[blainehansen]

Original author here. Yes, if I had the capability of writing a computer program or a formal proof that could stand in for this essay full of opinions and metaphors and heuristics, I would have.

> It's fully general, but it's also furiously ambiguous. Humans fall back to natural language when no other more precise way to describe what we want is available to us, either because it doesn't exist or we don't know it comfortably. We draw diagrams and blueprints and write math equations for a reason!

[throw310822]

Well, I disagree that humans "fall back to natural language"- this is plainly false as "natural" language is, of course, the natural way for humans to express themselves, their first choice, not the last. They do resort to formalised "languages" only in restricted domains, where the difficulty of such an un-natural choice is justified by a special need for precision or speed or visual clarity.

But I wouldn't say that metaphors, heuristics, slight ambiguities, subtexts, are unnecessary and undesirable elements of language; I think they are probably productive, ans that they reflect what intelligence is and how it works. If you read Terrence Tao's chat with ChatGPT to understand the counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture, it's a lot of formal math interspersed with dubitative formulas, suggestions, vague intuitions, mental images, imprecise quantifiers, etc., from both sides. Natural language does real work, it's not just a fallback.