"-- Your points about the subtleties of the gigabyte example are correct, very apt, and interesting! In some of my unpublished work I am strong on distinguishing very carefully between "potentiality" (yor word) versus "actuality", and not just in physics, but especially in mathematics. The very ease with which our brains take potentials to their limits and then treat them as existing realities is both an interesting efficiency aspect of how capacity-limited biological cognition works, and a warning of the dangers of being sloppy about the difference. Computer science flatly forces one to face some of these realities in ways that bio-brain mathematical abstractions do not. This is why I think it is very healthy for mathematicians to contemplate what happens if they convert their abstract equations into software."
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Terry Bollinger
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