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God created the real numbers

(www.ethanheilman.com)
136 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.604s | source
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andrewla ◴[] No.45067770[source]
I'm an enthusiastic Cantor skeptic, I lean very heavily constructivist to the point of almost being a finitist, but nonetheless I think the thesis of this article is basically correct.

Nature and the universe is all about continuous quantities; integral quantities and whole numbers represent an abstraction. At a micro level this is less true -- elementary particles specifically are a (mostly) discrete phenomenon, but representing the state even of a very simple system involves continuous quantities.

But the Cantor vision of the real numbers is just wrong and completely unphysical. The idea of arbitrary precision is intrinsically broken in physical reality. Instead I am off the opinion that computation is the relevant process in the physical universe, so approximations to continuous quantities are where the "Eternal Nature" line lies, and the abstraction of the continuum is just that -- an abstraction of the idea of having perfect knowledge of the state of anything in the universe.

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chasd00 ◴[] No.45068269[source]
> The idea of arbitrary precision is intrinsically broken in physical reality.

you said a lot and i probably don't understand but doesn't pi contradict this? pi definitely exists in physical reality, wherever there is a circle, and seems to be have a never ending supply of decimal points.

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1. LegionMammal978 ◴[] No.45068302[source]
> wherever there is a circle,

Is there a circle in physical reality? Or only approximate circles, or things we model as circles?

In any case, a believer in computation as reality would say that any digit of π has the potential to exist, as the result of a definite computation, but that the entirety does not actually exist apart from the process used to compute it.