idea

Three ways to take the ladder

Platonism: the top is the actual numbers, which exist apart from any rulebook. The cost is explaining how minds ever reach them.

No top: the ladder keeps going, and “true” always means true relative to some level.

The universe as the biggest system: if reality is the whole, nothing is outside it. Then either reality is not a formal system, or nobody inside can know all its truths.

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Sources

  1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics
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