> If you want to predict the future, science is the tool you want but if you want to court someone then maybe poetry is your tool. I agree and I definitely see

> If you want to predict the future, science is the tool you want but if you want to court someone then maybe poetry is your tool. I agree and I definitely see your point, what I'm saying (or what I'm trying to say, at least, English not being my mother-tongue and me not being a mathematician nor a philosopher) is that going one (or two steps) back one may ask him/herself about the very concept/idea of utility, more exactly on what "premise" (so to speak) we assign "goals" to the "reality" surrounding us, why do we assume there is an "utility", why do we assume there should be "goals"? Why should we instrumentalize said "reality" by seeing it through the prism of "utility" and "goals"? I know that taking that many steps back from "natural" concepts like "utility" and achieving "goals" risks turning everything into empty metaphysics and, worse (from the pov of a mathematician or of a scientist more generally speaking) into mysticism, but imo at the higher level the mysticism of the neoplatonists (i.e. Plato's ideas taken several steps further with some pre-socratic elements added in) plus the ideas of some pre-socratics themselves are more closer to the "reality" of it all than what we ended up adopting (basically Aristotle whom we refined/corrected in some specific points). Basically I think a guy like Heraclitus was closer to grasping the "reality" around us than Aristotle ever was, but had we gone the way of Heraclitus we wouldn't have had computers and rockets and all, computers and rockets that were made possible by Aristotle's logic (and by the way how he perceived the logic process per se). Again, imo, Plato stands between the pre-socratics and Aristotle, but because we chose Aristotle's way and we basically built our world on Aristotle's way of thinking when we read Plato we tend to focus only on the part of his philosophy that in a way confirms this "world" that we built, so to speak (with this correlation between Plato's ideas and mathematics being just an example for that). Anyway, these are just some ramblings :)