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michael0churchtoday at 11:52 AM3 repliesview on HN

It’s also genuinely surprising. We’re used to thinking of the countable as the small infinity, which it is, and yet a structure we feel like we can visualize contains so much complexity.

There is also, weirdly, a way in which massive finite numbers like TREE(3) “feel” larger than N, and large countable infinities “feel” larger than w_1, even though the opposite is clearly true.


Replies

aeneasmackenzietoday at 3:17 PM

All describable or recognizable complexity is part of the subcountable set of computable subsets of N. Higher infinities thus mostly contain fake elements about which nothing can be said, so they don’t feel any bigger.

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voidmaintoday at 11:55 AM

The visualization is of the power set, which is uncountable.

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zaebaltoday at 12:07 PM

TREE(3) is unimaginably small, compared to ω