On Friday, July 17, 2015 at 3:32:06 AM UTC+10, John Clark wrote: > > On Wed, 2:54 PM, John Mikes <[email protected] <javascript:>> wrote: > > > >> I think JC resoinded to Brent: >> *"I don't have a visceral grasp of the true immensity of infinity. Do >> you?" * >> I wonder if 'immensity' means - B I G - ? in which case I cannot refrain >> from thinking about the* infinite SMALL* as well. >> > > It's true that one is just the inverse of the other so you might expect > some sort of symmetry, but in the 13.8 billion years that existed before > my birth I had no trouble thinking about nothing and the same will probably > be true in the trillions of years that will exist after my death, and even > in the time in between I have very often thought about nothing; and yet I > have never ever thought about everything. Somewhere along the line the > symmetry has been broken so thinking very big is harder than thinking very > small. > > I think you're using the words nothing and everything rather loosely. Don't you think there's a difference between "not thinking" and "thinking of nothing"? Also, very big is not continuous with "everything" and "very small" is not continuous with "nothing". "Nothing" has no referent, so it is impossible to think of it itself, though we can think of the concept, or somehow imagine "non-existence". Likewise, to think of everything is impossible if it means one has to literally mentally encompass all that is, but I can easily entertain the concept of everything. I find it equally hard to imagine something 10^34 metres across as I do something 10^-34 metres across, so in this sense I see no asymmetry between large and small. And of course, finally, infinitesimal is not equal to nothing. Calculus rests on that distinction.
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