Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> writes: > That's wrong. If we had such a reason, we could state it: "the reason > we expect natural numbers are irreducible is ..." and fill in the > blank. But I don't believe that such a reason exists (or at least, as > far as we know). > > However, neither do we have any reason to think that they are *not* > irreducible. Hence, we have no reason to think that they are anything > but irreducible.
But by the same reasoning, we have no reason to think they are anything but non-irreducible (reducible, I guess). What the heck does it mean for a natural number to be irreducible anyway? I know what it means for a polynomial to be irreducable, but the natural number analogy would be a composite number, and there are plenty of those. You might like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20110806055104/http://www.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/papers/hm.pdf Remember also that "in ultrafinitism, Peano Arithmetic goes from 1 to 88" (due to Shachaf on irc #haskell). ;-) -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
