a VERY informal proof on living mentally finitely

"axioms & disclaimers"

a person's memory and lives are finite.  Proven through biology, chemistry, other sciences.  I guess it depends on a person's belief as to whether you'll take this truth.  Some people may believe memories are intangibly separate from the brain and human consciousness like ideas just exist but may or may not be forever.  Also, some people may believe in eternal souls and maybe eternal memories attached to that idea.   Also assume that complete knowledge, "the truth", is only achieved by reading all books ever published no matter how stupid.


1) It takes 72 hours to read the bible straight through.
2) There are 774,746 words in the bible.
3) That is about 10760 words per hour.  (774746/72)
4) There is an average of 80,000 words in a book.
5)There are 129,864,880 books that have been published in all of modern history according to Google's algorithms. but there will always be more books published as we are still conscious- this future fact alone discounts ever knowing "the truth."
6)Let's say knowledge consists of the complete knowledge of all books (even though web opinion is very important, books are easier / sufficient to make a point).
7) That makes 120864880*80000 words to know "the truth" as of August 10, 2010 when this article: http://mashable.com/2010/08/05/number-of-books-in-the-world/ was published.

2. # 0f words:             1.038919e+13

   Rad

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   sin

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   log

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   (

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   7

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8)  divide this number by 10760 words per hour, and you will obtain how many hours you have to live.
                                     965538141.264 hours
9)  To make this number more digestible convert it to years.

*Also note, that these approximations/numbers are not taken as absolute.  There will always be an error approximation.     

Doing these set of calculations, the conclusion is that you'll have to live 110221.249 years. Even if you memory was limitless, your lifespan will cut you off from knowing "the truth" unless you were continually cryogenically regenerated every so often, so that you live for 110221.249 years.  But after that, and after reading the books published during the time you were asleep, you will still find something you don't know when you move to the internet pages.  

Oh yeah I forgot to take into account, the existence of other intelligent beings and the existence of their texts.

Semi-Philosophically proven:

I want to casually call our finiteness as our problem with infinite regression.
If we wanted to know everything about a given situation, we would have to know the depths and details of everything in that situation.  This is the problem about a detective's job: truth is impossible to achieve.  Because if it was achieved, every point in this system known as "the universe" would have to be known in all dimensions, and all these points must count for significant fluctuations that brought us here to this point (which makes me question truth in computer modeling).  In a sense the true goal of science is to know "the truth," but those of us in science take this "playfully" and "lightly" thinking realistically, that this will never happen (at least not within the lifetime of this author).  Most of us in science, are in it for the fun of grappling with the unknown.  (I digress, damn it).  A detective must know why the killer killed his victim, the psychology behind it, the probably of the killer's condition, the means that he took to kill the victim, illness that the victim might've had, the statistics of the victim's death being a freak accident, and the details behind it in order to know for sure who did it.  But in a sense, a detective job is to make inferences based on not knowing everything.  A detective's role comes with an error statistic because he doesn't have the universe in his head.