Infinite Dedekind finite sets

Most paradoxes of actual infinities, such as Hilbert’s Hotel, depend on the intuition that:

1. A collection is bigger than any proper subcollection.

A Dedekind infinite set is one that has the property that it is the same cardinality as some proper subset. In other words, a Dedekind infinite set is precisely one that violates (1).

In Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) set theory, it is easy to prove that any Dedekind infinite set is infinite. More interestingly, assuming the consistency of ZF, there are models of ZF with infinite sets that are Dedekind finite.

It is easy to check that if A is a Dedekind finite set, then A and every subset of A satisfies (1). Thus an infinite but Dedekind finite set escapes most if not all the standard paradoxes of infinity. Perhaps enemies of actual infinity, should thus only object to Dedekind infinities, not all infinities?

However, infinite Dedekind finite sets are paradoxical in their own special way: they have no countably infinite subsets—no subsets that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. You might think this is absurd: shouldn’t you be able to take one element of an infinite Dedekind finite set, then another, then another, and since you’ll never run out of elements (if you did, the set wouldn’t be finite), you’d form a countably infinite sequence of elements? But, no: the problem is that repeating the “taking” requires the Axiom of Choice, and infinite Dedekind finite sets only live in set-theoretic universes without the Axiom of Choice.

In fact, I think infinite Dedekind finite sets are much more paradoxical than a run-of-the-mill Dedekind infinite sets.

Do we learn anything philosophical here? I am not sure, but perhaps. If infinite Dedekind finite sets are extremely paradoxical, then by the same token (1) seems an unreasonable condition in the infinite case. For Dedekind finitude is precisely defined by (1).