Ben Weinstein-Raun

ben@superstimul.us

Hello! I'm Ben. I like to make stuff and not go extinct. I'm the admin of the superstimul.us Friendica instance.

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Berkeley, California, USA

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Ben Weinstein-Raun

1 month ago •

Ben Weinstein-Raun
1 month ago •

Pascal's Wager doesn't go far enough:

Granted, the Christian God offers infinite rewards, but as far as I can find this is always in terms of "eternal" life or "eternal" communion with him, and so we can be confident that he is offering rewards only as large as the cardinality of the continuum.

So come on down to Crazy Georg's Omega Plus First Church of G...d: If you can conceive of a God advertising any size of infinite reward, G...d will match it.

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Ben Millwood

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • 3 weeks ago •

my god offers a reward the size of the first inconceivable ordinal

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Ben Millwood

in reply to Ben Millwood • 3 weeks ago •

tbh it's probably finite

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Daniel Filan

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • 3 weeks ago •

Granted, the Christian God offers infinite rewards, but as far as I can find this is always in terms of "eternal" life or "eternal" communion with him, and so we can be confident that he is offering rewards only as large as the cardinality of the continuum.

FWIW I think it's plausible that the Greek words used in the NT doesn't have this sort of connotation.

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Ben Weinstein-Raun

in reply to Daniel Filan • 3 weeks ago •

I would find this surprising, since I don't model the ancients as having concepts for infinity that could correspond to larger infinities than this

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Daniel Filan

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • 3 weeks ago •

I'm imagining that the words / concepts they used were vague enough to include those higher cardinals - e.g. my understanding is that a lot of the words that get translated as "everlasting" could also be translated as "of the ages".

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David Mears

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • 3 weeks ago •

I found this relevant and interesting chapter from Unsong by thinking "hmm, but Omega is an ancient word in some sense, and it's been more recently used in the context of infinities... and Jesus also referred to 'alpha and omega' to represent something like infinitude. So I can probably make a joke about kabbalah. Oh, but Scott Alexander will have already done that."

unsongbook.com/interlude-%D7%9…

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Daniel Ziegler

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • 2 weeks ago •

I had forgotten that Cantor himself identified the biggest infinity (not formalizable) with God! Unsong really had some great material to with with.

A number of Catholic intellectuals were hesitant to accept the objective existence of Cantor’s transfinite numbers on the grounds that, as God is often theologically identified with the infinite, the acceptance of the existence of transfinite numbers would lead inevitably to Pantheism

I have never proceeded from any Genus supremum of the actual infinite. Quite the contrary, I have rigorously proved that there is absolutely no Genus supremum of the actual infinite. What surpasses all that is finite and transfinite is no Genus; it is the single, completely individual unity in which everything is included, which includes the Absolute, incomprehensible to the human understanding. This is the Actus Purissimus, which by many is called God.

here’s a little-known fact: the symbol that Cantor used to denote the class of all cardinal numbers (too big to be a set, of

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