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

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Comment author: komponisto 05 May 2011 04:33:56PM *  4 points [-]

I think you're being a bit uncharitable here. You've just moved the infinitude/"mysterious magicalness" from talking about real numbers to talking about sequences of rational numbers

That was deliberate. (How was it uncharitable?)

I don't think it's really extraordinary to claim that an undefinable or uncomputable sequence is a bit mysterious and possibly somehow unreal.

It may not be extraordinary, but it's still a confusion. A confusion that was resolved a century ago, when set theory was axiomatized, and the formalist view emerged. The Cantor/Kronecker debate is over: Cantor was right, Kronecker was wrong.

The source of this confusion seems to be a belief that correspondences between mathematical structures and the physical world are properties of the mathematical structures in question, rather than properties of the physical world. This is a kind of map/territory confusion.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 05 May 2011 08:57:36PM 2 points [-]

A good point.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 06 May 2011 02:54:11AM 0 points [-]

Sorry, uncharitable was the wrong word there. I meant you didn't address the actual apparent problem. Your new comment does.