INFINITIES

Details/ INFINITIES / Detail No. 09

The concept of infinity has grasped a lot of people, including me, because of its unimaginable greatness. The infinite is something that is beyond reach and comprehension. Some people associate the infinite with God while others wear the “∞” symbol mindlessly as their earrings or (semi mindlessly) as tattoos.

The infinite is an intriguing concept but you don’t hear that many people really talking about it. This might be because some people argue that is useless to talk about, because infinity is just a concept that doesn’t exist in real life; it’s not really there, so it hasn’t got that many practical applications. I believe in some ways that’s true but in many ways it isn’t. I think that the infinite does play a huge role in our lives but to get that we need to approach the infinite in a certain way. In this blog, I will try to define infinity and how it plays a role in our lives.

The definition of infinity

Wikipedia describes infinity as a concept describing something without any bound, or something larger than any natural number. It also describes infinity as a “something” and many people approach infinity like it is a certain type of number. “From here to infinity” also implicitly defines infinity as a certain end, a static number. But I believe that is not really what infinity really is. I think that infinity is more of a process than an actual outcome.

The Infinite in our Life

If you question yourself; why do you eat, work, sleep, and play? It is hard to answer those because they are so automatic, but all these activities are a form of self-sustainment. Most of us just want to be on this world. There are many loops in our life that contribute to our self-sustainment. When we close our eyes, we want to open them again, when we consume energy, we want to burn it again, when we invest energy, we want it to be returned to us again, when we hug someone, we want a hug back. Of course, some people perform activities which are above self-sustainment, and others are below it, but each activity comes down to a relative closed loop. When we look at development, we see ever changing and repeating loops.

Every action we take in our environment provides us with feedback that we can use to learn. When we touch a fire, we get feedback of pain, and we won’t do it again (ending the loop). But when we grab fruits that’s delicious and nutritious, we’ll do that again. Through iteration (trial and error), we learn about our world and that helps us in sustaining ourselves. Failing actions will die of, while successful actions will iterate and loop. Successful actions that gain positive feedback are often actions we (are willing to) repeat, like wearing clothes, washing ourselves, and celebrating birthdays. These loops of behaviour are so ingrained in our lives, that we hardly think about them while doing them. But you could wonder however, where do we loop or iterate towards?

Where do we loop towards?

Then, we get to difficult questions. How old do you want to become? What is your goal of life? For these questions, there are no concrete answers. What I believe is that we don’t really have answers for this because life is an infinite journey. There is no age where most people really would like to die. After finishing your goals, new goals always emerge. When you try to solve something, new problems always emerge, the more you learn, the less you know, and so on and so on.

Life is a process of zooming and zooming and never really finding the end where you are done with everything. There is always something new to discover and to find out. The universe is infinitely large, there is no way to read all the books there are, or learn everything about the basic things around you. I like to see our cognitive growth as a growing tree where the branches represent the paths we’ve discovered (iterated across), our largest branches have many small branches attached to it, which represent the “specialist details” that are only known for the ones who really dive into these details.

Perceiving the infinite as a process makes a lot of sense for understanding why it’s such a fascinating concept that spread across all religions. If you see the infinite as an ever-repeating loop moving forward, like a fractal, you can see it emerge all around you, in your own behaviour and in nature. The question still remains where this infinite process heads towards. As many intelligent people have mentioned before me; life is a music piece that is not really heading somewhere, it is the process of life itself that makes it beautiful. When you start to perceive every act as an (Kantian) “end” instead of a mean to getting somewhere, you don’t actually get somewhere, you are already there. The infinity is than the certainty that it will go on, the loop is every action you take in relation to the environment. The loop needs to be balanced to go on, so one could always take different paths if desired, making different trees. The relation between you and your environment will never be a perfect loop, as you learn from the interactions and have memory that supports your development, making each loop slightly different but similar.

Dearest readers, you and I are infinite choice makers, we live in a field of all possibilities, where at all moments we have access to infinite choices, you don’t need to go far to know that the choices we make in our lives to a large extent sums up to a VALUE.

Bear in mind, the numbers keeps adding up and by numbers I mean INFINITIES. Some might be bigger, others smaller. Do your bits, make up your mind, wake up if you’re asleep, get to track now. This ain’t obligatory though, afterall whatever is yours is yours, not mine. But my guts says you should.

Your “tree” will be slightly chaotic, like a strange attractor, but I hope it’s ever growing!♾♾♾

Omodolapo

🤎