8∞

Pardon the pun, but infinity is a subject that can take one forever to understand. In fact, my contention is that no one does understand it fully, not to discount the very deep understanding of a relative few mathematicians here or there. I applaud their efforts, but something tells me–call it an aesthetic sensibility or something equally subjective and lacking in quantitative support–that what lies between numbers might be more important than what numbers represent.

Let me explain. When considering the nature of infinity, it might help to consider alongside this the nature of knowledge. Specifically, consider what I call conceptual categorization. By conceptual categorization, I refer to the mental process of forming coherent concepts from received information by associating that information with predefined categories emerging from prior learning. In short, the process of learning new information can be conceived as an organizing process that works by categorizing concepts and associating them with concepts derived from the same process and stored as prior knowledge.

As I see it, this process, the process of data-to-knowledge transference, is always governed by some language or system of pattern recognition. And we can see from the nature of patterns that all awareness is, in the end, a recognition of specialized, associative concepts, which, again, formed by segmenting prior knowledge into increasingly discrete semantic patterns.

This makes our neural substrate a sort of cranial language, if you will, all its own. Thus, the segmentation subprocess of learning language lies at the core of conceptual integration or, in short, conceptualization. What this tells us, as far as I can tell, is that the finite nature of language, which is informed by the finite nature of pattern recognition, which is informed–hold your breath–by the finite nature of data-to-knowledge transference, ultimately informs our awareness of such concepts as infinity, meaning that we can never truly conceive of infinity in infinite terms.