Kevin's Watch

Surreal numbers, IIRC, are Douglas Hofstadter's image of transfinite numbers in Godel, Escher, and Bach. There is a guy on YouTube whose videos I have seen some of, and he went over the topic too.

... But, reading about Conway from your link, and linking to surreal numbers from there, it appears that the surreal numbers are not the same thing, conceptually, as the transfinite numbers, though the "surreals also contain all transfinite ordinal numbers" (the Wikipedia article also says the "set" of surreal numbers is better spoken of as a "class" but not knowing enough about set-theory and category-theory and the like, I won't try to comment on that remark).

Vraith wrote:We are finitely infinite. We cannot understand/apply all things eternal or transcendent...but we can beyond any doubt whatsoever understand/apply/transcend our own particular selves.
We may live in a cage, but it is not a box---there is space between the bars, a field of view.
And maybe even a means of escape, eventually.

I suppose I'm thinking e.g. of people who say, "God is infinitely more than we are, so who are we to challenge His will?" Or some such thing. So I also suppose I'm arguing against my memories of what some obscure people have said at some point in time in my life, rather than a common issue. (For I thirdly suppose that the enormous number of people, including myself, who are romantic idealists of various stripes, are implicitly infinitists(?) in this context, hoping for a neverending relationship with a person with whom we are in love. So really, I don't know whether most people I've spoken to on this level, would be finitists about the substantial scale of human nature in a given human.)