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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (653)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: TobyBartels 12 September 2011 06:35:31PM *  0 points [-]

Priest (top of page 3 in the PDF above, numbered page 199) suggests an example:

I thought of something I would like to buy you for Christmas, but I couldn't get it because it doesn't exist.

In symbols:

x, (I thought of x) & (I would like to buy you x for Christmas) & [(I couldn't get x) ∵ (x doesn't exist)].

Turning this back into English:

For some x, I thought of x, I would like to buy you x for Christmas, and I couldn't get x because x doesn't exist.

But not this:

There exists x such that I thought of x, I would like to buy you x for Christmas, and I couldn't get x because x doesn't exist.

One could rescue this by claiming that x exists in the speaker's past thoughts but not in reality, or something like that. But then an uncountable ordinal may also exist in the thoughts of mathematicians without existing in reality.