Not all things are possible, only potentially possible ones.
If you take all the numbers between zero and one, you will find an endless supply of distinct numbers but none of them are 3.
Aren't you really just talking about the level of abstraction being applied? If there are infinite possibilities between zero and one, then it's just our way of relating to it that imposes the perception of a limitation.
No. You might be reading into it a little bit too much.
My point was that finding three needs to be possible for you to find it. If you are looking on the interval 0-1, it is not possible. As other comments have kinda of suggested, you could map every integer to a real and find "three" but if you are going to do that, why not just look on an interval that actually contains the number?
Yes! But at some level, doesn’t it kind of get blurred?
That is, we are trying to come up with rules describing the underlying rules, right? The world isn’t made of stuff, it’s made of rules, right? Or math? Just not the same notation, at least.
Help! I feel like I’m falling off a metaphysical cliff!
Surprising that he could have that intuition in 1935, before the Unruh effect was known of, before AQFT was invented, and really before most of QFT was formulated.
Given infinite time, is it possible to randomly draw a rational (instead of an irrational) from the interval [0, 1]? And if so, is it possible infinite times?
In this case it does. Describe any effective measure to pick a random sample from the interval and you will have cheated into choosing from the computable reals instead (of which there is a countable amount)
I don't think that's correct. You're describing a limitation of our physical computing devices (or perhaps physical reality itself) as opposed to a theoretical flaw. At least as far as I can tell.
What leads you to claim that you can't encode infinite information given an infinite set to work with?
That is, we are trying to come up with rules describing the underlying rules, right? The world isn’t made of stuff, it’s made of rules, right? Or math? Just not the same notation, at least.
Help! I feel like I’m falling off a metaphysical cliff!
Subtle difference, but energy conservation for example has to be adhered to.
But then again, he was John von Neumann.
-- David Hilbert.
Disclaimer: total armchair philosophy.