Lith-Maethor said:

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...never in my life have I wanted to smack someone on the nose with a rolled up newspaper so badly.

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Gandalf196 said:

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Back to the title:

Quote:

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David Hilbert famously said:

"No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us."

Don't worry, dear David and dear Georg, I am not trying to kick you out. But, it won't be quite as much fun, since you won't have the pleasure of my company. I am leaving on my own volition.

For many years I was sitting on the fence. I knew that it was a paradise of fools, but so what? We humans are silly creatures, and it does not harm anyone if we make believe that א zero, א one , etc. have independent existence. Granted, some of the greatest minds, like Gödel, were fanatical platonists and believed that infinite sets existed independently of us. But if one uses the name-dropping rhetorics, then one would have to accept the veracity of Astrology and Alchemy, on the grounds that Newton and Kepler endorsed them. An equally great set theorist, Paul Cohen, knew that it was only a game with axioms. In other words, Cohen is a sincere formalist, while Hilbert was just using formalism as a rhetoric sword against intuitionism, and deep in his heart he genuinely believed that Paradise was real.

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https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion68.html

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