Two things which the human mind can NEVER imagine: Infinity and Nothing

Discussion in 'Philosophy' started by Crexture, Feb 21, 2015.

  1. I was actually 7 years old and in grade 2 when I first thought of nothing/nothingness. Oddly enough, we were sitting around the teacher as he was reading from the bible. I got to thinking as I gazed at the clock "what if there was nothing" and darkness filled my mind like I had been transported to the end of space where no stars had yet formed. It was scary, and so I seeked comfort in bible stories and God, though strangely I always had a curiosity about the validity of what everyone believed. I could just tell, these people who claimed to know so much, were not so happy.
     
  2. Coming from the perspective of a math major that is completely wrong. We can imagine infinity and nothing, we use it every day in calculus. Once you really get into higher maths and start dealing with limits you get a concept of what infinity actually means. Infinity and zero are the only explanations for multiple phenomena in the math world. Asymptotes, continuity, critical points and inflection points. Idk anyways, infinity is pretty understandable.


    My grow journal http://forum.grasscity.com/indoor-medical-marijuana-growing/1353929-mopheads-purple-closet-adventures.html
     
  3.  
     
    Sounds fun i want to go there as well
     
  4. whaaat? Lol wrong quote?
     
  5. #45 Deleted member 813926, May 13, 2015
    Last edited: May 13, 2015
     
     
    Lol nope you said like i had been transported to the end of space where no Stars had yet formed.
     
    well i would like to see it too.
     
  6. Haha, the young innocent imagination I had :)
     
  7. Infinities in math is a telltale sign what is being described is bogus. Thats why you have to renormalize it. And just because you can explore something with math doesnt mean it exist nor that you can imagine it. String theory has something like 11-21 dimensions (its always going up i cant keep track). Yet you cant imagine a forth or fifth dimension.
     
  8. Imagining Infinity is quite easy.

    Step one is to not make the crucial mistake off the bat, thinking that imagining it will complete your thought.    If you complete the thought in any way, you failed to imagine infinity.

    Once you succeed in that, you're almost there.

    Infinity is picturing the widest, or smallest scope you can imagine.  Meaning, the known universe, or whatever the smallest subatomic particle is you know.  Then leaving your thought open to other things.  You don't even have to keep thinking that wide open thought, you can go on about your day thinking about anything else in any way.  The important thing is that your initial thought never got finished. If you can manage that.          You just imagined infinity.  A piece of it.

    The sheer difficulty humans have with imagining infinity is that they keep trying to wrap their mind around it but every time they "do" they fail by default because they created a barrier to infinity, which renders it finite, and renders the attempt a failure.

     
     
  9. Asymptotes are a perfect example of an infinite phenomena that we can imagine. We can see the point that the function approaches, but never touches. It infinitely gets closer to that point without touching. How is that not an imaginable circumstance?


    My grow journal http://forum.grasscity.com/indoor-medical-marijuana-growing/1353929-mopheads-purple-closet-adventures.html
     
  10. I love calculus - all kinds. Always have and always will. My 1st love is vector calc because I'm into electrodynamics and the Div and Curl are such fabulous ways to frame Maxwell's Equations. Also, Euler's Calculus of Variations kicks ass, IMO. Especially as realized in LaGrangian Mechanics. Fucking Euler!!!! That dude cranked out more brilliant and useful mathematics than a dozen other, also great, mathematicians. Well, maybe not a dozen... but close to it.
     
    But yeah - infinities are very "approachable" through limits and asymptotes.  lol. Sorry. Anyway, ya get yer hands dirty with the infinite and get the feel for dealing with infinities in actual mathematical usage, it's not a major mental obstacle at all. In fact, the infinite and the infinitesimal are fundamental to how we deal with continuous change and non-linearity. I'd say that anyone that had a couple years of Calculus would probably not be bothered by infinity at all. 
     
  11. Mathematical infinity is like internet sex; sure you orgasm, but something is missing.
     
  12. Sure mathematically an asymptote is infinitely approaching but it would require infinite resolution, which doesnt exist in nature. Ideal math doesnt describe reality. Just like you can say a perfect circle has infinite sides yet in reality there is a limit called the planck length.
     
  13. The Planck method is how they found the circumference of a circle before the "accurate" value of PI was found. Natural and imaginable are two very different things. The Internet isn't natural, but it definitely exists and is imaginable. So basically this argument was started with an opinion being stated as fact. Love it, pointless...


    My grow journal http://forum.grasscity.com/indoor-medical-marijuana-growing/1353929-mopheads-purple-closet-adventures.html
     
  14. My point is, its meaningless to speak of a perfect circle if the planck length is the smallest possible distance.

    The internet is natural because it exists in nature, thats why its imaginable.
     
  15.  
    That's assuming it is the smallest. Quantum mechanics first was focused on atoms, cause that was the smallest unit we were aware of. Then we learned about subatomic particles and fields and quantum mechanics switched focus, cause that is the smallest unit we were now aware of.. I'm not going to assume there is an end to the "levels" we will discover. Plus, Planck length is theoretical. It was created with math.. and is not, nor will there be for awhile, technology capable of directly observing it. Coming from someone who said "ideal math doesn't describe reality", you're leaning pretty hard into the math that is Planck length.
     
    As for a perfect circle, pretty sure we discussed this before.. but math doesn't create a perfect circle. The perfect circle already exists.. or can exist, but what isn't perfect is our math in describing it. We will never be able to have a perfect measurement of a circle.. even if the circle is perfect. Why? Because pi is an infinite number. No matter how many decimal places you go, there is still one more decimal place.. and one after that, and one after that, and one after that.. a number that never ends, an infinite number. You can make a perfect square.. and we have rational numbers where we can perform a equation with a perfect, rational answer.. but when you make a perfect circle, there is pi.. an irrational, infinite number. You calculate to it the billionth decimal place.. someone who calculates pi to one billion and one will have a better measurement than you. Then you one up him, and he one ups you.. and so on. You could literally calculate the dimensions of a perfect circle nonstop for the rest of your life and die knowing that there are more and always will be more precise measurements. Just because math will forever be finding a more precise answer to something doesn't mean said something can't exist.
     
  16. Im more than pretty sure we had this discussion before, i dont see the point in you feeding the asperger monster again.
     
  17. You're only the monster you create boo.. but yeah, we've gone round n round in circles about a perfect circle before. It's just, I never saw you say math doesn't describe reality while at the same time relying on a theoretical concept that only exists within mathematics to go against what everyone was saying.
     
  18. My point is, if you accept the math then its telling you there is a distance limit. They both may be wrong but both cannot be right.
     

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