chimera 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: 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: [deleted] 14 September 2011 10:36:56PM 2 points [-]

Set theory is just a made up bunch of puzzle pieces (axioms) and some rules on how to fit them together (logic) so it's weird to hear you lot talking about "existence" of a set with some property P as something other than whether or not the statement "exists X, P(X)" has a proof or not. I thought Hilbert's finitist approach should have slain Platonism long ago.