In “Nonconservation of Energy and loss of Determinism II. Colliding with an Open Set” (2010) Atkinson and Johnson argue in favour of the idea that an actual infinity should be excluded from physics, at least in the sense that physical systems involving an actual infinity of component elements should not be admitted. In this paper I show that the argument Atkinson and Johnson use is erroneous and that an analysis of the situation considered by them is possible without requiring any (...) type of rejection of the idea of infinity. (shrink)

We examine a distinctive kind of problem for decision theory, involving what we call discontinuity at infinity. Roughly, it arises when an infinite sequence of choices, each apparently sanctioned by plausible principles, converges to a ‘limit choice’ whose utility is much lower than the limit approached by the utilities of the choices in the sequence. We give examples of this phenomenon, focusing on Arntzenius et al.’s Satan’s apple, and give a general characterization of it. In these examples, repeated dominance reasoning (...) (a paradigm of rationality) apparently gives rise to a situation closely analogous to having intransitive preferences (a paradigm of irrationality). Indeed, the agents in these examples are vulnerable to a money pump set-up despite having preferences that exhibit no obvious defect of rationality. We explore several putative solutions to such problems, particularly those that appeal to binding and to deliberative dynamics. We consider the prospects for these solutions, concluding that if they fail, the examples show that money pump arguments are invalid. (shrink)