The Arts and the Age of the Chip

This chapter provides the capstone to this book’s argument that humankind has adopted quantification as a worldview. It describes how quantification has permeated our lives, far beyond just academic formulas to all domains, whether mathematical or otherwise. Examples are given first from the intersection of mathematics and art in da Vinci’s drawings. Next, the connection between mathematics and music is made, with a discussion of J. S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier and music theory’s circle of fifths. The chapter then provides an elementary explanation of artificial intelligence (or AI, as it is commonly known) with Bayesian logic, and a discussion of Nick Bostrom’s idea’s that the possibility of a computer having “superintelligence” poses a supreme danger to humanity. In addition, the chapter describes Max Tegmark’s innovative work in astrophysics and his belief in a wholly mathematical universe as part of a larger four-system multiverse.