| ▲ | alex_young 2 hours ago | |
And no discussion of Zeno? Pish. The idea that nothing is demonstrative of infinity is clearly incorrect. Take the screen you're reading this on. One pixel is composed of a bunch of different atoms, and once you get down to one of them, that atom subdivides into a bunch of subatomic particles, some of which even have mass. Let's take one of those for argument's sake. Split that, and you get some quarks. Now let's imagine that's the smallest you can go. We can still talk about half of a down quark, or half of that, etc. Say, uh, infinitely so. There you go, everything is infinite. That wasn't so hard was it? | ||
| ▲ | marcus_holmes 2 hours ago | parent [-] | |
I think you missed the point. So, firstly, you have split the particle 5 times. That's not infinite times. You can split it more, so that would be 6 times. And more. Even if you could split it 1000 times, that's not infinity. The standard argument for infinity is that "you can always add 1 to any number, so there must be an infinity of them", and the refutation is that no matter how many times you add 1 to a number, all you've done is create a larger number. You never reach the point of actual infinity, no matter how long you keep doing this. You need to have infinite time in order to create an infinity by adding 1 to each number, so you're starting with the axiom that infinity exists (because you need an infinite number of operations to actually create an infinity). If you don't start with that axiom, then you can never reach infinity by addition (or any operation). | ||