User blog comment:Vel!/Re: Rayo's function/@comment-5982810-20141231220359

Using the idea of taking the sum of all previously concieved numbers as "your number", or some variation of such (don't pretend that this is anything more than an elaborate version of that lame school-yard trick) is a bit like everyone trying to get rich by only stealing from their neighbors. Once everyone is a theif there is no incentive for producers of wealth to produce anything of value, and therefore the overall production value actually goes down! Likewise when you introduce a function like this and claim it's "legimate", you encourage everyone to use this function or some variation of it. But if everyone is using this function and no one is actually devising other functions for this one to feed off of, what do you think happens ... stagnation! This illustrates that functions like these actually contribute nothing to the discussion. They don't add one "iota" (pun intended) to googology as a whole. It's fine to talk about the "largest finite number ever concieved at a particular time" as a hypothetical concept, but practically speaking we have no way to verify or know every number ever concieved, thus this can be no more than a speculative thought experiment. Numbers should be explicitly defined using pure abstractions. You should never make references to physical constants, or attempt to reference data to which we have imperfect access (such as every thought ever concieved for example). This "function" is a example of "going meta" and "lack of specificity".