infinite andrew@benicetobears.com an infinite loop is one that never ends 980819 ... pete don't fuck with the infinite 980916 ... adam like the depth of your eyes forever searching, no-one , not even god, can find their way out. stumble, trip, fall , into you. 990303 ... emma jest. i'm only a quarter way through it, and i feel like a pretentious slut dragging this huge book around, but my god this book is fucking brilliant. pinkwater x nabokov. wow. 990303 ... ceorl breasts infinite with milk belly infinite with child eyes infinite with soul 990422 ... daxle I saw infinity in december three years ago and it scared me when my face had no apparent shape in the mirror. I stared at my watch to try to hold on but I had no choice. 990430 ... rsdio I guess it really doesn't much matter, but still I'm frightened by the concept. The one who might have been my salvation, in her eyes and cheeks and nose and lips and in her infinite darkness, has left me alone. 990604 ... Heidi75 infinite monkeys reciting infinite poems make heidi happy. 990622 ... Power through Passion One dark night long ago, I saw infinity in all its glory and my mind screamed at the concept. How dare nature and existance not conform to my conception of the universe? I once wanted to be forever, but to be forever one cannot have had a beginning. So I live in peace with the elegant rationality of reality and with the inevitable intrusion of infinity into my humble existance. I will gladly let it pull me in its currents and when it must ravage and reabsorb me, I will embrace it with the last remnants of strength and personality. Infinity did not place us here for a reason, but it will let us make our own. 000220 ... c-spandrea. "there is a feeling that i had friday night after the homecoming game that i don't know if i will ever be able to describe except to say that it was warm. sam and patrick drove me to the part that night, and i sat in the middle of sams pickup truck. sam loves her pickup truck because i think it reminds her of her dad. the feeling i had happened when sam told patrick to find a station on the radio. and he kept getting commercials. and commercials. and a really bad song about love that had the word 'baby' in it. and then more commercials. and finally he found this amazing song about this boy, and we all got quiet. sam tapped her hand on the steering wheel. patrick held his hand outside the car and made air waves. and i just sat between them. after the song finished, i said something. 'i feel infinite.' and sam and patrick looked at me like i said the greatest thing they ever heard, because the song was great and because we all really paid attention to it. five minutes were truly spent, and we felt young in a good way. i have since bought the record, and i would tell you what it was, but truthfully, it's not the same unless you're driving to your first real party, and you're sitting in the middle seat of a pickup with two nice people when it starts to rain."-the perks of being a wallflower. this book made me swoon. 000226 ... lost my sadness 000704 ... SCOTT my nature is infinite w/out beginning nor end and emptiness in between i saw it, once on a winters eve it stalked me-preying upon my fearful eyes i saw it..., and i laughed 001109 ... lovers lament souls colliding with one another. but none see. passionate lips kissing each other. but none feel. how sad. 001121 ... The Truth The Circle of cycles. The deepest spiral. They teach us that infinite can not be comprehended. But, have you ever tried? Think about it. At the end, there we find the beginning. At the farthest reach of our vision, we can see the back of our own head. The zoom of our most powerful microscope enables us to see into an atom. Inside that atom is an entire universe. Beyond our universe is another universe, and many adjacent to that one. Each component is necessary to serve it's function in creation. 010410 ... nocturnal and how did each component come into being and how did it come to serving its particular function? should such a question be answered according to each individual component or all things together as a whole? 010410 ... The Truth Both... 010410 ... nocturnal do explain 010410 ... nocturnal and "god made it that way" will not suffice as a satisfactory explanation. if you can, leave god out of this. 010410 ... The Truth That would not be scientific. 010410 ... nocturnal haha. that's a joke, right? 010410 ... The Truth This is not a chat room, nocturnal. However, I will answer your question. see: The_Answer 010411 ... supersonic paranoid schizophrenic No wait... dialectic IS the third variable! so you see... astral identity in the context of the infinite OR the finite comprises existence outside of whatever concepts you hold in relation to either or its opposite, travelling back and forth BETWEEN anything possible and whatever it renders impossible, revealing it is actually only constructed to appear as such... in fact its inspiration is derived from a basis that dialectic (tension re: the psychological implications of living for dying)holds AS ITS OWN COSMIC OPPOSITE as it travels back into itself! 011211 ... fella "i'll ease ya mentally, gently, sentimentally, instrumentally, with entity, dementedly, meant to be... infinite." 020205 ... Sintina A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist." To which the universe replied: "Yes, but it has not sparked in me the slightest cause for obligation." 