Comment on Tough Trolly Choices

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wisha@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

It might sound trivial but it is not! Imagine there is a lever at every point on the real number line; easy enough right? you might pick the lever at 0 as your “first” lever. Now imagine in another cluster I remove all the integer levers. You might say, pick the lever at 0.5. Now I remove all rational levers. You say, pick sqrt(2). Now I remove all algebraic numbers. On and on…

If we keep playing this game, can you keep coming up with a choice of lever to pick indefinitely? If you think you can, that means you believe in the Axiom of Countable Choice.

Believing the axiom of countable choice is still not sufficient for this meme. Because now there are uncountably many clusters, meaning we can’t simply play the pick-a-lever game step-by-step; you have to pick levers continuously at every instant in time.

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