Post
by Seth » Wed Jan 07, 2015 5:56 am
Xamonas Chegwé wrote:Seth wrote:There's maths and then there's common sense. If something is infinite, it by definition includes everything, otherwise it's not infinite. I do understand that when it comes to math it may be convenient to create the fiction of an infinite limited set, but that's an abstract concept having little to do with reality. A thing is either infinite or it is not. Binary choice.
Twaddle! There are an infinite number of negative integers. All are
by definition less than 1. You are making no sense and should really stop digging...

Sorry, but if you limit the set to negative integers you are
ipso facto limiting infinity, making it less than infinite. Now it is useful in the mathematical sense to think of an abstract thing like a number as being part of an infinite set of other abstract ideas because numbers have no actual existence, they are cognitive labels created by the mind. Therefore one can philosophize and say that there is an infinite number of negative integers, but one cannot, of course, prove that this is the case, one can only speculate. There may in fact NOT be an infinite number of negative (or positive) integers, it may merely be a number so large that you can't comprehend it and therefore have to label that mystery as "infinite."
Just as the universe may not be infinite (merely very, very large and expanding all the time), numbers may not be infinite either.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
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