Thread 24640991

I was reading this fag's History of Western Philosophy, and at the end of the chapter on St. Thomas Aquinas, he claims that mathematics can prove the possibility of infinite regress. Specifically, he claims the series of negative integers up to negative one is an infinite regress; his example is silly, as he mistakes priority for predication.

However, I wax curious. Can one construct an infinite regress in mathematical terms? Would such a construction prove the possibility of infinite regress? Would it have ramifications in the philosophy of mathematics?

Also, why did Bertie write a history of philosophy when he gets filtered every other chapter?

>>24640991 (OP)
>Also, why did Bertie write a history of philosophy when he gets filtered every other chapter?
Wittgenstein mussy.

He wrote it for some night class course he was teaching because he needed the money. Anyway obviously mathematics can’t prove anything, it just expounds upon the assumptions you go into it with.
Read copleston instead.

>>24641001
> Read Copleston Instead.
I might he looks interesting.

>>24640991 (OP)
I believe it's an open problem in mathematics. You may have seen a meme where an infinite sum is -1/12, but I don't remember the exact name.
>>24641001
Dumb retard.

read the physics

>>24641001
Mathematics can't prove anything because of incompleteness. It can't prove anything about the world of apprehension because pure reason can't make claims about material reality.

Science can't prove anything because of induction. Humanities laying outside of pure reason in the world of linguistic comprehension because of the hard problem of consciousness and the undemonstrability of language possessing meaning.

Nobody can't know nothing. They say they know what is what but they don't know what is what they just strut—what the fuck?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4KTsdDTiDs

>>24640991 (OP)
>Can one construct an infinite regress in mathematical terms?
Yes, it’s trivial.

>Would such a construction prove the possibility of infinite regress?
Depends on what you mean by “possible.” It shows that a human being can define a concept which entails an infinite regress, but it doesn’t prove that this concept maps to some fact about the empirical world.

>Would it have ramifications in the philosophy of mathematics?
Yes, but banal ones. Most contemporary philosophers of math are social constructivists (to whom any specific mathematical object is merely a thing someone made up) or neoplatonists (to whom infinities are attractive, because they show a gap between the world of mathematical forms and the material world).

>>24641128
>Mathematics can't prove anything because of incompleteness
I think you're confused about what's up with the Incompleteness theorems.

>>24641160
> Yes, it's trivial.

How? Is it by recursion of some kind? That's the only way I could imagine it might be feasible.

>>24641184
>I think you're confused about what's up with the Incompleteness theorems.
Any system will have undemonstrable statements.
Any system will be unable to demonstrate its self-consistency.

That's enough to hang pure-reason in philosophy for the purpose of caps T Truth.

Useful, sure. True, get fucked. Just like the Sciences. Just like the Humanities. Just like Theology. About the only system of human knowledge which hasn't faced these problems is the social sciences, but that's because they don't ever attempt to demonstrate anything, just receive funding and abuse the poor (preferably sexually).

Geometry is the bridge math has to reality.
Looking for fractals? Sacred geometry aligns all dimensions and connects all.

>>24641194
>Any system will have undemonstrable statements.
>Any system will be unable to demonstrate its self-consistency.
No, Godel's theorems don't apply to every instance of a formal logical system, they apply to a particular set.

You're also conflating formal logic with pure reason, which seems like an error. You have to treat these things more carefully.

>>24641410
You know precisely which game I'm playing, and how successful the simultaneous attacks on all epistemologies are, and you're playing this drivel? The question being why Bertie was writing tripe in order to get laid so he could find a hot gay autist to talk to?

>>24640991 (OP)
Bertrand Russell is the ultimate midwit.
I once read a 107 page rambling thing he wrote that literally boiled down to: "I'm atheist because there is no empirical proof of a God." His inability to be concise shows that he is not a true genius.
>series of negative integers up to negative one is an infinite regress
Like look at this pedantic meaningless shit, it's like arguing how many angels fit in the head of pin.

>>24641424
The attacks aren't "successful" if they're just merely willful. "Incompleteness proves logic is unprovable because I said so" is a pretty bad attack when it turns out that it only really applies to certain first-order logics, and it's not a great attack on pure reason when anyone can point out that pure reason != formal logic in all authors, like Kant, so it doesn't even get off the ground.

>>24641645
>I need you to know I'm an analytical philosopher and can't grasp adequate previous proofs when they're foundational.
I bet you think you're a subject.

>>24640991 (OP)
>his example is silly, as he mistakes priority for predication
and how do you distinguish predication from existence?

Copypasta on Russell the giga-midwit:
>His Principia Mathematica side hustle imploded. Gödel the Godcuck ruined it.
>He had epistemological trolls that any atheist Reddit neckbeard could have come up with and that were less sophisticated than those of Sextus Empiricus and Hume.
>His theory of descriptions was completely unnecessary, a midwit answer to something only midwits see as a problem ("[Meinong] argued, if you say that the golden mountain does not exist, it is obvious that there is something that you are saying does not exist -- namely the golden mountain; therefore the golden mountain must subsist in some shadowy Platonic world of being, for otherwise your statement that the golden mountain does not exist would have no meaning. I confess that, until I hit upon the theory of descriptions, this argument seemed to me convincing.")
>Even his stupid paradox in naive set theory that bears his name had been prefigured elsewhere in letters from Zermelo.
>Continental scholars routinely demonstrated his misunderstandings of Continental philosophers, toward whom he had emotional, Anglocuck revulsions unbecoming of a thinker.

>>24640991 (OP)
Not in anything remotely close to standard mathematics. No one outside a few extreme contrarian models of "foundations" would consider it. Typically a demonstration would be considered to involve a finite number of propositions.
If you tried telling a congress of mathematicians that you can demonstrate some big theorem but writing out the demonstration would involve an infinite number of intermediate steps so you can't write it but only rely on your infinite intuition. you would be laughed out of the room.
Some people might be confused by terms such as transfinite induction and the like, or even basic infinite processes, none of which have anything to do with infinite regress.

>>24641128
>falling for the pure reason meme
Pure reason doesn't exist. The very concept is an egoic construct. You don't need pure reason to know things. Induction produces knowledge, sensation produces knowledge, intuition produces knowledge. You seem to be coupling truth to pure reason and that's retarded.

>>24642083
>knowledge is truth
If it isn't, there's no reason to talk about it.