*Flair may be wrong*
In: Mathematics
Imagine a rubber duck. Just plain, yellow, and with that little rubber duck smile.
Imagine another one, but wearing a little tie. Imagine another one, with a different color tie. Then a bunch more, with just different color ties.
It’ll be hard to come up with much more than just a crayon box worth of colors.
Now imagine another with just a little baseball hat. Imagine more with all of the diiferent colors we had for ties. Then imagine more with team logos, team logos in the wrong colors, company logos in the right and wrong colors…
Now you just have hundreds of ducks in mind, right?
That’s very far from infinity, and hard to keep track of.
You might be able to remember the duck with the green hat with orange shark carrying a machine gun logo, wearing the blue and green striped bow tie , but what are the ducks next to it? Did you also imagine orange ducks, or ducks with pink beaks, or ducks holding things?
Imagine all of those infinite permutations of rubber ducks? Now imagine them all with feet. Whoa! Double infinity! Now imagine them all in rubber boots, sneakers, sandals, and clogs. Ten times infinity! Imagine all of the permutations of colors for thosemshoes, and the legs, and one shoe off, and different combinations mixed and matched.
Now imagine all of those ducks as little rubber alligators…more infinity…
The permutations become mind boggling. You stop remembering them, and instead create them on queue. Because we can’t conceptualize so many things. You could surely think of an infinite number of things, given enough time, but you’d forget about some of the older ones after a while.
Dealing with infinity, or just very large or small numbers, as concepts is manageable, but truly envisioning an infinite thing is really not possible.
Edit: cleaned typo
The concept is not incomprehensible, but what it “really means” is. You can grasp the concept of forever, endless, etc. But there’s really no way to make sense of it. How do you understand an infinite amount of something – that no matter how much you take from an infinite pile, the pile never decreases – there’s always as much left as what you started with. In fact you can create infinite separate piles from one infinite pile and the original pile is just as large as it ever was.
There’s no corollary to this in everyday life, in the actual world we evolved to survive in, so there’s no way to experience it and no sense in building brain structures that could grasp it (if such a thing were possible) since that takes energy and resources and puts them into things that don’t confer a survival advantage. Evolution tends to “punish” such use of resources and they are not selected for in times of scarcity.
We don’t experience any infinities in the real world, so there has never been any evolutionary advantage to having an understanding of infinities.
It’s a bit like how we can do maths in four or more dimensions, but the real world that we interact with has three spatial dimensions, so we can’t visualise any more than that.
Even mathematicians treat many infinities as not being real, though some are such as the number of integers (whole numbers) starting from 0.
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