020523 ... freakizh two types of infinites: the one that keeps going forever, unique, different each time, and the loop one, the one that never ends because it repeats itself. to which one do you think time belongs? we're too small and finite to know anything about it. if i remember correctly.. nietzsche believed in the second one. 020523 ... silentbob ironic that this blathe is finite 020523 ... Syrope says who? 020624 ... silentbob i like that someone quoted perks of being a wallflower long before it was such a rave on blather 020624 ... Arend I feel infinite. 021129 ... god infinite just for a minute 030529 ... me =) 030714 ... rlentless inner critic only until the voluble one gets a hold of it 030717 ... relentless inner critic Dammit! That's relentless inner critic god!! 030717 ... ferret infinitit! 030717 ... immortal א 030725 ... immortal Let S be the enumerated set of all infinetly long strings of ones and zeros. Create a string s, such that, it differs from the nth string in set S in the nth position, where n is any number from 1 to infinity. s, is not an element of S, because it differs from every in S in one position. So, s should have been a member of S from the start. Add, s to S. Now, create a string s' just as s was created. s' is not a member of S. Therefore, there exist an infinite set S' which contains all of the strings of S and the strings not in S. But, S' is not enumberable, because for every element in set S, there is always another element in S' that is not in S. Thus the number of elements in S' is greater than the number of elements in S. Therefore some infinite sets are larger than other infinite sets. 030725 ... i bow before your supreme eggheadedness biggeldymmmiimby glook 030725 ... Piso Mojado 'the aleph' jorge luis borges 030725 ... Sam Vaknin Finiteness has to do with the existence of boundaries. Intuitively, we feel that where there is a separation, a border, a threshold – there is bound to be at least one thing finite out of a minimum of two. This, of course, is not true. Two infinite things can share a boundary. Infinity does not imply symmetry, let alone isotropy. An entity can be infinite to its "left" – and bounded on its right. Moreover, finiteness can exist where no boundaries can. Take a sphere: it is finite, yet we can continue to draw a line on its surface infinitely. The "boundary", in this case, is conceptual and arbitrary: if a line drawn on the surface of a sphere were to reach its starting point – then it is finite. Its starting point is the boundary, arbitrarily determined to be so by us. This arbitrariness is bound to appear whenever the finiteness of something is determined by us, rather than "objectively, by nature". A finite series of numbers is a fine example. WE limit the series, we make it finite by imposing boundaries on it and by instituting "rules of membership": "A series of all the real numbers up to and including 1000" . Such a series has no continuation (after the number 1000). But, then, the very concept of continuation is arbitrary. Any point can qualify as an end (or as a beginning). Are the statements: "There is an end", "There is no continuation" and "There is a beginning" – equivalent? Is there a beginning where there is an end? And is there no continuation wherever there is an end? It all depends on the laws that we set. Change the law and an end-point becomes a starting point. Change it once more and a continuation is available. Legal age limits display such flexible properties. Finiteness is also implied in a series of relationships in the physical world: containment, reduction, stoppage. But, these, of course, are, again, wrong intuitions. They are at least as wrong as the intuitive connection between boundaries and finiteness. If something is halted (spatially or temporally) – it is not necessarily finite. An obstacle is the physical equivalent of a conceptual boundary. An infinite expansion can be checked and yet remain infinite (by expanding in other directions, for instance). If it is reduced – it is smaller than before, but not necessarily finite. If it is contained – it must be smaller than the container but, again, not necessarily finite. It would seem, therefore, that the very notion of finiteness has to do with wrong intuitions regarding relationships between entities, real, or conceptual. Geometrical finiteness and numerical finiteness relate to our mundane, very real, experiences. This is why we find it difficult to digest mathematical entities such as a singularity (both finite and infinite, in some respects). We prefer the fiction of finiteness (temporal, spatial, logical) – over the reality of the infinite. Millennia of logical paradoxes conditioned us to adopt Kant's view that the infinite is beyond logic and only leads to the creation of unsolvable antinomies. Antinomies made it necessary to reject the principle of the excluded middle ("yes" or "no" and nothing in between). One of his antinomies "proved" that the world was not infinite, nor was it finite. The antinomies were disputed (Kant's answers were not the ONLY ways to tackle them). But one contribution stuck: the world is not a perfect whole. Both the sentences that the whole world is finite and that it is infinite are false, simply because there is no such thing as a completed, whole world. This is commensurate with the law that for every proposition, itself or its negation must be true. The negation of: "The world as a perfect whole is finite" is not "The world as a perfect whole is infinite". Rather, it is: "Either there is no perfectly whole world, or, if there is, it is not finite." In the "Critique of Pure Reason", Kant discovered four pairs of propositions, each comprised of a thesis and an