[alex_young]

Does half of something have a limit? Not by its definition. Same thing with addition or multiplication. All of these only work with some concept of infinity.

We could redefine "half" to mean "half of whatever you're talking about until you get to some arbitrary limit", but doing that to all of arithmetic is going to wind up in a very odd place.

[lostmsu]

Half of something has a value, and that value is not infinity. You need to be more specific about how exactly do you get infinity from the fact that half of something has a value.

[drdeca]

Not from “that half of something had a value”, but from “that half of any thing has a value”.

If you accept that every natural number has a successor which is a natural number, and no two natural numbers have the same successor, and that there’s no loops (e.g. by saying that there’s a total order on natural numbers and that any natural number is less than its successor), then there can’t be a finite collection which is all the natural numbers.

You could say “there’s no collection which has all the natural numbers”, which, ok, how do you want to talk about things true of all natural numbers then?

Formulating descriptions of physics without the axiom of infinity (or, without something to play the role of the real numbers) is super icky. You, in practice, can’t do any significant mathematical physics in an ultrafinitistic approach.

[lostmsu]

> how do you want to talk about things true of all natural numbers then

There's an entire branch of math for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...

[drdeca]

I’m aware of constructive math. You still have the type of natural numbers in that?