On 1/20/2014 4:41 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 11:32 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 1/20/2014 12:25 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
And to answer this properly, you have to define "physical
existence of
Brent" without using arithmetic.
Brent:=the being who typed this sentence. (Or next time you're in
California, come by and I'll give an ostensive definition - and a
cup of
coffee.)
Thanks very much for the coffee cup, I appreciate. But frankly this
will not
work. If I need to define number by invoking a being typing a sentence
in a post
dated the 19 janvier 2014, oops: I am using some numbers here.
You didn't ask to define a number, you asked to define "physical existence
of
Brent". And 19 January 2014 can easily be defined as when Brent typed the
above
message. I think you (understandably as a logician) are so immersed in the
axiomatic method that you lose of sight of its connection to the physical
world.
Definitions become nothing but relations between symbols if you never
ground them
in pointing.
Don't ask someone who want to compute 2+2=4 to come in California and
drink four
cups of coffee, if all computers have to do that I am afraid the net
will become
extremely slow ...
I find much more plausible that I can explain numbers behavior, and
Brent's
brain and ideas, from elementary arithmetical axioms, than explain
arithmetic
from Brent and other humans ideas. Come on ...
I'm quite sure you can explain Brent's brain and ideas without using any
number
bigger than 10^100.
Just the sentence:
"I'm quite sure you can explain Brent's brain and ideas without using
any number bigger than 10^100."
Takes a number larger than 10^100 to represent.
No, the sentence only uses the description "any number bigger than 10^100". It's
logically equivalent to, "Every explanation of Brent's brain and ideas uses only number
less than 10^100".
Brent
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