Re: virus: religion

Tracy Yucikas (tyucikas@cts.com)
Wed, 13 May 1998 22:56:52 -0700 (PDT)


>It takes a mind to pose a question (regardless of how that mind is manifest).
>all the possible permutations in all dimensions of all the quarks in all
>the "brains" of all the sentient entities (in all the universes?) that
>could even loosely be identified as a question are still "infinitely less
>than infinity". The only way to have an infinite number of questions is if
>the basic units of cognition were infinitely small ...
>infinity is an alluring idea, even useful to some, but there's really no
>such _thing_.
>
>Philosophical discourse can be fun, even /useful/, but only when constrained
>by fact, logic and rational thinking.
...
a possibly "less than infinite" approach to the concept of infinity ..

Consider a glass of water in your hand and a table to place it on ...
How many locations are there to choose from ? Is two-dimensional
space quantized ? Are there less than an infinite number of "places"
on the tabletop ? Any spot you pick, I (for example) relocate the glass
to a new spot 1/sqrt(3) from the left side if the original distance
was "1" . Starts to look like an infinite number of locations on the
table top .. even using only one dimension. And then there's the
"front-back" dimension ... and the rotation of the logo on the glass ...
each of these "variables" seem to have an infinite number of states.
As for the amount of water in the glass ... if composed of something
like quarks, sure, there's a finite number of ways to partition this
quantity, but the spatial relationships between these quarks exhibit
something like "uncountably infinite" number of states.
The language of mathematics shapes the concepts easily framed.
The language of an aborigine may not contain a word for "snow", but
this does not mean that snow does not exist.

... the home for non-verbal memes ...