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a merriam webster dictionary definition doesn't exactly resolve questions of meaning.
if they did, all philosophy would be is putzing about until someone in a conversation got fed up with it and decided to turn to a dictionary.
i would think a finite process could theoretically be endless in the sense that it would repeat it's activities endlessly and produce whatever it produced endlessly, but that seems to me a finite situation, infinite only in the most restricted (mathematical) sense.
infinite has a considerable metaphysical weight to it, a considerable history. to collapse it into it's mathematical definition requires that you define the rules of the game up front such that this is the meaning that we are talking about. the op did it to some extent long ago, but the discussion moved out from under that.
such discussion as there is here at this point is really a conflict over which rules for interpretation obtain.
i've been playing by the rules of philosophy of language; vigilante by something between cosmology and something else (can't remember); you by mathematics. so it's no surprise there'd be a differend. and it's no surprise that the debate would reach a point where someone would try to stipulate the rules by stipulating the genre.
thing with doing that is that it makes discussion circular. you know in advance the meaning that's in question because the rules of the game spell it out for you.
the philo of language is probably the only space that allows for consideration of the relation between such rule sets, words and phenomena in the world that they're made to refer to. but this is also a genre with it's own rules. so by mentioning it, i engage in the same game of trying to stipulate which game we're playing.
we could go in any of these directions.
but no question of any real interest is settled via merriam webster---except in the special case of one or another player in a given game not understanding the word.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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