infinity exists because the word does.
you don't need to have an idea of content to have a name function as a name.
there are a many ways to get to this, but the one i know off the top of my head is from the meditations on first philosophy: decartes something like i know i am a finite being. finite implies a mode that is it's opposite, so the infinite. so you get to the idea by negation, not because there either is or is not an infinite.
in terms of what it might correspond to, there's an arithmetic type, which refers to the idea that one can never stop counting, that there's always a +1, so it's a way of referring to a very large open ended series.
then there are the other types that folk like to think about, but they're all ways of trying to map onto the world what is implied by the word infinity.
typically it refers to things that are really fucking big.
pascal talks about a second infinity that opens out from things that are really fucking small.
infinity is a fun toy.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|