[ExI] Why is there Something rather than Nothing?

Anders Sandberg anders at aleph.se
Thu Jul 12 04:22:18 UTC 2012


On 12/07/2012 13:16, Mike Dougherty wrote:
>
> in the context of alephs, is an infinite hierachy of alephs measured
> in alephs or is *infinite* a qualitative measure rather than a
> cardinality?

No, it is ordinal.

Cardinals denote how many of something there is ("1 X, 2 Xs, 3 Xs, 
aleph_0 Xs...") while ordinals denote an ordering ("1, 2, 3, ... omega, 
omega+1, omega+2, ... , 2*omega, 2*omega+1, ... , omega^2, ... , 
omega^3, ... omega^omega, ... omega^omega^omega, ... , epsilon...). See 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number

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




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