alan – inquiring life

Infinity: Into the Endless Sea

There are more real numbers between zero and one than there are atoms in the entire known universe – and somehow, that’s only the beginning. Infinity isn’t just big. It stretches our ability to understand the fabric of space and time. It unsettles philosophers, challenges scientists, and even makes its way into video games.

Infinity first caught my attention when I was a kid. I was entranced by the never-ending staircase in Super Mario 64, where no matter how far you ran, you didn’t get any closer to the top unless you had reached a certain milestone in the game.

No matter how far you run, you never reach the top – and the music never stops climbing either. This looping hallway was my first encounter with the Shepard Tone: a sound that seems to rise forever. A staircase and a song, both climbing endlessly into the infinite.

I didn’t know much about math or philosophy back then (to be fair, I still don’t know that much), but something about it stuck with me. It made me start to question what people meant when they talked about things like eternity, or when I heard in Sunday school that God was “infinite.” Was that just a fancy way of saying “very big,” or did it point to something real – something even more mysterious and unending than that staircase?

As I got older, I noticed most people didn’t like to think much about infinity. It was easy to brush off, as if it was just a silly thought experiment and not something worth thinking about. But I also started to sense a kind of unease beneath the dismissal. When I asked questions or tried to have discussions about infinity, people would usually shift the conversation or laugh it off, like the topic made them uncomfortable. And I get it – because when you start to really consider what infinity implies, not just as an idea but as a possible structure behind our reality, it blurs the lines between what we know, what we believe, and what we can’t explain.

That’s what this post is about: a journey into the idea of infinity – not primarily to make an effort at explaining it, but to explore how it shapes our view of existence. We’ll begin with a brief look at how humans across time have wrestled with the infinite, from ancient philosophers and theologians to modern mathematicians and cosmologists. And then, we’ll step into deeper waters.

Blockchain With a Purpose

Note: This is not investment advice – just an exploration of how mission-driven blockchain tech is built and used in the real world.

Back in college, I remember hearing about Bitcoin, which at the time was trading for well under a dollar. I was interested, but I figured it was probably just a fad, or at best, a clever idea that would fizzle out. And honestly, it seemed complicated. Wallets, private keys, exchanges – it felt like more trouble than it was worth for a busy college student.

Fast forward to 2019. I had stayed on the sidelines when it came to cryptocurrency, just watching from a distance. However, I was using Keybase (a secure messaging and cryptography platform) for work when they announced something called the “Spacedrop.” Users would receive free Stellar Lumens (XLM), the native asset of the Stellar network. I received a few XLM and decided that I might as well learn what it was all about. The airdrop didn’t last long – scammers, gaming the system, eventually forced an early shutdown – but by then, I’d found my way into the Stellar community and started learning about blockchain in earnest.

Awake My Soul: An Interpretation

One of the things I’d like to do on this blog from time to time is reflect on songs that, for one reason or another, have stuck with me over the years. I enjoy sitting with a song and exploring what it might mean – not just the meaning that the songwriter intended, but what it means to me personally. As I touched on in my Poetry Without a Poet post, I’m not aiming to find the One True Meaning of any given song. I’m not here to tell you what a song should mean to you. But I hope that by sharing what it’s meant to me, it might enrich your own understanding – adding one more thread to the tapestry of meaning we all bring to the music we love.

🎵 Music Interpretation Reminder 🎵
As I touched on in Poetry Without a Poet, art often carries meanings beyond what the artist intended. I’m not searching for the “One True Meaning” of any song. Instead, my hope is that this interpretation adds another layer to the meaning and beauty that this music already holds.

“Awake My Soul” is a track by the British folk-rock band Mumford & Sons, released in 2009 on their debut album Sigh No More. The band quickly became known for their rich, folksy sound, paired with lyrics that explore raw emotional themes with spiritual undertones. While not a religious band, many of their lyrics tap into questions of identity, love, purpose, and grace. They often use language that feels a bit religious in tone – which makes sense given that lead singer Marcus Mumford grew up in a home where both parents were leaders in the Association of Vineyard Churches. “Awake My Soul” has always stood out to me (since I first heard it back in college) as one of their more reflective songs, weaving together themes of longing, vulnerability, and transformation in just a few verses.

If you haven’t heard it in a while (or ever), I encourage you to listen to the track below with fresh ears. After that, I’ll dive into exploring the lyrics more closely.

What is the Singularity?

In recent years – first in science fiction, and now increasingly in tech headlines – a particular word has begun to surface more and more often: Singularity.

Originally, this term was used by mathematicians (describing points where equations break down) and physicists (most famously, when discussing black holes). But today, if you’re hearing it in conversations about technology, it likely means something else – generally referring to computing power, artificial intelligence, and exponential change.

The recent leaps in AI may just seem like new tools for making quick work of essays or generating memes. They are much more than that, though – they mark the beginning of a profound shift that will, sooner or later, ripple through every part of our lives. It’s worth taking a few minutes now to explore what the Singularity actually is, what it could mean for us, and how we might begin to prepare for it.

Doomscrolling and the Global Shallows

The phrase “doomscrolling”, which was first popularized during the COVID pandemic, describes a behavior pattern that goes back even further than that – at least to the dawn of social media. If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling your Facebook timeline for the fifth time in an hour, re-reading the same (often negative) posts because your brain is hooked on checking for a tiny drip of new information, you’ve participated in the phenomenon. It’s closely tied to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), a term coined in 2004 just as the internet was really finding its place in the hearts and minds of people around the world.

What’s changed in recent years is the sheer scale of it. Our ancestors might have worried about their town, their family, their crops. We, on the other hand, are handed an endless feed of every war, every disaster, every outrage – filtered through algorithms designed to keep us hooked. There’s a strange social pressure to stay informed about everything, as if not knowing about a faraway tragedy makes us complicit or self-absorbed. But is this constant exposure actually increasing our depth of compassion – or stretching it too thin to be useful, at the expense of our spiritual and mental health? When everything feels urgent, it’s hard to tell what actually deserves our attention. Our desire to stay deeply informed about the world can end up making our empathy surprisingly shallow.

Poetry Without a Poet

Anytime I encounter art – whether it be poetry, music, a novel, etc. – I like to try to understand the intent of the artist. They carefully crafted this work, so I should put forth the effort to receive it as they intended, right? While I still think that is a valuable exercise, it may also be that much of the experienced beauty in art isn’t created solely by the artist – not all of it deliberately, at least. C.S. Lewis captured this idea when he wrote the following in The Personal Heresy:

Hello world!

Just testing out the blog – howdy!

public class InquiringLife {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Thought thought = new Thought("Hello, World");
        thought.contemplate();
    }
}

class Thought {
    private final String message;

    public Thought(String message) {
        this.message = message;
    }

    public void contemplate() {
        // TODO: build out observation, reflection, & integration functionality
    }
}