For some reason the email keeps coming back, so I'll post it here;

Math is to reason what chess is to war. It is, in all senses of the term, formulaic. With chess players, they understand it is a game, even if they devote their lives to it. With mathematicians, it’s like explaining water to fish. They are emotionally devoted to order and their world is based on the assumption it is elemental. “Mind of God."

It’s not so much about solving problems as creating and running programs. Just so long as the axioms/rules are followed, you can spin off into multiverses and wormholes through the fabric of spacetime. The binary is order versus chaos and presumably order will emerge from the chaos, if the rules are applied effectively. That's why they have problems with logical incompleteness, singularities, infinity, etc. Places where the rules contradict, or just spiral into infinity.

You are no more going to get them to see order as emergent, rather than platonic, than any other religious order would accept their premises as fallible. I doubt they can be appealed to directly, but like lots of other schools of thought, they offer object lessons, in terms of how routines come to dominate our lives, far beyond the point they should. Which does go back to the point that people are linear and goal oriented, while nature is cyclical and feedback generated.

Looking at the social and political picture, so much shit just keeps hitting the proverbial fan, the analogy that keeps coming to mind is of a gigantic scab over a festering wound. Since we hope to be part of the skin growing under the surface, it’s basically a situation of keeping plugging along and let the people in that crust keep self destructing. Reductio ad absurdum.

It’s good to set seemingly impossible goals. If you never reach them, you don’t have to worry about finding others and if you do, you will be pleasantly surprised.