Martin Escardo 2012. The Weak Limited Principle of Omniscience (only somebody called Bishop could have called it that), or WLPO for short, says that every infinity binary sequence is either constantly 1 or it isn't. This is equivalent to saying that every decreasing infinity binary sequence os either constantly one or not. The type ℕ∞ of decreasing binary sequences is defined in the module GenericConvergentSequence. The constantly 1 sequence is called ∞. WLPO is independent of type theory: it holds in the model of classical sets, and it fails in recursive models, because it amounts to a solution of the Halting Problem. But we want to keep it undecided, for the sake of being compatible with classical mathematics, following the wishes of Bishop, and perhaps upsetting those of Brouwer who was happy to accept continuity principles that falsify WLPO. In the words of Aczel, WLPO is a taboo. More generally, anything that implies a taboo is a taboo, and any taboo is undecided. Taboos are boundary propositions: they are classically true, recursively false, and constructively, well, taboos! \begin{code} {-# OPTIONS --without-K --exact-split --safe --auto-inline #-} module Taboos.WLPO where open import MLTT.Spartan open import CoNaturals.GenericConvergentSequence WLPO : 𝓤₀ ̇ WLPO = (u : ℕ∞) → (u = ∞) + (u ≠ ∞) open import TypeTopology.DiscreteAndSeparated \end{code} If ℕ∞ is discrete, i.e. has decidable equality, then WLPO follows: \begin{code} ℕ∞-discrete-gives-WLPO : is-discrete ℕ∞ → WLPO ℕ∞-discrete-gives-WLPO d u = d u ∞ \end{code} Added 12 September 2018. Conversely, assuming function extensionality, WLPO implies that ℕ∞ is discrete. The proof uses a codistance (or closeness) function c : ℕ∞ → ℕ∞ → ℕ∞ such that c u v = ∞ ⇔ u = v. \begin{code} open import UF.FunExt WLPO-gives-ℕ∞-discrete : FunExt → WLPO → is-discrete ℕ∞ WLPO-gives-ℕ∞-discrete fe wlpo u v = Cases (wlpo (ℕ∞-closeness u v)) (λ (p : ℕ∞-closeness u v = ∞) → inl (ℕ∞-infinitely-close-are-equal u v p)) (λ (n : ℕ∞-closeness u v ≠ ∞) → inr (contrapositive (λ (q : u = v) → ℕ∞-equal-are-infinitely-close u v q) n)) where open import TWA.Closeness fe \end{code} More discussion about WLPO is included in the modules TheTopologyOfTheUniverse and FailureOfTotalSeparatedness, among others.