Where are we?
Assuming our universe is finite, what lies beyond it's edge? Where is the universe located in the first place? What lies above and below the universe?
Even if we assume we're in a multiverse, what lies outside the multiverse? If there's a god, where is he located and what lies outside the place where god is sitting? And what lies outside that? And outside that?.....
And if the universe is infinite, what does it really mean to go on forever? How can an infinity be located anywhere? Inside another bigger infinity? And what lies outside that bigger infinity?...
And if we're inside a simulation, what are the chances we're in base reality? And if we're not in base reality, where is the base reality and what lies outside the base reality?
*First post here, so excuse me if it included too many topics at once, but I guess it also presents the opportunity to discuss different topics and find their relations in the same post.
Even if we assume we're in a multiverse, what lies outside the multiverse? If there's a god, where is he located and what lies outside the place where god is sitting? And what lies outside that? And outside that?.....
And if the universe is infinite, what does it really mean to go on forever? How can an infinity be located anywhere? Inside another bigger infinity? And what lies outside that bigger infinity?...
And if we're inside a simulation, what are the chances we're in base reality? And if we're not in base reality, where is the base reality and what lies outside the base reality?
*First post here, so excuse me if it included too many topics at once, but I guess it also presents the opportunity to discuss different topics and find their relations in the same post.
Comments (44)
Carry on.
this proves that reality MUST NECESSARILY be infinite
Nothingness is a problem, and therefore reality MUST be infinite and eternal. In order to avoid the problem of nothingness.
The reason nothingness is a problem is because already have somethingness. So what's beyond it? nothingness? makes no sense. Where did it come from? nothingness? makes no sense.
Therefore: this somethingness that we currently have MUST be infinite and eternal.
Even if we assume the universe is infinite, still begs the question: where is it located?
And how do we explain the Olber's paradox if it really is infinite?
https://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/suborbit/POLAR/cmb.physics.wisc.edu/tutorial/olbers.html
We live in our town/village/city, which is inside the country, which is inside this planet Earth, which is inside the solar system, which is inside the Milky way galaxy, which is then inside this universe. Continuing the same set of questions, inside what is this universe located?
Keeps going forever. Which makes alot more sense than its alternative: nothingness.
It's not about having the perfect answer, it's about having the best answer.
Everywhere.
I'd rather have the truth
And where is this "everywhere" located?
All around you.
It's omnipresent. It's an infinite infinities inside another infinity.
I didn't say nothing, I said nothingness. They are different.
You would rather have your perfect fantasy, which is not achievable.
I had forgotten about Olber’s paradox, so thanks for that.
Quoting Echoes
I like this question very much, even though it’s clearly incoherent. You could read up on cosmology and get some idea how cosmologists tame their intuitive sense of ‘space’ or ‘location’ so that they don’t get into this sort of mess, maybe learn some tricks for almost visualizing how it works, but the fact remains that the question itself is incoherent and you won’t ever get an answer to it. We have never been waiting for science to figure out where the universe is, so whatever cosmologists say, it won’t be that.
But it’s still a lovely question. Because we know it’s a question that cannot be answered, we have some new things to think about:
(1) Why would we think, at first, that we could answer such a question?
(2) Why is it so easy to ask a question that, we might say, makes no sense?
(3) Does the way the question fails tell us anything else interesting?
* And lots more, but that’s a place to start, not finish.
It depends on the relation you want to clarify. If you ask such a general question like "where are we?", you have the choice of narrowing the topic down. So, in one instance, we are on a planet in the universe. Speaking more narrowly, we are in a galaxy in the universe, the Milky Way. To be more specific, we are in a solar system containing eight planets and we are the third planet close to the sun.
We don't have evidence to say that we are in a multiverse, that is only speculation based on a mathematical supposition, which may or may not be true. From here you could specify an arbitrary line on a map and call that "your country", furthermore you can state if you belong in a town or city, all the way down to your address. That's where you are in a sense.
We now enter tricky territory because you'll say "I am here" as opposed to over there. Where is here exactly? Do you want to give an exact longitude or latitude? Are you next to a chair or a table? Are you the same person all the time, otherwise looking for you will have a temporal characteristic. And so on. In absence of a relation to something else, you can't say to be anywhere.
Space is just one of many mathematical objects and all mathematical objects exist in mutual relations of similarity, of which spatial relations are just a special kind of relation. And by the way, time is just a special kind of space, at least according to theory of relativity.
The question itself is “Where is the universe?” and so fails because it’s like asking “Where is everything?” or “Where is everywhere?” and neither of those leave anything to be related to.
But it’s curious that the title of the thread is not “Where is the universe?” but “Where are we?” (although the conversational emphasis would probably be “Where are we?”). So the question could be, “Where are we, in relation to everything?” which sounds a little different, a question about, as people say, ‘our place in the universe’, which is not a question about location at all.
