I see no reason why disembodied brains wouldn’t find a need for social agreements as well, it’s not like the absence of élan vital would cause them to cease being social. The content and mode of expression of those agreements might be quite different, of course.

(We fleshbags could probably use more widespread application and understanding of formal language and notation as well—the most cumbersome description of linear interpolation I’ve ever seen was in the section on a real estate tax hike in the tax code; it had paragraphs! I mean, I feel for those who didn’t have a good time in high-school algebra, but I don’t see how they could reasonably deal with that monstrosity either.)

"Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales." -- Stephen Hawking

Algebrophobia apparently is a thing.

Medically, I’m entirely willing to believe there’s an X-phobia for any X. I just doubt this particular one would cut off more people than avoiding unreasonably long phrasing would include (let alone the weird French lingo the English-speaking world seems to insist on), and making a text accessible as is to literally everyone is plainly impossible. For regulations you’ll have to arrange special accommodations for some groups in any case—it’s only a question of which ones; for contracts it’s just another thing to negotiate.

Culturally, yes, and I can’t help but be awed at how stupid and self-inflicted it is. (See “Mathematician’s lament”, et al.) Introducing algebra into legal practice now would probably be a spectacularly bad idea even if it were possible. That’s why I mentioned “more widespread application and understanding of formal language”. Passing this hurdle is a massive ordeal—if I meaningfully contributed to it and knew that, I could probably die a happy man—but, I mean, we were talking disembodied brains in VR here.

By the way, can anyone explain what it is people actually like about A Brief History of Time? I went on to study some of this stuff, but the book appears both unnecessarily convoluted and surprisingly stingy with actual information compared to my preferred pop sci fare. I like me some enigmatic promises of explanations, but Hawking’s were left mostly unfulfilled, or so it seemed to me.