The Greeks had already noted that there are two ways of considering
infinity.
- Potential infinity is what we consider when we say that counting
never ends. Whatever natural number you can think of, there is a
bigger number. Formally
$(\forall x\in\mathbb{N})(\exists y) (y>x),$ and this is not
really deniable.
- Actual infinity is what happens when we switch the order: There is a
number which is bigger than any natural number you can think of.
Formally
$(\exists y)(\forall x\in\mathbb{N})(y>x),$ and this naturally
implies that $y$ cannot be a member of $\mathbb{N}$.
The existence of an actual infinity is philosophically non trivial and
not accepted by all mathematicians. Its existence cannot be proven; it
is axiomatically given (see
[ZFC](ZFC.md "ZFC")).
The real question however is, given a collection, how does one determine
whether it is finite or not. Certainly, if one can count all the
elements of a collection, then the collection is finite, but who can
count up to a
[googol](Googol.md "Googol")?
yet it is finite.
Gallileo noticed that there are as many even numbers as there are
positive integers. To see this without formal machinery: imagine the
collection of all positive integers. Don't try to imagine them
individually, imagine them as a completed collection. Now multiply them
all by 2. There are no left overs. This violates the Greek saying that
the whole is greater than the parts.
This leads to Dedekind's characterisation: A finite set cannot be in
one-to-one relation with a proper subset. An infinite set is a set that
can be in one-to-one relation with a proper subset.
In this sense, once accepted the existence of the set of all natural
numbers, $\mathbb{N}$ is infinite since it is possible to map $n$ to
$n+1$ thus providing a one-to-one relation from $\mathbb{N}$ to
$\mathbb{N}\setminus\{0\}$.