= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Nick_Tarleton comments on The Last Number - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (57)
See also: "Division by Zero" by Ted Chiang
This story was a bit weird, main characters seemed to take it a bit too strongly that arithmetic failed.
I mean, there is some sense in which 1 does not equal 2. Even if arithmetic fails to define a framework where they're separate, that would simply mean that we need to redefine stuff, figure out a better way to describe our intuitive way of understanding how they're different, and thus changing the framework towards that intuitive understanding.
It would of course be a bit embarrassing, when much of the work had to be revisited and all that sort of stuff. But the characters seemed to be plain overreacting.
Man that would be hard, though!
I imagine that if this happened, math would become, at least for a while, an empirical science. People would study the derivations that led to contradictions. Proscriptions of such derivations would be taken as provisional, "this-is-how-our-universe-seems-to-work" axioms.
(Of course I don't actually expect arithmetic to ever be shown to be inconsistent.)
ROT13: Uhu? Bar znva punenpgre gbbx vg uneq. Rirelobql ryfr jrag "uhu, gung'f jrveq", naq pbagvahrq ba. Guvf znva punenpgre jnf n zngurzngvpvna jub unq onfrq ure frafr bs gehgu naq pbeerpgarff naq zrnavat ba zngu -- zngu juvpu unq qvfcebirq vgfrys.