To Infinity, and Beyond!

Infinitely Small

I was in a staff meeting, which sometimes feels like purgatory, when a thought occurred about the infinite nature of infinity.

When you're in a situation where your mind is under-stimulated and you feel no emotional attachment, your perception is that a given (finite) amount of time takes longer to pass, such as my meeting earlier.

The flip side of that is when something stimulates your mind, when you are enjoying yourself, time appears to move much more quickly; again addressing something finite.

The weird thing about the infinite is that it can exist within the finite. Not in the sense that a fish is contained within the water and the water is contained within the fish... but in a more literal sense.

To understand me, if I am even making sense, you have to look at an analogy. We tend to only look at the larger part of infinity, in a universal sense. The earth is small compared to the sun, which is small compared to the milky way, which is small compared to the known universe. Continuing on that scale, you can get larger and larger until the universe becomes an unknown, unable to be perceived by man beyond his own means.

Now, let's look at the reverse. Look at a cell, the atoms within a cell, the the particles that make up the atoms, if you subscribe to string theory then look at the strings that make up those particles. If you divide a number in half, you can always find a smaller number approaching zero (nothing) without ever reaching zero.

This was my thought. In the few passing moments which comprised my meeting, there were contained a series of multiple infinities. Were my perception to become so narrowed that I would experience just a given moment infinitely, I might never progress forward. Sort of a temporal black hole where time stops but perception continues on it's own time.

I started thinking about people in comas, or the state of mind of the dead. Perhaps in a coma time fast forwards, or maybe that individual could be trapped in a moment somewhere in their subconscious mind for an immeasurable perceived amount of time, forever. The only escape is the limitation of the mind to only be able to process a thought so quickly. Perhaps at the moment of one's death, like finding the derivative of a number which approaches zero but never touches, our perception shifts with a sudden curve towards an end which is never reached on a given timeline.

Of course this isn't biblical thinking, but it does not contradict the bible either. If I were tasked to come up with an alternative idea of hell besides a lake of fire, this would be it. Forever trapped in your thoughts, forever trapped in whatever feelings your body might be experiencing in a given moment (pain, hunger, being cold), forever denied social interaction and only your guilt and regret to entertain the one sense, the sense of self, that you have left.

They say in a black hole when you reach it's event horizon, you get to a point where if you could perceive light without being sucked in, even light itself appears to stop. You'd physically be sucked into the black hole, but it would look like you just stopped moving at the threshold of the event horizon. This is a mathematical and perhaps visual model for this small infinity.

Kinda crazy to think about.