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551 No. 551
Do you think infinite numbers really exist? Or if they do exist, can we manipulate them in ways that are meaningful?

The reason I ask is that I've noticed there's a lot of finitists on various chans and prominent people like Wilderberger are espousing a dogma that doesn't permit any "completed" infinities despite their applications.

Thoughts?
>> No. 554
Wildberger is a quack. At least, when it comes to inifinity.
>> No. 558
Infinity is where all of the interesting Mathematics happens. Pretty much all of (in)computability theory focuses on that. Church out some of Godëls theorems.
>> No. 563
Research in large cardinals has shown that accepting the existence of a sufficiently large number is logically equivalent to statements that on their surface have nothing to do with infinite numbers.

For instance, if you accept the existence of infinitely many Woodin cardinals and a measurable cardinal above all those, you can create a model that satisfies ZF + Determinacy.

My point is that even if these numbers don't exist, they are extremely useful for consistency results and other applications I don't know about. I would put infinite numbers on the level of transcendental numbers- we will never be able to fully "Exhaust" one in the real world, but accepting their existence is useful and intuitively true. So yes, we can clearly manipulate them in meaningful ways.
>> No. 565
finite numbers don't exist, yet we maniplulate them in ways that are meaningful.
>> No. 566
>>565

Yes they do! Numbers exist not in themselves but as properties of objects. 2 exists as the number of cups of coffee I've had today, the infinite cardinality of the continuum exists as the number of points between my fingers and the keys.


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