Academian comments on The Last Number - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 10 April 2010 12:09PM

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Comment author: Academian 10 April 2010 09:11:14PM *  6 points [-]

4.2 is a number such that when multiplied by 5 yields 21.

So one interpretation is that a Turing machine implementing successive additions of 1 in Peano arithmetic, starting at 1, storing the results, and multiplying each result by 5=1+1+1+1+1, might eventually output the result 21=(1+1+..+1), which is easily shown to be a contradiction.

If you're not happy with what is meant by "contradiction", then lets just say it would be extremely surprising if that happened, and a lot of people would be very upset ;)