Comment by wat10000

8 months ago

But Q is a number you can actually count, for a definition of “actually” that includes unimaginably large space and time. That finiteness comes from the basic mechanics of the Turing machine, which don’t depend on your mathematical axioms.

Sure, you can come up with a set of axioms where the natural numbers include infinities. You may be able to use it to prove interesting things. But all that does here it make it so that the set of numbers describing how many steps a Turing machine runs before it stops is no longer the “natural numbers.”