TITLE: Does anyone understand this comment about the continuum hypothesis?
QUESTION [8 upvotes]: At 31:37 in his lecture titled What is a manifold? posted on Youtube, Mikhail Gromov states that if we do not allow generic functions to exist then the continuum hypothesis is "obviously" true,  and that if we do allow generic functions to exist, then the continuum hypothesis is "obviously" false.
What concept is he referring to? It sounds extremely important.
Note: this is a follow-up to a question I posted on Math.SE: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1887350/what-is-a-generic-genetic-geometric-map-in-the-study-of-manifolds
Also I'm not sure how to tag this question, so please feel free to fix the tags as appropriate.
EDIT: When Gromov mentions generic functions for the first time in the lecture, around 29:30 if I remember correctly, it seems like it is with regards to generic points (which are generic by Sard's Theorem I believe)  for which the Implicit Function theorem can be used to generate a manifold from the equation $f(x)=0$; the functions $f$ for which this holds are what he refers to as "generic". I don't know if this helps anyone at all; I don't really understand Gromov's terminology.

REPLY [15 votes]: You might read "if we do not allow generic functions to exist then the continuum hypothesis is obviously true" as a reference to the fact that Borel sets satisfy CH, or possibly to the fact that CH holds in Godel's constructible universe. For the "obviously false" part, I suspect a nod to Paul Cohen's comment:

A point of view which the author feels may eventually come to be accepted is that CH is obviously false. The main reason one accepts the axiom of infinity is probably that we feel it absurd to think that the process of adding only one set at a time can exhaust the entire universe. Similarly with the higher axioms of infinity. Now $\aleph_1$ is the set of all countable ordinals and this is merely a special and the simplest way of generating a higher cardinal. The set $c$ is, in contrast, generated by a totally new and more powerful principle, namely the power set axiom. It is unreasonable to expect that any description of a cardinal which attempts to build up that cardinal from ideas deriving from the replacement axiom can ever reach $c$. Thus $c$ is greater than $\aleph_1$, $\aleph_\omega$, $\aleph_\alpha$ where $\alpha = \aleph_\omega$, etc. This point of view regards $c$ as an incredibly rich set given to us by one bold new axiom, which can never be approached by any piecemeal process of construction.

I feel disingenuous not adding that my personal view is that $\aleph_1$ and the real line are both proper classes, so that CH is not a meaningful question.