[ExI] The meaning of life revisited

[Anders Sandberg]

Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> , 16/6/2014 4:03 AM:


On Jun 15, 2014 3:46 PM, "Anders Sandberg" <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
 >
 > (Last week I discovered that going meta about metaethics just gives you metaethics: it is its own meta-level theory, handling its own metal-level questions. But there is metametaphysics! Whether metametaphysics is its own meta-level theory I do not know...) 

Sounds like various alephs: we can work with these symbols according to rules governing their proper use, but really knowing/understanding their nuance escapes most. 
Yes, but some mathematicians are entirely at home with them. I share an office with one: he relaxes by talking about ordinal numbers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number ). There is an identification between *some* of the ordinals and alephs, but there are also large countable ordinals that are very, very, very^very large ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_countable_ordinal ). One of the interesting and mindbending aspects of some of these entities is that they are so large that standard logics cannot handle them. In fact, some of them are large enough that they cannot be described in any useful sense: they are neither even nor odd, or have any other definable properties. 
Some branches of math are *weird*. But it is fun to know about this when dealing with a religious person going on about how infinite God is. There are always a bigger and stranger infinity out there. ("We in the church of transfinite recursion believe God is as great as the Feferman–Schütte ordinal!" "Yeah, but that is still *countable*.")

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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