On Jul 24, 3:04Â pm, Don Stockbauer
hotmail.com> wrote:> On Jul 22, 11:51 am, "Jack"
yahoo.com> wrote:
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>>> "Don Stockbauer"
hotmail.com> wrote in message>
>
>>> On Jul 22, 11:51 am, "Jack"
yahoo.com> wrote:>>>> Suppose you have a pixilated screen, say, 10000 x 10000 and two
>>>> colors--black and white pixels only. Â That's 10 to the 8th pixels. Â 100
>>>> million.
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>>>> Now imagine all the possible combination--every other pixel lit, every
>>>> third, etc.
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>>>> Now realize that among all the possible combinations is all the text of
>>>> every book ever written in every language. Â And all the text of every
>>>> book
>>>> ever written with you holding a bottle of shampoo on the page. Â And every
>>>> page of every book ever written with you and Jack London sitting down to
>>>> a
>>>> penguin dinner with a glass of pH 4.01 standard  buffer solution balance
>>>> on
>>>> Jack head.
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>>>> And portraits of every one your possible unconceived siblings.
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>>>> And so on.
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>>> Certainly there are a very, very large number of such combinations.
>>> But there aren't an infinity of them.  There  aren't an aleph null,
>>> the actualized infinity of them. They form a potential infinity. Â An
>>> actualized infinity is a mathematical abstraction which can never be
>>> realized.
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>> This post is one possible combination of my screen example.
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> Correct. One out of a huge number of possibilities, though the number
> of possibilities is not infinite.- Hide quoted text -
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> - Show quoted text -
So under what circumstances can one not be added to any number?
This reminds me of the story of Pythagoras who supposedly had a
student executed for suggesting the square root of minus one.
BOfL
