It might sound trivial but it is not! Imagine there is a lever at every point on the real number line; easy enough right? you might pick the lever at 0 as your “first” lever. Now imagine in another cluster I remove all the integer levers. You might say, pick the lever at 0.5. Now I remove all rational levers. You say, pick sqrt(2). Now I remove all algebraic numbers. On and on…
If we keep playing this game, can you keep coming up with which lever to pick indefinitely (as long as I haven’t removed all the levers)? If you think you can, that means you believe in the Axiom of Countable Choice.
Believing the axiom of countable choice is still not sufficient for this meme. Because now there are uncountably many clusters, meaning we can’t simply play the pick-a-lever game step-by-step; you have to pick levers continuously at every instant in time.
This would apply if I had to pick based on the set of levers in each group. By picking the first one I see I get out of the muck of pure math, I don't care about the set as a whole, I pick the first lever I see, lever x. Doesn't matter if it's levers -10 to 10 real numbers only, my lever x could be lever -7, the set could be some crazy specific set of numbers, doesn't matter I still pick the first one I see regardless of all the others in the set.
Pure math is super fun, but reality is a very big loophole
It seems to me that, since the set of real numbers has a total ordering, I could fairly trivially construct some choice function like "the element closest to 0" that will work no matter how many elements you remove, without needing any fancy axioms.
I don't know what to do if the set is unordered though.
Help me, I assumed that it's possible but then two men appeared to decompose the train and put the parts back together into two copies of the original train
I select the most proximate lever in each cluster, using any criteria that would produce a beginning of a discrete order (so no ties for first). If I get infinite "tries" then even if it is an infinitesimally small chance of selecting the functional lever, at some point I will expect to get it.