Sewing-Machine comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Unnamed 25 August 2011 02:17AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 06 September 2011 05:37:15AM 2 points [-]

For essentially the same reasons I have trouble believing that the first infinite ordinal exists.

Finite ordinals are computable, but otherwise your remarks still apply if you swap out "countable" for "finite." According to ZF there are uncomputable sets of finite ordinals, so you can't verify that they are well-ordered algorithmically.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 September 2011 06:01:41AM 4 points [-]

For essentially the same reasons I have trouble believing that the first infinite ordinal exists.

So what you're saying is that you don't believe the natural numbers exist.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 September 2011 04:03:20PM 2 points [-]

The natural numbers exist in about the strongest possible sense: I can get a computer program to spit them out one by one, and it won't stop until it runs out of resources. It's more accurate to say I don't believe that they're well-ordered, see here.

You might find my reasoning preposterous, I only wanted to point out that it's essentially the same as EYs reasoning about uncountable ordinals.