cousin_it comments on The Pascal's Wager Fallacy Fallacy - Less Wrong

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 April 2011 10:44:28AM 5 points [-]

The Lowenheim-Skolem theorem says (loosely interpreted) that even if you CLAIM to be talking about uncountably infinite things, there's a perfectly self-consistent interpretation of your talk that refers only to finite things (e.g. your definitions and proofs themselves).

Only in first-order logic. In second-order logic, you can actually talk about the natural numbers as distinguished from any other collection, and the uncountable reals.

Amusingly, if you insist that we are only allowed to talk in first-order logic, it is impossible for you to talk about the property "finite", since there is no first-order formula which expresses this property. (Follows from the Compactness Theorem for first-order logic - any set of first-order formulae which are true of unboundedly large finite collections also have models of arbitrarily large infinite cardinality.) Without second-order logic there is no way to talk about this property of "finiteness", or for that matter "countability", which you seem to think is so important.

Comment author: cousin_it 29 April 2011 12:04:44PM *  4 points [-]

You can capture the property "finite" with a first-order sentence over the "standard integers", I think. This leaves open the mystery of what exactly the "standard integers" are, which looks lightly less mysterious than the mystery of "sets" required for second-order logic.