1st June 2020

 

regressus in infinitum – you can’t get to “100” without first passing “50”; you can’t get to “50” without first passing “25”. Und so weiter. This infinite regress is vicious, of course, because ‘you’re required to complete an infinite number of actions before attaining your goal, which – since the whole point of ‘infinite’ is that there’s no end to the number of these actions – renders the goal logically impossible’ (Wallace, Everything and More, pp. 48-9). Nothing changes. I know nothing of the Sisyphean hell, an eternity, a temporal ∞, of pain now smouldering in American cities. But I can see the infantry viciousness – ignorance sharp as knives and quick as a whip. Think critically, down on the street level. Analysis pending. Analyse. Limiting processes, the summation of infinite series, infinite processes, indefinitely continued without ever coming to an end. Such a series may be convergent, in which case it has a finite value or limit to which it approaches, or divergent, in which case it has no such limit. It was Weierstrass who proved that the infinite of Zeno’s Dichotomy is actually not an infinite regress requiring endlessly proliferating subtasks, but rather one task of traversing the distance from one side to its limit (the other side) – a convergent infinite series, whose limit we’ve been approaching for centuries. Or, perhaps, we instead find ourselves at a function’s exceptional point of singularity – undefined.

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