There’s a really cool position in Philosophy of Mind called Hylemorphic Dualism, which actually preserves (makes sense of) our intuitions about “souls” without breaking physics.

Did you just compare actual living sapient people with thoughts and feelings to an unconscious, unborn fetus?

Maybe you have a lot in common with a fetus. I don’t.

Exactly, the whole point is that she wasn’t a loser at all. It was about self-perception.

How could I forget about eigenvalues?

Abstract reasoning is the most “useful” intellectual ability you can have. However, the most important would be the normative insights we usually call “wisdom” (which isn’t taught but learned — for instance by reading literature and living life with curiosity). Critical thinking and other philosophy goes without saying.

You know people who use the unit circle on a regular basis? How about conic sections or the quadratic formula? These topics take months if not years to learn in school. We do so not because they’re useful in any practical sense for most people, but because they instill intuitions about how the world works.

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Most professions don’t require mathematics, and we’ve automated so much of it anyway.

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Abstract versus applied math. It looks different. More like studying numberless patterns and proof methods.

Each of these people has written intelligent and wise things, abundant examples of which you’ve deftly avoided in order to quote shit that makes us all look like idiots.

This post is implying that OP is unfamiliar with sociology, psychology, history, and the texture of grass.

Sure. And for the 90% of kids who correctly say they won’t use math, it doesn’t matter. We are doing math so they can learn to navigate formal systems of reasoning. We could honestly teach deductive logic instead, or set theory, or group theory, or finite field topology. It doesn’t have to be algebra or anything remotely practical.

I’m an anarchist. What you’ve quoted is absurdly naive.

Yes, community rehabilitation is good for some sorts of criminals. The abolition of prisons, on the other hand, might be possible 1000 years from now with the proper technology, which makes the suggestion at best unhelpful and at worst actively counterproductive.

Additionally, we don’t encourage kids to read books so they can become better at communicating. We push them to read so that they can have something worth communicating.

Yep. We don’t teach kids math so they can learn to do math. We do it so they can develop an intuition for abstract reasoning.

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I replied to the wrong person. Sorry

Math exists in the minds of humans, [not animals].

This is incorrect. Every animal we’ve ever researched, including insects like bees, can do arithmetic.

Anyway, not a single one of the examples you’ve given involves second-order reasoning. These are all prosaic interactions with the environment, which is how most animas (yes, including dumb humans) experience the world.

First-order reasoning: “What is moral?” Second-order reasoning: “Do moral beliefs constitute knowledge claims?”

First-order reasoning: “One plus one is two.” Second-order reasoning: “number theory is either inconsistent or incomplete.”

First-order reasoning: “What does this word mean?” Second-order reasoning: “How do words connect with their meanings?”

The examples I gave you are extreme, but to be fair so is your confusion.

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