Counting to infinity pt1

Time is not a real object. It is simply a concept that we made up to differentiate the passing of days. Events in our lives happen sequentially. They do not happen to us all at once. Time and the different markers that we have chosen for it such as hours, decades and seconds are not real. They are just ways of making it possible to describe what came before, what came after and how to decide where to place things when describing the story of our lives.

Numbers are the same way. Although we can make physical objects that represent the different numbers, numbers themselves are concepts. A tree would still be a tree regardless of what we chose to call it. As would a fish a fish and a bird a bird. These things are real and tangible.

We, as a society, place definitions on things that describe exactly what they are. We define them so that we do not need to completely explain every detail about each thing to each person that we encounter every time we want to talk about that thing.

But, life is seldom black and white. There are so many grey areas. Those that fight against the establishment often think of themselves as revolutionaries fighting to make the world a better place. The people that they fight against often call them terrorists or murderers. History, or in other words, the story that is told, is decided by the winning side. Who is right and who is wrong? Well technically, both are both.

People that disagree with what society chooses to call a thing are generally thought to be having a psychotic break with reality. By definition when society does things one way and a person chooses to do things another way that other person is either labeled wrong or insane. I mean think about it. If I call a tree what everybody else calls broccoli, I'd be insane right? Or how about if I called daylight a bunch of bananas? And does it really matter if it was one person or a whole group of people that thought this way? How does it work when these people call their terminology for the redefined things lingo or jargon? Are they still insane?

This brings me to a story that happened recently. We had a guest over for a couple of days. He is someone who is a good friend of ours whom I have known for over fifteen years. We don't always see eye to eye though.

He is a math major who actually intends to spend most of his life studying and teaching advanced mathematics. My interests are more along the lines of English and philosophy. Knowing these two things the disagreement we got into should be a surprise to nobody. I say disagreement because, to him I am sure, we were arguing. To me we were debating.

Somehow, the subject of infinity came up. He was saying that there were multiple different types of infinity. We all just nodded and smiled. The lay person knows that there is only one infinity and that it is infinite. And that is all we need to know. Mathematicians however know that the rest of us are wrong. And he proceeded to tell me so in so many words.

Mistake number one. Never ever tell another person to their face that they are wrong, especially in public, unless you are actually grading work that they have done. Even then it should only be done with extreme diplomacy and tact. Do not just smack other people in the face with what you know to be facts. If you do, even if what you are saying is as plain as the nose on your face, they will not agree with you. In many cases, you will make an enemy for life and all you will have gotten out of it is the satisfaction of showing your intellect to be superior to that of the other person. In other words, you may lose friends in exchange for a mild boost to your ego.

We are both kind of hardheaded and both actually may have violated this rule. He began by saying that there is the regular infinity that everyone is aware of and that mathematicians call it the countable infinity. I of course stopped him there by pointing out that the definition of infinity is a concept describing something that has no ending and therefore applying the adjective countable to it was a logical fallacy. He more or less ignored my statement and went on to state that there were then several types of infinity that were labeled as not countable.

He provided an example of a countable infinity as the set of whole numbers. You know like 0,1,2,3,4 and so on out to infinity. I challenged him to count to infinity. Even though I sat back and offered to wait while he did so, even though I offered him the opportunity to show me that it was countable, he declined.