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ec429 comments on Syntacticism - Less Wrong Discussion

-3 Post author: ec429 23 September 2011 06:49AM

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Comment author: ec429 24 September 2011 06:51:21AM *  0 points [-]

But you don't have to have unlimited resources, you just have to have X large but finite amount of resources, and you don't know how big X is.

Of course, in order to prove that your resources are sufficient to find the proof, without simply going ahead and trying to find the proof, you would need those resources to be unlimited - because you don't know how big X is. But you still know it's finite. "Feasibly computable" is not the same thing as "computable". "In principle" is, in principle, well defined. "In practice" is not well-defined, because as soon as you have X resources, it becomes possible "in practice" for you to find the proof.

I say again that I do not need to postulate infinities in order to postulate an agent which can find a given proof. For any provable theorem, a sufficiently (finitely) powerful agent can find it (by the above diagonal algorithm); equivalently, an agent of fixed power can find it given sufficient (finite) time. So, while such might be "unfeasible" (whatever that might mean), I can still use it as a step in a justification for the existence of infinities.