An Open Letter to Evrim Ağacı and a Dialectical Intervention

Dear Evrim Ağacı team and dear Çağrı,

As a volunteer for science who reflects on technology, artificial intelligence, and the future of mental labour, I have always followed with great appreciation the immense historical mission you have undertaken in this country's struggle for enlightenment, as well as the high-quality content you produce. In a geography such as Turkey, where scientific thought is so often battered, your instilling a love of science in young minds and your effort to make sense of nature and the universe are exceedingly valuable.

Yet precisely because of this value and the millions of people you reach, making the philosophical and ideological positions in your content visible is an inescapable responsibility of dialectical materialism. In your video, Can Artificial Intelligence Finish Mathematics?, the “neutral” and apolitical stance you display unfortunately draws you inexorably into the waters of bourgeois ideology, positivism, and biological determinism.

Science and technology are shaped not in the sterile setting of a neutral laboratory, but in the very midst of class struggles, relations of production, and forms of property. To adopt an apolitical position by saying, “We only explain science,” is in fact to become a passive acceptance of the existing dominant relations of production and technological fetishism.

Let us re-examine the themes you address in your video with a dialectical scalpel speaking directly to you.

Dear Evrim Ağacı, Why Is It Wrong to Reduce the Human Mind to a Rustle in the Bush?

At the opening of your video, while explaining the human brain and mathematics—the brain’s most refined product—you take refuge wholly in a biological survival reflex:

• You state that the human brain is a “pattern-recognition machine,” born from the necessity for our ancestors to quickly determine whether the rustling behind the bushes came from the wind or from a hungry lion.

• You note that those unable to make this vital determination could not pass on their genes, and that the genes inherited by us have therefore been hyper-optimized to sense such dangers.

• You claim that mathematics is nothing more than the most abstract, most refined, and uniquely human form attained by this ancient evolutionary capacity for pattern recognition.

Dialectical Intervention: When you reduce human consciousness and thought to the mere “genetic reflex of a primate fleeing a lion,” you erase from history the sole element that historicizes the human being: labour and praxis (the purposeful transformation of nature). Mathematics is not a passive evolutionary extension of our genes. It arose from direct processes of material production and social needs: calculating the flood seasons of the Nile, dividing land, constructing architectural works, and exchanging products. Imprisoning mathematics within biological evolution renders invisible the thousands of years of collective human labour and social practices behind it.

The Leap from Quantity to Quality and the General Intellect

In your video, you convey the latest upheavals brought about by artificial intelligence in the world of mathematics through highly striking examples:

• You explain that an OpenAI model, using algebraic number theory, discovered an entirely new family of examples that disproved an eighty-year-old conjecture concerning Paul Erdős’s 1946 planar unit-distance problem.

• You emphasize that Ernest Ryu solved the Nesterov optimization problem, unsolved for forty-two years, by using the human mind to sift the “valuable fragments of ideas” from ChatGPT’s flawed proofs and steering the system accordingly.

• You relate that DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve model spontaneously revealed hypercube patterns in Bruhat intervals, and that a counterexample to the Jacobi conjecture was found with Claude Fable.

• You state that, thanks to proof assistants such as the Lean language and Aristotle, artificial intelligence can carry out formal verifications and instantly rewrite papers according to the reader’s level.

Dialectical Intervention: Yet, dear Çağrı, in presenting this picture, you mystify artificial intelligence almost as though it were a magical new subject independent of human constraints. But the fundamental mechanism at work here is the dialectical law by which quantitative accumulation turns into a qualitative leap. The coming together of trillions of data points, the historically accumulated mathematical corpus, and immense computational power (quantity) produces a leap (quality) in which new connections are established at the algorithmic level. Artificial intelligence is not an independent miracle; it is the General Intellect of which Karl Marx speaks in the Grundrisse: the form in which all humanity’s collective and accumulated dead labour has been transformed into fixed capital.

The Victory of Praxis and Matter: Navier–Stokes and Embodied Intuition

The most valuable and dialectically richest passage in your video is the example of the three-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations, where artificial intelligence becomes stuck, and the surfer-mathematician Steve Schorler:

• You state that artificial intelligence has been unable to produce a meaningful proof of singularity for the viscous 3D Navier–Stokes equations.

• You relate that Steve Schorler, who has surfed since childhood, discovered the jump singularity of fluids because he had physically experienced the chaotic energy of the ocean.

• You acknowledge that artificial intelligence has never felt the resistance of the wind or the acceleration of water, and constructs the world solely through data and formal representations.

Dialectical Intervention: In the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx says that the objective truth of human thought is not an abstract theoretical question, but “a practical question.” This splendid Schorler example you provide draws the ontological limit of a data processor severed from matter and practice. Consciousness arises from bodily, material, and practical interaction with nature (praxis). The capacity for abstraction of a system that establishes no dialectical relationship with water, gravity, and wind—one that does not experience them in its own being—will always remain deficient in grasping reality as a whole.

The Alienation of Mental Labour: “Black Box” Science

In your video, you question the future of knowledge through Robben H.S.’s warning and the crisis of assessment in education:

• You ask whether it would still count as “mathematics” if a computer were to produce a proof tens of thousands of steps long—too complex for any human to understand—and another program confirmed it, while not a single human being could grasp that proof.

