Comment by discoutdynamite | Hacker News Reader

Comment by discoutdynamite | Hacker News Reader

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discoutdynamite

The double entendre of "having studied Agrippa" in the footnotes is probably going to go unnoticed unless someone mentions it here. Contemporary to the cited Camillo Agrippa, fencing master, was Henrichus Cornelius Agrippa, whose collections on philosophy and occultism are much more relevant to the topic. H.C. Agrippa's work is still considered authoritative in its fields: the numbers represent the ideas, which were both created in the first moments by God. the difference between set of reals and set of integers might have a correlation to the difference between the set of all expressible concepts, and (the smaller) set of actually meaningful concepts. Maybe some computability theory could be tossed in there too.

Not all reals are expressible: to be expressible is to have a finite representation in some language. Definable numbers [1] are that (countably infinite) subset of the reals which can be expressed individually. Almost all reals are not definable and therefore cannot be individually named.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definable_real_number

I was thinking of making a "the other Agrippa" reference since with half my friends if you say Agrippa will think Camillo and the other half will think Henrichus Cornelius. I've only read Camillo Agrippa, I've been meaning to read Henrichus. Is he worth reading? What do you recommend?

> H.C. Agrippa's work is still considered authoritative in its fields: the numbers represent the ideas, which were both created in the first moments by God.

That does sound like the computability idea of numbers being programs.

``` In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. ```

The "Word" in Greek is translated from logos which also means logic, rational, metric.

``` In the beginning was the Number, and the Number was with God, and the Number was God. ```

Looking around on the internet, there is a lot here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationes_seminales

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