Like a really good book--or a really intense hangover--attending the World Science Festival is an experience that sticks with you. I took the plunge and joined back-to-back sessions, one on the nature of consciousness and other on the meaning of infinity. My head still hasn't fully recovered, and that is exactly what I had hoped for.
So...shall we take a walk on the endless landscape of numbers? (Credit: WSF) Consciousness and infinity, more than any other topics (except maybe cosmology, and sure enough that eventually came up too), push at the outer limits of the human intellect. Making sense of consciousness is the ultimate inward-looking act; making sense of infinity is the ne plus ultra of looking out. Both are acts of profound transcendence. How can a finite brain comprehend the infinite? How can a mind that is trapped within a physical structure understand itself from the outside? I hustled ...
