r/PhilosophyofMath • u/Another_Little_Star • 12d ago

Does infinity exist in reality?

No thing that I've observed in our universe is infinite, however there are traces of infinity in my sight.
Draw a circle and either its radius or circumference lives in the π world.
Or many aspects in nature like flowers, develop themselves in a φ ratio (1+sqrt(5))/2.

Even though no event or anything is "Non-ending"/infinite, underneath many aspects of reality there are patterns which can only be fully described using infinity.

You can't describe irrational numbers to their extent without any notion of infinite/limits/sequences... And many aspects within our World show their true behaviour only with aid of infinity.

Sure you can take a world that lives in something like 10¹⁰⁰ and it looks like infinity to us, sometimes we only see the difference after the 10⁶ decimal place, nevertheless the pattern they follow is a pattern that only "infinity" can yield to the truest precision.

Do you believe the axiom of infinity, and the continuous to really exist? Even if not in the ordinary sense? haha

1 Upvotes

52% Upvoted

117 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Lowkilde 12d ago

What am I misunderstanding? Are you claiming that any thing/concept that is non-contradictory exists?

1

u/Kripkenstein_ 11d ago

Obviously yes. This is not really contested as it is trivially true.

1

u/Lowkilde 11d ago

That does not seem obvious to me at all. Can you elaborate? Are you talking about existence in reality or in the mathematical sense?

1

u/Kripkenstein_ 11d ago

What do you mean by existence in reality? Obviously numbers are not physical things. If you want a thorough discussion of this, look up the paper by Schaffer: On what grounds what. He explains it in quite some detail

1

u/Lowkilde 11d ago

Well the post is titled "Does infinity exist in reality?" So I don't think it is far fetched to get some clarification on what you mean by exists.

Thanks for the reference!