by Ethan Johnson
December 21, 2006
Often, and without warning, I am struck by strange thoughts. Not creepy-weird thoughts; more like wondering what would happen if you froze a pound of fresh peas and thawed them out at some interminable future date and ate them for dinner. I wouldn't have known I was hypothesizing the advent of frozen food, but I'm sure that given enough free time, I would have thought about it.
One favorite topic to roll around in my head and observe from various angles is the concept of Infinity. Let's review:
- Infinity + 1 = Infinity.
- Infinity - 1 = Infinity.
- "A number approaching Infinity" is impossible. Either the number is infinite, or it is not.
- Infinity [squared, cubed, fourpled, etc] is still Infinity.
Yeah, I have trouble sleeping sometimes.
Much is made about rich people. Even more is made about money in general. There is a line that divides money from wealth, and petty economics from finance. But at root, money is really two things: Symbolic, and numeric. I think about direct deposit sometimes, for example. My employer "pays" me in numbers, which are wired to the bank, who agrees that a set of numbers was transmitted from my employer to their super-secret (I hope?) financial database. In turn, a debit card spree means that I chip away at that number until it reaches zero, or damn near. If I want more money, I need to earn/borrow/beg/steal more numbers from someone/somewhere else. It's all very headache inducing.
Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey are frequently lauded/hated/admired/envied/feared for their personal fortunes. Yet their fortunes are finite. Here is a thought that will ultimately lead to blindness, madness, and even death: Imagine that you hit the ultimate jackpot. You are now worth [Infinity] dollars. Because Infinity - X is still Infinity, you are infinitely wealthy. You could own Oprah and Bill Gates. You could own Berkshire Hathaway. Money is no object, ever. Money is utterly meaningless to you now.
Or over time, it will be. You can literally tend to the financial needs of the entire planet until the end of time itself because you are worth [Infinity] dollars. Accounting is not about determining how much money you have left, but rather who you gave it to, and how much. Nobody needs to pay you back either, because you are always worth [Infinity] dollars.
Have the lambs stopped screaming yet, Clarisse?
This hypothetical and utterly fantastic scenario is a lot to absorb. Never mind what that kind of wealth can do to a person. Heck, we see what great financial wealth does to people anyway, and none of the wealthiest people combined throughout the whole of human history were collectively worth anything close to Infinity. How would the world change if one person commanded such a fortune? Would such a person embody ultimate altruism? Or ultimate nihilism? How would others react to such a person? Awe? Wonder? Envy? Hatred? Fear?
Perhaps someone worth so much financially would get the treatment that people do who succeed beyond the capacity of all others in a given area: Someone declares the person to be the "all time winner" at [whatever] and the game changes. Maybe instead of financial wealth, higher value would be placed on barter, communism, socialism, sand as currency, whatever.
And now, the punchline.
I bring all of this up as something of a response to some of the cock-sure proclamations that I read from time to time on self-described "skeptic" blogs/web sites. Don't get me wrong, I agree that skepticism is a good tool to have in the box, and right on top for easy reach. Here is a sample quote from Phil Plait that ultimately drove these thoughts to press:
I don’t think the world has changed much at all. We still have self-claimed psychics, conspiracy theorists, religious fundamentalists, and all manners of conmen whose only purpose is to confuse people about the real world. Many of these people honestly believe that what they are doing is right, but that does not make them right.
[...]
The language of the Universe, as far as we can tell, is science and math, and those remain — and will probably always remain – our best tools to understand it.
Well, as I have outlined to some extent above, Infinity is a tough concept to fully grasp. Worse yet, even if we get one Infinity reasonably figured out, there are (gasp!) infinite Infinities. Have fun parsing all of that.
Which means that yes, in terms of infinity and all that it implies, psychic phenomena (for example) exist somewhere, even if only in the realm of unrealized (in this place) probabilities. So does me with blond hair, or three eyes, or wings. Or you.
And having said all of that, I believe in Infinity, and all that it implies. <EM>
(Aside: I joke from time to time that the difference between being interesting and a boor is 2 billion dollars. If someone was indeed worth [Infinity] dollars, why, I don't even want to begin to imagine how much sycophancy such a situation would generate. Shudder.)
