Posted: Dec 26, 2017 12:40 am
Newmark wrote:
Tomorrow is 1 day from today. Yesterday is... how many days from today? I would say that "-1" would be a perfectly reasonable answer. Or do you propose that we can't measure the distance from now to a point in the past? Or are "yesterday" and "tomorrow" the same day, if both are the same distance from today?
Today has only come about after a succession of yesterdays. If there were an endless number of yesterdays, "today" would never come about. It would be indefinitely postponed.
Not that this hasn't got the slightest bit to do with the passage you quoted, but I have explained several times why your usage of "forever" is insufficient. This "problem" only becomes absurd in your straw man version of infinity.
Forever means to continue without ever stopping.
No.
You are, as usual, dead wrong. Some infinite sets fulfills the requirements for some mathematical definitions of "complete". No definition of complete fits all infinite sets in a way that would help your argument, especially since you could even answer my question above about what constitutes "all possible elements". Give me the definition of "complete" and "infinite" you are using (and "endless" while your at it), and tell me if you think the following sets are both "infinite" and "complete":All natural numbers
Or, you can simply admit that you have no idea what you are talking about.
All odd numbers
All negative numbers
All primes
The union of all integers greater than 1 and all integers less than -1
All rational numbers between 0 and 1
All real numbers
All complex numbers, excluding the real numbers
No.
You are confusing apples with oranges. An infinite set of odd integers is a complete set of odd integers. An infinite set of even intergers is a complete set of even integers. Neither set lacks anything because they can only possibly contain odds or evens, but not both types of integers. Translation: you are done with negative numbers because you still haven't grasped the the difference between set size and distance between points, and prefer to stick with your straw man. You are indeed wise to stop arguing about things you know nothing about, like your claim that the reals and the rationals are the same set if you approximate enough...
I'm done with negative numbers because they relate to a point in the arbitrary here and now (i.e zero). But that present point is never reached if there is an infinite amount of prior numbers.