Attention is our only currency

Articulating how we think and ideate is a big ask. The only way I can accomplish this feat is if I chip away bit by bit. The hope (or faith) is that as I am chipping away and recognizing singular insights, the whole will be revealed to me.

In my previous post, I made a list of how we think and operate differently from machines. I want to expand on one of the differences, i.e. how we can fathom infinity.

We are finite in space and time with 3 pounds of brain. How then, do we wrap our minds around something that is infinite? Infinite is not something we have measured, witnessed or experienced and yet, we acknowledge its existence. More than that, how do we know it to be real and true? I think that is because we have a faith and belief in something bigger than us. In this essay, I want to make the case that faith is a pre-requisite for human ingenuity. It is one of the ingredients of the secret sauce.

Before I talk more about faith, I want to talk more about how infinity can be perceived. My first brush with infinity was as a mathematical concept and tool. Cantor proved that there are some infinities bigger than others*. He came up with a way to grapple with infinity and its various forms despite infinity not being truly tangible. Ramanujan, whose treatment of infinity was different than that of Cantor, was able to converge infinite sequences to a finite number**. These discoveries were guided by intuition and faith before they were formalized. And I personally feel very powerful that I can represent the concept of infinity and use it as a tool on a piece of paper. These guys believed it to be true before they set out to prove it. The power of faith is more pronounced by the fact that you cannot always prove what is evidently true (Godel’s incompleteness theorem).

Religious adherents are no strangers to the idea of infinity. They take solace and strength in the fact that there is a higher power who looks after them. Their thoughts and actions are oriented in service of God. However, people outside of organized religion, they too are bowing down to an altar. I will go out on a limb and say that unbeknownst to them, they are submitting themselves to a God of their own making. God is whatever sits at the top of one’s value structure. For me, and I think for several others, love sits at the top. Love is my God. It is the analog to the mathematical concept and tool of infinity is love. When we truly love, we know it to be limitless and we can feel it blossom more and more everyday.

Love and faith is our conduit to grasp infinity, the vastness of the reality we live in. This is part of the secret sauce that makes us human. We think and ideate the way we do because we have a hierarchy of values. God is whatever lies at the top of this hierarchy.

Footnotes:

*A quick way to explain this is: think about the set of natural numbers that are listed as 1, 2, 3, …..this list is infinite. Now think about the numbers 0 and 1. This is a finite list. Pick any number between 0 and 1 and divide that by 2. Let’s say I picked 1/2 and now, after dividing it by 2, have 1/4. Now divide ‘1/4’ by 2 and continue this ad nauseum. You will never get to zero and this list will be infinite! So there’s an infinite nested between two finite numbers! Although Cantor’s ideas are more common place now, when he first introduced them it resulted in an idealogical conflict, not just within the mathematical community but also among the theologians who believe in one Infinity, one Almighty.

** 1 + 2 + 3 + … = -12

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