• You state that cryptographic or medical systems built by blindly trusting incomprehensible “black-box” proofs could produce enormous disasters.

• You draw attention to the fact that artificial intelligence solving assignments in seconds makes it harder to cultivate experts, by preventing students in universities from developing their mental muscles.

Dialectical Intervention: The crisis you diagnose here is the apex of alienation in mental labour. Just as the worker becomes alienated from the object they produce, and that object becomes a dominant power over them, humanity is becoming alienated from the “black-box” knowledge produced by artificial intelligence nourished on its own collective data. Knowledge ceases to be humanity’s instrument for understanding and liberating itself from the world; in the hands of capital, it risks becoming a dehumanized and uncontrollable autonomous force.

A Comparison of the Bourgeois Technocratic Vision and the Marxist Dialectical Vision

The following table summarizes the fundamental ontological differences between the apolitical-positivist approach displayed in the video and the dialectical-materialist approach we defend:

Axis of Debate	Evrim Ağacı’s Approach (Bourgeois-Positivist)	Marxist Philosophical Approach (Dialectical-Materialist)
Origin of Intelligence and Mathematics	The abstraction of the genetic pattern-recognition capacity of ancestors fleeing lions.	The historical result of processes of material production in which humanity transforms nature (praxis).
Nature of Artificial Intelligence	An independent power with an architecture different from human beings, solving problems autonomously.	The objectification in fixed capital of humanity’s accumulated social intelligence (General Intellect).
Limit of Physical Intuition	AI’s limitation of data and simulation; its lack of embodied experience.	The impossibility of separating consciousness from practice; the absence of a dialectical bond with matter.
“Black Box” Proofs	The practical risk of error that incomprehensible knowledge might cause in technological systems.	The alienation of mental labour; humanity becoming the slave of the knowledge it has itself produced.
The Future and the Everest Analogy	AI as a robot traversing the course, humanity as the mind charting the route.	The struggle over ownership of the means of production; the position of living labour before dead labour.

In Place of a Conclusion: Whose Flag Will Be Planted on the Summit?

Dear Evrim Ağacı team, as you close your video, you rely on two typical refuges of bourgeois philosophy: on the one hand, the positivist illusion that sees science as a “neutral lantern illuminating the darkness,” isolated from classes, property, and relations of production; on the other, a pragmatist optimism that, taking refuge in Terence Tao’s analogy, defines artificial intelligence as a robot that leaps over obstacles two or three metres high and humanity as a noble will strategically plotting a route to the summit of Everest.

Unmasking the Positivist Pose and the Pragmatist Refuge

The positivist conception presents artificial intelligence as a classless “lantern” bestowed upon humanity. Yet dialectical-materialist philosophy must ask these unavoidable questions:

1. In whose hand is the lantern? Is the hand holding it a public will that safeguards the collective benefit of all humanity, or is it monopoly technology capital that holds the gigantic servers, property rights, and algorithmic patents?

2. Will the human mind truly chart the route? Tao’s “Everest route” analogy is captivating; but under capitalist relations of production, what charts that route is not humanity’s free scientific curiosity. What determines the route are the profit margins of markets, the needs of the military-industrial complex, and capital’s expectations of return.

Moreover, the instrumentalist and pragmatist conception tends to accept “black-box” proofs merely because they work technologically. Knowledge that humanity cannot comprehend, whose correctness it cannot understand, does not liberate human consciousness; on the contrary, it turns humanity into a passive object of knowledge.

The Liberation of the General Intellect

A genuine vision of the scientific future sees artificial intelligence neither as a mystical god to be worshipped nor as a dystopian monster to be feared. Artificial intelligence is the algorithmically objectified form of the collective knowledge, mathematical accumulation, and data produced by humanity across generations; that is, it is the General Intellect.

While the apolitical understanding of science turns this development into a crisis of “the substitution of human power,” the dialectical vision shows us this:

• Artificial intelligence and automation are the greatest opportunity to abolish drudgery in mental and physical labour and radically reduce humanity’s hours of necessary work.

• Thanks to this technology, every individual can find the time to freely realize themselves in art, philosophy, and fundamental scientific research.

• Yet under the private ownership of the means of production, this immense potential is transformed into anxiety about a futureless existence, mental dulling, and alienation for the masses.

Everest’s Empty Summit

The summit of that Everest of which Terence Tao speaks is empty now.

• If AI infrastructures and processes of knowledge production continue to remain the registered property of Silicon Valley technocrats and monopoly capital, what will be planted on that summit will be the emblem of capital, alienated knowledge, and a dehumanized technocracy.

• But if this immense technological productive force is separated from the drive for profit, the tools are socialized, and the “black-boxing” of knowledge is not permitted but instead knowledge is offered for the common use of humanity, then the flag of emancipated human reason and the collective future will be planted on that summit.

Dear Evrim Ağacı, the struggle for scientific enlightenment cannot be apolitical. What will determine the world of the future is not the processing speed of algorithms, but the dialectical and class struggle humanity will wage over these means of production.

With love and scientific solidarity!