From david turgeon Sent Fri, Jun 11th 1999, 15:55
From david turgeon Sent Fri, Jun 11th 1999, 15:55
> I hate to enter into your discussion---its tastey though. i hate to enter into yours too, but it's even tastier. > Get this, Infinity is a concept which I dont think humans should even > deal with! For there is only One Entity which can understand the term, > and is, get this now, Outside of the term! Fuck the Math stuff, for > just think, all of the mathematical formulas and or scientific knowledge > has always progressed forward(it has been proven untrue--at least some > of it----) thru the years, if U feel me. Thus, our mere conjecture at > such a term is at best fruitless! Despite the fact if the theory was > correct all the time---where has it gotten the world------a better form > of living(some would argue), better personalities, nope! mathematics aren't meant to represent reality but to understand it. i.e. they aren't esoteric images of some god (whose existence or nonexistence anybody has yet to prove, btw) but rather tools to quantify what we know of the universe. that is to say that i can't understand your point at all. infinity shouldn't be used in mathematics because we measly humans cannot understand the concept? where did you get that? i can understand infinity. you can understand infinity. you might not _know_ something infinite (neither do i) but that isn't the point -- mathematics is its own language, & within mathematics, infinity makes sense, just like chaos & quantum physics make sense from a physical point of view, or just like god makes sense from a religious point of view. (note that i don't mean to mesh them all together so crudely, but that's essentially what all these things are -- points of view). > Also, what do humans know of that is Infinite? One thing. Proof, sounds > like a Western Scientific question? It sounds like one is saying, if it > doesnt alert the 6 senses, then it cant be true(the Major Pitfall of > Western Science)...........Many things exists which dont alert the > senses----but some dont believe it, its cool. I understand that side. > But there are so many things which exist in this 3-D plane that we Still > dont know about that just the thought of the term Infinity, becomes > trite(although it does interest me---the abstractness of it all). Give > me an example U ask? Hmmm. I point u toward the molecular world, the > atomic, the cellular--- before microscopes what did they believe? My > point, this shit is contingent upon our discovering it.....but we should > never be so foolish as to rule something out, because we just dont > know---------I would have thought that humans would have learned this > pattern in Human history long ago-----but as a Very wise man once said, > "there is nothing new being done under the sun"! nothing new is being done under the sun, perhaps (religion, philosophy & science have been repeating that over & over, although they sometimes dispute the assessment for one reason or another, usually championing free will), but new ways to look at the "nothing new" are thought of every minute. i think you've got your history wrong, actually. we _used_ to think that something had to alert the 5 (what's the 6th one?) senses in order for it to exist. & long before that we thought that things existed that didn't alert the senses. now we revised our definition of existence only to replace it by a _supposition_ of existence based on physical stimuli & calculations of probability in time-space. that is to say that existence isn't considered an absolute anymore, but rather a convention which we use when we mean that it would make sense for this or that object to exist in the universe as we envision it (see wittgenstein's theories on objects/events regarding how these frameworks are made). so why should we avoid infinity if it makes sense? people spend their whole lives trying to figure out a way of putting it all together so we can eventually know how to, say, cure cancer, drive spaceships, make music on cheaper software... & you would deprive them of a simple mathematical tool called infinity because "mere mortals cannot understand such a thing"? now, if you mean infinity in the religious sense... sure, we don't understand it. boo hoo. -- david turgeon at http://www.notype.com