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LegionMammal978yesterday at 5:02 PM0 repliesview on HN

> However, an axiom of infinity is independent, it doesn’t contradict anything in standard formalizations, and so it doesn’t make sense to say “infinity is wrong”.

Suppose we start with ZFC - Infinity as our base system. Then the negation of Infinity is consistent with this system. But adding Infinity itself makes the system strictly stronger, since ZFC proves the consistency of ZFC - Inf: in particular, in ZFC, we cannot prove that Infinity is consistent with ZFC - Inf.

In other words, in principle, it might be the case that ZFC - Inf is consistent, yet ZFC itself has a contradiction. In practice, most people believe that ZFC is also consistent, but we have no way to prove it a priori without accepting even more new axioms.