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Fischer and Rabin proved a superexponential bound $2^{2^{cn}}$ for the worst-case length of a proof of a proposition of length $n$ in Presburger arithmetic. The result is in

Michael J. Fischer and Michael O. Rabin, Super-Exponential Complexity of Presburger Arithmetic, Proceedings of the SIAM-AMS Symposium in Applied Mathematics 7 (1974), pp.27–41.

Are there any explicit positive lower bounds for the constant $c>0$ in their estimate?

This was asked on MSE without input.

The question is whether the Fischer-Rabin theorem could have philosophical consequences. Gaifman claimed in 2012 that

"if our resources restrict us to less than super-exponential computation, then some truths must remain unknown. ... the answers to some simple mathematical questions—for example, that some Diophantine equations have no solution—are beyond what we can know; and this is due to our epistemic limitations."

Gaifman appears to derive such a consequence from both incompleteness and Fischer-Rabin. But apparently one could not derive such philosophical consequences without an explicit lower bound for the constant $c$. Indeed, statements of interest to human beings have a uniform upper bound on length, say 1000000. If the constant $c$ is small enough, the superexponential bound of the Fischer-Rabin estimate may not provide any practical limitation on the length of a proof of statements of interest to human beings. Thus, concrete estimates on $c$ could have some bearing on the possibility of deriving philosophical consequences from the Fischer-Rabin result, as envisioned by Gaifman.

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  • $\begingroup$ The result is constructive, hence it should be easy to extract an explicit constant. However, it will depend heavily on all kinds of irrelevant details of the definition of the length of a formula: do you count brackets? What connectives and quantifiers do you take as basic? How do you represent variables for the purposes of counting length? These all affect the size of formulas linearly (or worse). Thus, whatever constant you come up with will not really have any fundamental significance. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 10 at 14:26
  • $\begingroup$ @EmilJeřábek, the choice of the particular conventions may not affect the rough order-of-magnitude of the constant $c$. I elaborated in my question. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 10 at 14:38
  • $\begingroup$ The rough order of magnitude should be close enough to 1. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 10 at 15:10
  • $\begingroup$ @EmilJeřábek, you may want to elaborate for the non-experts. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 10 at 15:19
  • $\begingroup$ There's a philosophical objection to your philosophical remark. I (firmly) believe that a lot of statements expressible in low-strength theories, which are of interest to humans, have astronomically large size after translation from dynamic type theory (also known as "mathematical English") to those low strength theories; and all double exponents will be eaten up by the translation function (which is a lot faster than any iterated exponent). $\endgroup$
    – Denis T
    Commented Nov 10 at 22:16

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