Comment by Animats
9 hours ago
There's an unpopular branch of mathematics which does not have infinities - finiteism.[1] The constructive version of finitism takes the position that there is no such thing as infinity, just arbitrarily large upper bounds. You can have theorems about arbitrarily large numbers, but you never get
1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... = 2
The benefit of finitism is that it escapes undecidability.
The big objection to finiteism is that it's a lot more work. Infinity swallows many special cases. Proofs get longer without infinity, and most of the special cases are uninteresting. That's not a problem for AIs.
Someone may start up an AI and make it grind through Hilbert's program for putting mathematics on a fully consistent foundation, starting from a finiteism base. This is a huge, unrewarding job. Great for machine work.
> 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... = 2
It's not necessarily clear that this statement requires infinity, if you're willing to treat "... =" as a shorthand. You might prefer something like "1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... -> 2" if it's more clear, where "->" means something like "gets as close as you like without ever getting further away than that", but really the "=" sign is already overloaded in all sorts of subtly different ways anyway, so there's not really any trouble using it here. Almost any rigorous definition you can write down of exactly what that statement means would not rely on the use of infinity.
See this introduction to limits.[1]
If you allow infinite recursion, you soon get to Godel and undecidable problems. Finite deterministic systems are decidable, because you can in principle enumerate all the states. The halting problem is decidable for deterministic systems with finite memory. It may be exponentially hard for some programs, but that's quite different from being undecidable.
(This is too long a subject to discuss here, and I haven't worked on constructive mathematics in many years. It's more practical than it was decades ago. You need power tools, which we now have.)
[1] https://www.mathsisfun.com/calculus/limits.html
Limits can be defined within finitism as long as the end result is finite. Essentially it’s just a process which lets us get as close to 2 as we want.
A better example would be a limit that equals sqrt(2) which finitists would probably say cannot represent a real object because it is only defined as the end of an infinite process.
Finitism doesn't escape anything, it just gives you the illusion of safety. Any intellectually honest thinker should accept the possibility that 10 is a nonstandardly large number.