I would have done the following if I had been asked that: calculate which numbers I would have time to count up to before I was thrown out/got bored/died/earth ended/universe ran out of negentropy. I would probably have to answer I don’t know, or I think X is a number for some of them, but it’s still an answer, and until recently people could not say wether “the smallest n>2 such that there are integers a,b,c satisfying a^n + b^n = c^n” was a number or not.
I’m not advocating any kind of finitism, but I agree that the position should be taken seriously.
I would have done the following if I had been asked that: calculate which numbers I would have time to count up to before I was thrown out/got bored/died/earth ended/universe ran out of negentropy. I would probably have to answer I don’t know, or I think X is a number for some of them, but it’s still an answer, and until recently people could not say wether “the smallest n>2 such that there are integers a,b,c satisfying a^n + b^n = c^n” was a number or not.
I’m not advocating any kind of finitism, but I agree that the position should be taken seriously.