Kindly comments on Standard and Nonstandard Numbers - Less Wrong

31 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 December 2012 03:23AM

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Comment author: Kindly 19 May 2013 02:38:55PM *  0 points [-]

It's a bit worse than that. Even if we defined the "k-successions" operator (which is basically addition), it doesn't actually let us do what we want. "For all x, there exists a number k such that 0 after k successions is equal to x" is always satisfied by setting k=x, even if x is some weird alternate-universe number like 2*. Granted, I have no clue what "taking 2* successions of 0" means, but...