ClamdestineBoyster posted:

Calculus is all about numbers approaching infinity, but nobody really does a lot of practical work with very high numbers. Say we took a googleplex, which is the highest whole number a machine can store without cryptography, and used another adding machine to square that number, what would that yield? The answer is an excessively long series of 9s, like 999999999999999 etc, one less than the mathematical result. The initial quantum sum is one less than the mathematical answer, and the machine ultimately counts itself as one in the second part of the process. So really in theory the numbers after the 1 could be anything during the first step of the calculation. The quantum value is irrelevant until the number is summed. And that chain of numbers is not encrypted, it doesn’t represent information, so a googleplex squared could actually be anything up to one less than 2 googleplex squared and contain the same quantum value as the known mathematical result before the machine sums it. Because this number can theoretically be anything, we have to conclude that the unknowable value has to have the property of intelligence, that it is of will to exist in some sort of way because the adding machine has already contracted a result. Not random, not cryptographic, but an unmeasurable value that has to exist for some time within the calculation. It has to choose something, intelligently.