Thread by @wolftivy

I think we have to understand mathematics as a new kind of consciousness.

By disciplined study you can learn to see in terms of the secret relationships behind nature.

Not a mistake that the philosophers centered mathematics in liberal education!

For those keeping track of types of consciousness:

Raw physical primitive consciousness
Evolution by natural selection
Cellular control systems
Neuronal consciousness
Linguistic social/cultural consciousness
Mathematics/precise diagrammatic culture?
Networked computing machines

The single most important causal cultural factor behind the industrial revolution isn't any political system or philosophy other than the tradition of (applied) mathematics itself.

It is the precision and depth of mathematics that gives us access to technology.

From the outside, math just looks like this weird thing that you don't understand. You don't feel it's power or appreciate it as a nearly spiritual discipline until you are initiated in a moment of revelation: "IT WORKS!"

Even then you occasionally regress and forget.

Mathematics is enormously expensive to produce and learn. You need wizards dedicating their whole lives to maintaining and advancing our mathematical concepts. It is a necessarily social, institutional, and initiatory form of consciousness. The individual is helpless before it.

What makes mathematics possible is the self correction and compressibility inherent in concepts with exact precision. If you are missing an area, it can be built out from the ragged edges of nearby math. It's almost a form of abstract life.

Of course like anything, it is possible to fall into an idolatry of mathematics. Modern academic culture arguably has in many areas. Use of math beyond and outside it's practical value for social and ideological reasons.

But the thing itself lives on in other fields.

We could easily lose mathematics as a live tradition. First substitute a fake cargo-cult imitation that lacks depth, then collapse the social support for the real thing. No one would even notice, except that history would include great feats of implausible magic.