientific spirit awakened by correct study of physics, chemistry and biology. This may seem paradoxical but the philosophical and scientific attitude of the Nyâya and Vaisheshika are actually the secret core of correct and successful Buddhist meditation. Investigate the work of Ludwig Bolzmann.
What is true genius in mathematics ? It it is faithfulness at once to
i) logical-axiomatic-conceptual clarity and rigor
ii) algorithmic-combinatorial-geometric-dynamic intuitive clarity
iii) its simplifying, unifying and clarifying role in the whole of mathematics
iv) its substantial philosophical relevance and significance
v) its essential connection to science
vi) its artistic connections and human value
vii) the clarity and adequacy of its teaching and presentation
This is what defines a true genius in mathematics such as Abel, Gauss, Grassmann, Riemann, Poincáre or Hilbert - or in logic such as Frege, Gentzen, Gödel, Brouwer, Russell, Skolem, Turing, Lawvere, Girard and Martin-Löf
What a confusion and tragedy in the history of the foundations of mathematics. With the theory of types of Russell and Church, Gödel's system T and its extensions, Maclane and Lawvere's Categorical Foundations (Elementary Topoi) and above all the Constructive Type Theory of Martin-Löf. how can the miserable ZFC foundations (or Cantorian set theory) still be considered more than an embarrassing historical oddity ? Consider how ordered pairs are defined $(a,b) = \{\{a\}, \{a,b\}\}$. What sane mathematician would accept that $\{a\} \in (a,b)$ ?
A book is just a book. You can hold it in your hand and discard it. But reading a screen is plugging yourself into the matrix (running not only on electric energy but collective focused mental energy).
Owning and reading a book - or any information storing and displaying device not connected to the World Wide Web - is a higher form of revolution and freedom. Put together vast offline libraries (digital or analog).
ii) a radical reform of language, communication and social interaction (and of course the complete elimination of any engagement with shallow, short, mindless, addictive, memetic, unreliable social media) - perhaps drawing inspiration from the Ch'an tradition, certain literary and poetic traditions as well as the best and most beautiful counter-cultural artifacts of the 20th century. Develop a self-referential, self-transcending style of expression and thought that is totally beyond the reach of LLMs and internet Encyclopedias. There are surely more philosophically interesting and advanced forms of cryptography which work at deeper syntactic or semantic levels.
The idea of 'linguistic relativity' can be found already for instance in von Humboldt, Herder and Hamann. This is something which merits a deep philosophical analysis. We note only that LLMs are almost exclusively trained on datasets in contemporary English with its far-reaching linguistic-cognitive-cultural bias and format. Thus the cultivation of multilingualism (and a rejection of Anglo-supremacy and Anglo-centrism, the proposal of a new lingua franca), with a special emphasis on ancient languages, is a powerful weapon.
iii) unwavering universal dedication to international law and justice, human rights and animal rights, demilitarization and the protection of the environment.
iv) unite science and art, in particular science and literature such as in the best science fiction.
We must become again truly ourselves (Attadīpā viharatha, attasaraṇā anaññasaraṇā) so we can truly be with others.
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