3 ms·
I was just musing, no concrete connections at the moment. I don't know if infinity needs self-awareness, but I was thinking that it could prompt one to call int
by dpflan 11y ago
I was just musing, no concrete connections at the moment. I don't know if infinity needs self-awareness, but I was thinking that it could prompt one to call into question his/her self relative to the infinite that is being experienced, and in that perhaps adjust one's concept of self through comparison. Or even just thinking about how one can conceptualize such a thing based upon all life experiences where almost everything encountered is finite.
- hodwik 11y agoIn my experience, children (and most people) just conceptualize infinity as a very large set, just as they perceive a tire a "circle", and think a square drawn on paper is made up of "lines". It requires years of thinking about these mathematical entities before people get a first glimpse of what they really mean, beyond a simplistic qualitative experience. To most people, children included, infinity is conceptually no different from the amount of sand on a beach. They just allow that it is simply not quantifiable. That turns off the brain. The more interesting thing to test, I would argue, would be the human mind conceptualizing a very, very large but ultimately finite set of something. That requires that we make a distinction between the discreteness of something and our ability to quantify it. That is a much more difficult concept to comprehend, and it must be understood before we can even begin to think about teaching a child about mathematical entities like infinity, circles, or lines.