On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 10:39:20AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > His retort was that > > integers weren't stuff - but I think that is somewhat of a lost in > > translation moment. The French word etouffe > > Etoffe. > > > > > basically means material, > > and in English stuff used to mean the same, but in more recent times has > > taken on a placeholder function, a generic collection of "things". > >
My point about the lost in translation moment still pertains. My grandmother used to admonish me for saying things like "... and all that stuff", because for her, stuff meant material. Language has changed. Colloqially, we can refer to integers, sets and stuff, and clearly mean something along the lines of the rest of mathematics with stuff. It is a very colloquial word, best avoided for precision :). > > > > > One mystery does remain though - why don't we see things like Hilbert > > hotel computers? It is a somewhat hidden assumption of > > computationalism that such things don't exist. > > Only 0, s(0), s(s(0) … are existing. You need an axiom of infinity to have a > Hilbert Hostel. > > My axioms are only classical logic + Kxy = x and Sxyz = xz(yz). > Yes - but Deutsch's point would be: why just those axioms, and not say some kind of infinity axiom that allows Hilbert hotels? -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