antithesis, both compellingly plausible. The thesis of the first antinomy is that the world had a temporal beginning and is spatially bounded. The second thesis is that every substance is made up of simpler substances. The two mathematical antinomies relate to the infinite. The answer to the first is: "Since the world does not exist in itself (detached from the infinite regression), it exists unto itself neither as a finite whole nor as an infinite whole." Indeed, if we think about the world as an object, it is only logical to study its size and origins. But in doing so, we attribute to it features derived from our thinking, not affixed by any objective reality. Kant made no serious attempt to distinguish the infinite from the infinite regression series, which led to the antinomies. Paradoxes are the offspring of problems with language. Philosophers used infinite regression to attack both the notions of finiteness (Zeno) and of infinity. Ryle, for instance, suggested the following paradox: voluntary acts are caused by wilful acts. If the latter were voluntary, then other, preceding, wilful acts will have to be postulated to cause them and so on ad infinitum and ad nauseam. Either the definition is wrong (voluntary acts are not caused by wilful acts) or wilful acts are involuntary. Both conclusions are, naturally, unacceptable. Infinity leads to unacceptable conclusions is the not so hidden message. Zeno used infinite series to attack the notion of finiteness and to demonstrate that finite things are made of infinite quantities of ever-smaller things. Anaxagoras said that there is no "smallest quantity" of anything. The Atomists, on the other hand, disputed this and also introduced the infinite universe (with an infinite number of worlds) into the picture. Aristotle denied infinity out of existence. The infinite doesn't actually exist, he said. Rather, it is potential. Both he and the Pythagoreans treated the infinite as imperfect, unfinished. To say that there is an infinite number of numbers is simply to say that it is always possible to conjure up additional numbers (beyond those that we have). But despite all this confusion, the transition from the Aristotelian (finite) to the Newtonian (infinite) worldview was smooth and presented no mathematical problem. The real numbers are, naturally, correlated to the points in an infinite line. By extension, trios of real numbers are easily correlated to points in an infinite three-dimensional space. The infinitely small posed more problems than the infinitely big. The Differential Calculus required the postulation of the infinitesimal, smaller than a finite quantity, yet bigger than zero. Couchy and Weierstrass tackled this problem efficiently and their work paved the way for Cantor. Cantor is the father of the modern concept of the infinite. Through logical paradoxes, he was able to develop the magnificent edifice of Set Theory. It was all based on finite sets and on the realization that infinite sets were NOT bigger finite sets, that the two types of sets were substantially different. Two finite sets are judged to have the same number of members only if there is an isomorphic relationship between them (in other words, only if there is a rule of "mapping", which links every member in one set with members in the other). Cantor applied this principle to infinite sets and introduced infinite cardinal numbers in order to count and number their members. It is a direct consequence of the application of this principle, that an infinite set does not grow by adding to it a finite number of members – and does not diminish by subtracting from it a finite number of members. An infinite cardinal is not influenced by any mathematical interaction with a finite cardinal. The set of infinite cardinal numbers is, in itself, infinite. The set of all finite cardinals has a cardinal number, which is the smallest infinite cardinal (followed by bigger cardinals). Cantor's continuum hypothesis is that the smallest infinite cardinal is the number of real numbers. But it remained a hypothesis. It is impossible to prove it or to disprove it, using current axioms of set theory. Cantor also introduced infinite ordinal numbers. Set theory was immediately recognized as an important contribution and applied to problems in geometry, logic, mathematics, computation and physics. One of the first questions to have been tackled by it was the continuum problem. What is the number of points in a continuous line? Cantor suggested that it is the second smallest infinite cardinal number. Godel and Cohn proved that the problem is insoluble and that Cantor's hypothesis and the propositions relate to it are neither true nor false. Cantor also proved that sets cannot be members of themselves and that there are sets which have more members that the denumerably infinite set of all the real numbers. In other words, that infinite sets are organized in a hierarchy. Russel and Whitehead concluded that mathematics was a branch of the logic of sets and that it is analytical. In other words: the language with which we analyse the world and describe it is closely related to the infinite. Indeed, if we were not blinded by the evolutionary amenities of our senses, we would have noticed that our world is infinite. Our language is composed of infinite elements. Our mathematical and geometrical conventions and units are infinite. The finite is an arbitrary imposition. During the Medieval Ages an argument called "The Traversal of the Infinite" was used to show that the world's past must be finite. An infinite series cannot