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The issue is not one of “power”—one can make almost any formal system sufficiently “powerful” by adding a few axioms that get you over the rough spots in your p
by jkhdigital 6y ago
The issue is not one of “power”—one can make almost any formal system sufficiently “powerful” by adding a few axioms that get you over the rough spots in your proofs.
The problem is that the modern world increasingly relies on mathematics, in nearly all aspects of life, to make consequential decisions about how to interpret data and act on it. The challenge is not one of power, but of fidelity—using a mathematical structure that is a suitable abstraction for the real world situation. Use the wrong abstraction, and you end up with paradoxes like the incompleteness theorems.
I believe a goal of univalent foundations is to make the abstract structure that one is working with absolutely explicit, evidenced by the (almost) total absence of axioms from the system. If you want to work in ZFC, you can add those axioms yourself.