The Problem of Infinity

Infinity does not play well with experience. In mathematics, we define irrational numbers as those which cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers. Their decimal expansions go on forever, without repeating. They represent the impossible perfection of nature: the diagonal of a square, the circumference of a circle.

And yet, experience — especially conscious experience — is quantized. We don’t perceive infinite information. Our reality appears in slices, in units. Something must be giving way. Something is being lost.

That "something" may be truth itself, filtered.

Our minds are conditioned to believe in independent variables. We do this by ignoring the negligible influences they have on each other. What we don’t realize is that by doing so we are glossing over the subtle and imperceptible layers of reality, the subtle noise. The exact layer where the butterfly effect takes place. In doing so, we don’t just create a streamlined thought-pattern; we unwittingly create a false framework. Rationalism, touted as the truth-seeker's strongest weapon, is actually very blunt compared to reason, due to the fact that it doesn’t deal with the real vast majority of reality, which is tucked in the minutia. We know this because the building blocks that guide common thinking are rational, while the vast majority of numbers that structure our world are irrational. When we think in concepts rooted in quantities and values that are finite, we create serious neurocognitive barriers few can recognize.

This may all seem to be silly nitpicking, a thought experiment divorced from any practical meaning. After all, on a pragmatic and survival level, we are well-advised to round away the negligible. But where it gets dangerous is when it creates false axioms in the underlying logic behind all of our thoughts. We may fail to arrive at correct conclusions regarding the metaphysical structure of reality. A correct framework is necessary in order to see far deeper and more profound truths.

Geometrically speaking, if we plot two seemingly-unrelated variables on a graph, we are implying a 90-degree separation. A one-to-one relationship within this context is represented by a unit right triangle. Because a unit right triangle has a hypotenuse of the square root of two, which is an irrational number, it is impossible to render any truly independent variable or orthogonal dimension.

If we as highly conscious beings begin to go down the hierarchy - from humans to animals to plants to minerals to atoms to empty space - our most popular viewpoint is that we eventually hit zero consciousness; a table and rock aren’t conscious…but are they? Panpsychism proposes that all is conscious, with absolutely no exception, because the idea of asymptoting to zero is ontologically worlds apart from actually hitting 0. No number behaves like 0 except for 0. Any point in space and every un-ensouled node in reality, therefore, is simply part of a greater field within the emanating reality spawned by the observation of a conscious being.