Mathematics Discovering Its Consciousness: Lasso Estimator as Cosmic Backdoor(zakelfassi.com)
zakelfassi.com
Mathematics Discovering Its Consciousness: Lasso Estimator as Cosmic Backdoor
https://zakelfassi.com/blog/2025/2025-09-14-lasso-estimator-mathematical-consciousness-constraint-freedom
6 comments
Yes, exactly. That sense of “secret of the universe encoded in a proof” is what I was trying to put words around. I know the jump from RIP to consciousness is huge; I’m not claiming a formal bridge, more that the shape of the constraint feels like an echo of something lived. A kind of resonance between mathematics as a language of limits and consciousness as the negotiation (or compilation?) of them. Your PhD work & courses with Candés as grounding makes you uniquely able to sense when leaps are being made. Thanks for your comment!
Articles like this make me feel bad. Many articles on HN do this to me, but ones like this in particular. I can sense the author's excitement, and everything sounds so profound, yet I have no clue what any of it actually means. The worst part is, even if it was ELI5, I'm fairly sure I'd still be lost. I guess I'll just go eat more Pop Tarts.
If it feels opaque, you’re in good company. One of the core ideas I work with is that part of what lets us “stay ahead” cognitively is embracing density: not because every idea must be immediately digestible, but because wrestling with dense models (math, theory, abstraction) builds the muscle. You don’t need to grasp every LASSO coefficient to feel the weight of what constraint means. And yes — Pop-Tarts are more than fine (those Hariboesque gummies recently dropped at Trader Joes is that for me.)
We all need something simple now & then when the brain’s been stretched.
Compressive sensing does have this mystical effect on people.
Mystical is the right word. Maybe the danger is in mistaking the shimmer for a conclusion, when really it’s an invitation to keep looking.
The leap from the RIP to consciousness is … big. But the wonder of mathematics does this kind of thing to me too. Sometimes you see a result so cool and wild that you have the sense that it encodes a secret of the universe; this feeling is why I got into mathematics to begin with.