fishfry

Not ubiquitous to me, I'm a philosophical dummy. I'll Google around. I'm way out of my depth. I will do some surfing and maybe glean some clues. A qui...

I don't find that satisfactory. It only casts doubt on the premise "if supertasks are impossible." I agree with you that the lamp and staircase and ot...

Have you got a reference to Midgley and Davidson? Is there an interesting professional discussion of these issues?

I'm making the point that you are perfectly willing to accept {1/2, 3/4, 7/8, ..., 1} as a valid set that contains an infinite sequence and its limit;...

You confused me a while back. You said you don't believe in the real numbers . So I asked you, what are those symbols 0, .5, 1, and so forth? If they'...

Cherry picking teachers is misleading. A quick Google search on "how much to college graduates earn?" said that they make $50k their first year. "Aver...

Well ok, then why don't I complete a supertask when I walk across the room, first going halfway, etc.? Can you distinguish this case from your definit...

I love when people agree with me. It happens so seldom around here :-) I agree with you too! Let me see if I can clarify my point. In the lamp problem...

Right. So why is a lamp circuit that can switch states in arbitrarily small slices of time reasonable, and spaghetti isn't? That's one of the cognitiv...

Thanks, I hope that didn't come out too ... however it came out. J6 is a sore point on both sides of the issue. If I said anything at all I'd be invit...

So glad I could provide some insight. That was an interesting question. Formalism is saved!

The natural numbers have no physical instantiation as far as we know. Their existence is only abstract, fictional if you will. Or, to a formalist, pur...

Well between the two of you I have no idea what a supertask is anymore. I tend to agree with you, that supertasks either (a) may be physically possibl...

Such as ...? Citation? Jeez I don't have to read you the daily newspapers, do I? The college students having their loans "forgiven" aka transferred to...

So you believe in the rational numbers? But then the reals are easily constructed from the rationals as Dedekind cuts or equivalence classes of Cauchy...

But I did not say that. I said that Congress should pass a law funding college costs if that's what they want. Biden's action is illegal. And as a sel...

I like analogies fine. I don't understand any of yours. I thought we were making progress on at least having the same conversation when we were traver...

You're taking that as fundamental? I like football but these picture posts aren't doing much for me. We were at least having the same conversation abo...

I don't see how that is. Take as an example the Peano axioms for the natural numbers. Do we have a model of them? Yes, namely \mathbb N, the smallest ...

I don't believe I've said anything to lead you to believe I'm against education. I'm against Biden's illegal, election year transfer of lawful debts f...

Even taken at face value, I fail to understand how posting stills from the movie relates to anything we're discussing. And like I said, humans make lo...

A metric space. A metric space is already a topological space, as a cat is already a mammal. Calling 0 by the name 0 would be far less confusing. Who ...

I was making my point about mathematical convergent sequences. Don't know whether it strictly applies to walking.

A nation of farmers would live a lot longer than a nation of comparative literature majors, I'm sure you agree. The trades are "real work." Tradesmen ...

No. Consider the sequence 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, ... It has the limit 0. We may form the ordered set {1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, ..., 0}. It's a...

Ok. @"Michael" has been using that as an example of a supertask so I can't say. I haven't studied them much. Ok. Perhaps you and @"Michael" could hash...

The two sets in question have the same order type, denoted \omega + 1. That's mathematically true, and it's all that's relevant to these two examples....

Actually it's Biden who engaged in election denialism this week when he gave the Presidential medal of freedom to Al Gore, in part for not disputing t...

Ok, that at least makes sense. But why denote the point 0 as ? Isn't that obfuscatory and confusing? The union covers the closed unit interval. I don'...

I believe Churchill also said that the greatest argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. :-) Biden's bailout i...

I'm afraid I don't get the joke.

I said no such thing!! If you like, you can think of the limit as being the \infty-th item. That is, if 1/4, 3/4, 7/8, ... are the first, second, thir...

I don't see how you could count all the natural numbers by saying them out loud or writing them down. Is this under dispute? Do you mean the fact that...

The working class should fund the education of the cognitive elite who will vastly out-earn them in their respective lifetimes? Did I understand you c...

Which includes magic lightbulbs and staircases? I'm open minded, I don't think I can predict the future. Even a few hundred years ago nobody could ima...

We have no disagreement then. People should pay off their own loans that they knowingly agreed to pay. That's exactly the point. Welders don't have st...

Don't be silly. The rotational rate of galaxies is physical, even if our current theory of gravity doesn't explain it. We don't say it's not physical ...

Yeah I care. I spend most of my time on this forum in mathematically-oriented threads. I'm dipping my toes in the political waters over here and tread...

By the conditions of the problem. Is this about the lamp? The problem says it's on at 1/2, on at 3/4, off at 7/8, etc.. The problem itself doesn't def...

Jeez that's kind of creepy ... true, I suppose. Death is the least upper bound of the open set of life. In the future, if physics ever figures out how...

If I stand in a parking lot and call out "one, two, three, ..." and keep going, I can never count all the natural numbers. In math, I can say, Let {1,...

I am not sure why you think it's necessary to point that out to me. I took the class. I read a couple of different books, not that particular one. But...

Perfectly correct. Then why should the taxpayers shoulder the burden of those who make bad choices? Doesn't that create what they call a moral hazard?...

I always engage directly with anything I understand. I don't dismiss the rest, I clearly say I don't understand. This has been true all along. And why...

If only. It's the gender theory taught to five year olds that worries people about the government schools these days.

I find this incredibly annoying. Can't you get to the point? I don't see the point. It's not esoteric, it's basic high school math. The real number li...

I don't even get a mention now? That's the only way I know when someone's talking to me. I don't know what you are talking about. I swear to God, I do...

Well, it's not logical to reject a possibility on the grounds that you don't like it. You're allergic to randomness? Is that the argument you're makin...

Please start any time. I simply have no idea what your overall point is, nor have I understood any of your examples. Start from the top. "I wish to re...

I'm unable to understand their point. McDonalds, Sushi, Wok and Roll. Now I'm hungry. Once again you leave me utterly baffled as to why you posted thi...