Human memory and infinite possibilities
May 20, 2011 in Mathematics by Administrator
I’m not sure if a reader will be familiar with the differences of cardinality of numbers and infiniteness, but there’s
- finite,
- countably infinite, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countably_infinite
- and uncountably infinite. http://www.mathwords.com/u/uncountably_infinite.htm
Their is a HUGE difference between them. For example, problems in life that are countably infinite we work on and maintain a level of maintenance that we are satisfied with. Problems that are uncountably infinite we typically throw our hands in the air and say forget that, or if the problem is important enough we strive heavily to maintain it and usually get shown how futile our attempts are. Trimming shrubberies is vaguely a countably infinite problem, but preventing an act of terrorism is uncountably infinite.
Recently I cited a discovery about the human brain and memories. The research I mentioned discovered that our memories are complex strands of protein that are assembled in a pattern which encodes them as we remember them. Each strand would be finite. The number of possible strands is also finite (because the skull can’t grow to accommodate more memories than the current capacity). It would seem to follow that all human thought would have to be not just countable but indeed finite. However, cleverness need not come from an existing memory, and perhaps by it’s pedestrian definition, it is always new thinking.
My question is how do we as humankind go from a finite number of finite minds with finite knowledge, to infinite possibilities of actions? Is that moment of human verb the essence of what the religious would call our soul? We are not really defined by our experiences alone or their would be no reformed criminals, everybody that grew up in a tough, poor neighborhood would only do wrong, and everybody raised in a religion would only do right.
Ah, the marvelous mind!
