Banno

And it's a problem for moderation on the forums, too. Witness the recent discussion concerning banning @"Bartricks": https://thephilosophyforum.com/di...

No, I'm not.

Now another thing is, given that Devans has been shown to be wrong, that he is at odds with accepted body of mathematics, what should happen? One migh...

Again, the answer is that the number of points on a line segment is uncountable. The topic here is not mathematics; it's why folk like you can't recog...

See? Devans lacks the understanding needed to see how he is wrong. And here, learning stops. Thank goodness this sort of thing does not happen in, say...

Now this presents a genuine problem. As @"tim wood" is finding, addressing these sort of posts is pointless. The analysis I am proposing helps us to s...

Yep. So back to the topic of this thread - Devan's, and similar behaviour can be explained as entering into critique before having sufficient grasp of...

Let me leave you with one thing to consider. The folk who get paid to do mathematics are on my side. They agree with me that the number of points in a...

...that says "this expression is illegitimate". Yeah. You don't get it. I understand that. I'm not going to continue the discussion of the error of di...

UNDEFINED is not a number. So any equation involving it is not well-formed. It's shorthand for "Don't do it!"

Well, for our purposes here, that's not quite right. One says don't do it. The other is illformed, since it treats UNDEFINED (why allcaps?) as if it w...

Yeah, but I have this excellent Moroccan recipe for goat or lamb.... I think we can agree that our lives are far removed from our natural food sources...

Are you asking me why you can't help yourself? I don't know.

Facepalm. So you know you shouldn't do it, but you just can't help yourself?

@"Devans99", what is missing is not that 1/0 is equal to "undefined", but that mathematics, for good reason, forbids division by zero.

Dude, I did... here is the second place I addressed your reply: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/362728 A third time: do not divide b...

I wonder if the opposite might not be true. We buy meat carefully packaged, as removed as possible from the blood and gore of the fact of killing. Wha...

Yep. Well said.

Sure, but what makes the examples in the OP interesting is the active roll played by the third sex.

Yes, I am generalising your approach to the forums, as a topic in itself. I think it interesting - and the popularity of that thought in this thread s...

See how Devans keeps repeating UNDEFINED - his allcaps - as if it were a magic spell that will render his ideas true? One sees the same thing in, for ...

What I am proposing in this thread is a possible explanation for the sort of posts that we so often see here, where acceptable physics and mathematics...

See? What is going on here? Why can't Devan's see that division by zero is an illegitimate act?

Here's a case in point, then. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/362707 Notice that Devans does not look to the previous work done in m...

Yeah. No. I'm taking this example to my thread on critical thinking, because you are providing me with an excellent instantiation of the issue I was a...

...and then one gets a reply like this. Your objection was anticipated, and answered:

A neat division, which I think leads astray. See http://mathworld.wolfram.com/DivisionbyZero.html, especially the flippant answer from Derbyshire. So ...

Yes, Banno - write a book for us with the whole of the maths of infinity in it.

Which case? Being specific is important. See, for example, Meta's comments.

These are interesting variations on Hilbert's hotel, perhaps. It seems there are folk who read these and think "but you can't do that!", concluding th...

Well, that's kind of what my interest is. It would be wonderful if there were philosophical issues with infinity; so i like to keep an eye on these th...

Hello, Meta. Sigh. The harmonic series diverges (very slowly) to infinity. What is it that you think is not done?

This whole thread, and others hereabouts, are based on the apparent inability of a number of folk to comprehend the way mathematics treats infinity. T...

Interesting. That doesn't surprise me. Looks good. the fuss has settled down.

Oh, God, More Thomists. :wink: I am suspicious that arguments which have the outward form "time is thus-and-so, hence there must be a god" are actuall...

I don't know. I haven't been able to follow your line of thought. It feels like you are only posting half of what you are saying. As if I am missing h...

Do you really think Bart is talking about supertasks? I still think he is talking about simple sequences.

Again, you change the topic. Reiterating, you said: SO, here is an infinite task: (1+½+?+...). The harmonic series. It diverges to infinity. An infini...

Nuh. That 'd be too hard. Cooks have to work long hours at odd times. Not for me.

(This will be funny...)

Jesus, you won't get far if you admit mistakes. You are supposed to dig in and insist that everyone else is wrong.

And limits involve infinite steps... 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4... So, it's impossible. Says you.

True, that.

That's reassuring. Limits, in mathematics, are calculations - tasks - that are infinite; they involve infinite steps. You asserted that any task with ...

And yet we differentiate.

Spot on.

Well, it's right, isn't it? Time is not democracy. That is self evident. Now, if time were a cheese, it would necessarily be one sort of cheese, or it...

Yeah. The confusion of stuff and dimension. Like saying that time is neither democracy nor cheese.

That didn't help.

Yep. And?