cousin_it 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: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 September 2011 02:44:47AM -1 points [-]

The existence of the real number line is one thing. The existence of an uncountable ordinal is another. When you consider the hierarchies of uncomputable ordinals to their various Turing degrees that are numbered among the countable ordinals, and that which countable ordinals you can constructively well-order strongly corresponds to the strength of your proof theory and which Turing machines you believe to halt, and when you combine this with the Burali-Forti paradox saying that the predicate "well-ordered" cannot be self-applicable, even though any given collection of well-orderings can be well-ordered...

...I just have trouble believing that there's actually any such thing as an uncountable ordinal out there, because it implies an absolute well-ordering of all the countable well-orderings; it seems to have a superlogical character to it.

Comment author: cousin_it 14 September 2011 04:52:36PM *  0 points [-]

Would Chaitin's constant also be one of these "superlogical" things that cannot "exist" "out there"?

Comment author: TobyBartels 17 September 2011 09:18:44PM 0 points [-]

I know that you rescinded this question, but intuitionists (at least) would answer it affirmatively.