be completed (=the infinite cannot be traversed). If the world were infinite in the past, then eternity would have elapsed up to the present. Thus an infinite sequence would have been completed. Since this is impossible, the world must have a finite past. Aquinas and Ockham contradicted this argument by reminding the debaters that a traversal requires the existence of two points (termini) – a beginning and an end. Yet, every moment in the past, considered a beginning, is bound to have existed a finite time ago and, therefore, only a finite time has been hitherto traversed. In other words, they demonstrated that our very language incorporates finiteness and that it is impossible to discuss the infinite using spatial-temporal terms specifically constructed to lead to finiteness. "The Traversal of the Infinite" demonstrates the most serious problem of dealing with the infinite: that our language, our daily experience (=traversal) – all, to our minds, are "finite". We are told that we had a beginning (which depends on the definition of "we". The atoms comprising us are much older, of course). We are assured that we will have an end (an assurance not substantiated by any evidence). We have starting and ending points (arbitrarily determined by us). We count, then we stop (our decision, imposed on an infinite world). We put one thing inside another (and the container is contained by the atmosphere, which is contained by Earth which is contained by the Galaxy and so on, ad infinitum). In all these cases, we arbitrarily define both the parameters of the system and the rules of inclusion or exclusion. Yet, we fail to see that WE are the source of the finiteness around us. The evolutionary pressures to survive produced in us this blessed blindness. No decision can be based on an infinite amount of data. No commerce can take place where numbers are always infinite. We had to limit our view and our world drastically, only so that we will be able to expand it later, gradually and with limited, finite, risk. 031014 ... Spare Change And should I die tommorow I'd still be here today, remembered for all eternity, in these few words I say. And everything is infinite, all we say and do. And infinite describes the way I feel about you. If I'm not here tommorow, remember that I loved today. 031014 ... Whitechocolatewalrus The days are infinite. Night comes and goes, the stars twinkle randomly, occassionally the sky becomes emotional, but always, forever times two, everything comes back to day. 031104 ... oldephebe well..i have to say sam (or this projected facsimilie of sam (this is unverifiable despite the evidense of learned etchings comprising these temporal lobe taxing elucidations..by unverifiable..i mean at least unverifiable by simply acknowledging your blather identity..but let us not pursue that excerbatingly masturbatory vein of really impressively eggheadedness and pointlessnes in the world of brick and mortar and sweat and distributive economics...blech)i will have to sharpen the old cognitive forceps. Very impressive bit of elucidation. Now for the perecentage of us intellectual grub worms who are not enamoured or even intimate or even have a remedial apprehension of the higher maths and turgid tombs of esoterica/logic could you distill all of these really impressive referances and syllogisms into a context more palatable to those of us in the real world who have not been endowed with the staggering IQ to critically deconstruct your learned assertions, nor have the leisure to assimilate libraries devoted to the vast continuum of logic and epistomology..and all the subsequent tributaries that were spawned out of it? Still though (not that my presumptuous flirtations with socratic iconoclast deconstruction constitute ANY standard of reasoning or assimilation equal to your prodigies of recall and elucidation..but still i found some lines that the laity could ruminate upon and even use as a starting point for a primer on/or as an adjunct to their already burgeoning arsenal of argumentation - rhetorical armory. Sure awkward construction..yep that's pro-forma for the course..my oh so incidentally flippant bag.. very impressive stuff though.. 031108 ... Philosophistry the quantity of kipple in the universe as t goes to infinity 040307 ... mannY what IS this all about ...........i will be clicking around forever!! 040419 ... Mary and in that moment, we were infinite. 040630 ... zanna i want to feel infinite. 040810 ... cpgurrl forever into an abyss that is my soul or is it yours? (btw, has anybody else read THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER? if not i v. v. v. highly recommend it.) 040811 ... Ideas ... 040811 ... hsg door of meditation 040920 ... god look anywhere 040921 ... Sintina Charlie, Sam, and Patrick. And everyone like them everywhere. All the glories of the "glory days" and everyday before or since. Kisses and tears. Laughs and fears. The wind and the air and the city lights. Oh what a day, oh what a night! 051201 ... . unmarked box to unmarked box 070515 ... becca.stands.tall i was once infinite free falling into the beautylife like a flower piercing the sky stars poked their eyes out from the heavens blinking furiously in the day like a million shards of shattered glass i was once infinite the world twirling round my head falling into the blackness of night the moon looked out and smiled he had no mouth to speak his words i watched the stars raise me high skimming the surface of a universe and those arms carried me home the infinite flying past. 080515 what's it to you? who go blather from