earthwormchuck163 comments on Second-Order Logic: The Controversy - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 January 2013 07:51PM

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

Comments (188)

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

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 05 January 2013 01:19:13AM 19 points [-]

I kept expecting someone to object that "this Turing machine never halts" doesn't count as a prediction, since you can never have observed it to run forever.

Comment author: earthwormchuck163 05 January 2013 09:50:42PM 3 points [-]

If you take this objection seriously, then you should also take issue with predictions like "nobody will ever transmit information faster than the speed of light", or things like it. After all, you can never actually observe the laws of physics to have been stable and universal for all time.

If nothing else, you can consider each as being a compact specification of an infinite sequence of testable predictions: "doesn't halt after one step", "doesn't halt after two steps",... "doesn't halt after n steps".