4 ms·
Wittgenstein in a lecture once asked his audience to imagine coming across a man who is saying “...5, 1, 4, 1, 3 — finished!”, and, when asked what he has been
by jjgreen 1y ago
Wittgenstein in a lecture once asked his audience to imagine coming across a man who is saying “...5, 1, 4, 1, 3 — finished!”, and, when asked what he has been doing, replies that he has just finished reciting the complete decimal expansion of π backwards.
A. W. Moore The Infinite, Routledge, 1990
- tocs3 1y agoI don't get it.
- jjgreen 1y agoWhen you recite the figures of pi, 3, 1, 4, 2, ... it goes on for ever, and no-one seems to object to the "..."; Wittgenstein turns it around, by reversing the sequence he places the infinity in the present, a potential infinity becomes an actual infinity and most people find that disturbing. But infinity has nothing to do with time, it is outside it, so our discomfort being time-direction dependent illustrates that we should have been disturbed by the "...", in the first case -- this is Wittgenstein's brilliance.
- tocs3 1y agoAh, I read the π as n.