And maybe the conversational emphasis is the right one. What does it mean to be the sort of thing that has a physical location? That’s a defining characteristic of us, but what does it mean to have a location? Can my having a location only be described in terms of the location of other things or beings that have a location? That still doesn’t say what it is for anything — those things, me, us — to have a location. The simplest way to block even thinking you can answer my location question by talking about the location of other things, is to ask “Where is everything?”
And that’s a very good question. Not ‘where am I in relation to (something else)’, but what is ‘being somewhere’?
Raymond Tallis writes about this in some detail, I'm forgetting the book now, or books.
I don't think that's possible to answer without postulating a self-referential entity and this itself is highly puzzling. In some sense, I have to be different from myself in order to refer to me and my location. For if I am completely in myself, I don't see how I could recognize other things at all. I would just be a passive creature, taking in whatever sense data the world happens to throw at me.
Don't assume you are recognizing anything other than yourself. How do you know you have senses? Did you sense them? A brain in a vat could be made to think it is a being with senses walking around in a physical world. Simply by creating shapes that appeared to be objects and triggering a feeling response when those objects come into contact with its virtual body. It would then use those shapes and feelings to "prove" a real physical world existed. But even if the world is a simulation something somewhere has to be real to create the simulation. Therefore the world is real, it's just not what we think it is. It is not what it originally appears, and is thought, to be.
But you‘re asking, “How I can know where I am?” aren’t you? And that’s another thing entirely.
So far we have:
(1) Where is everything?
(1a*) Where is everywhere?
(2) What does it mean for something to be somewhere, for anything to be anywhere?
(2a) What does it mean for me to be somewhere, to be anywhere?
(3) How can I know where I am?
(3a) How can I know where anything is?
The 3’s don’t seem to leave a lot of room for the sort of answers that the 1’s and 2’s might require. It’s hard to imagine an answer to a 3 as anything but ‘where-in-relation-to’. Why is that? Why is knowledge so insistently relational?
If I answer the question “Where am I?” with “here”, then presumably we can ask “How do I know that I am here?” If ‘here’ is simply relational, then that’s the same as asking “How do I know I am not there, for all values of there?” But that’s just another way of not facing up to the question. When you answer “Where are you?” with “Here,” you give no location, in one sense, not even a relational one; it’s like saying, “I am wherever I am”, or “I am wherever this place is” or even “I am in whatever this place is.” Is that a location? It’s not saying “nowhere”.
Or not: ‘wherever I am’ is also relational, but marks place by reference to me. We have the same answer available for ‘all of us’ or for ‘everything’. The universe, too, is wherever it is, and since we’re in it, that’s where we are. Or, maybe better, the universe is wherever we are.
Of course we’re going around in circles, which is not necessarily bad, but it feels like we keep running past points where the questions might connect to each other. If we could say, clearly, how we can know where we are, or know where anything is, would that tell us what ‘being somewhere’ is? If, for instance, the question, ‘how can we know’, has to be restricted to ‘how can we know in relation to (something else)’ — and, of course, we haven’t shown this yet — then would be entitled to say that ‘being somewhere’ is only ‘being somewhere (relative to something else)’? That is not clear to me at all.
One other question we passed over is “How do I know I am somewhere?” or “How do I know something is somewhere?” Not ‘what is its location?’ but just ‘that it (or I) have one’. I counted this as a non-question by saying it’s just a property of us, or other things, to have a location. And it doesn’t seem to be a property of the universe. But how do we know that? Is that something we know?
Open question, then, for me. How we know which sorts of things have locations, and which don’t, how we know what those locations are, or don’t, might help us understand what having a location is, or might not.
Look at this way. My phone has GPS. It knows that it is somewhere, only operationally, only insofar as it knows where it is in relation to other things. My jacket does not have GPS, and knows neither where it is, nor that it is somewhere. But, unlike my phone, I know that I am somewhere even when I don’t know where that is. Now you can say that I always know a little about where I am, that I’m on Earth and so on, but do I seem to know even more than that: I know that I must be somewhere because I am spatial, and insofar as I am at all, I am located. What is that sense of being located, that’s what I want to get at, and what I think “Where is the universe?” can force you to confront. I don’t think you get to say that I know I must be located only in the sense of being located relative to other things, because we cannot claim already to understand what it means for those things to be located somewhere. And obviously we can’t say where the universe is in relation to anything else, but we can still say that it’s right here, or that it’s ‘all around us’.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Some things can be put in the forms of questions: "why is there nothing?", "what isn't a thing"?, but these don't have answers. So we say something trivial like, (1) everywhere, (1a) all around us. That leaves us with blank stares. We have to produce a question that could be given some kind of answer.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Both are fine.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well, what then? I can say "I am here", that doesn't tell you much. It's true that relations themselves don't explain the question, but if we don't include them, then we can't speak of where we are in any sense I can think of.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That sense of being located is what you feel, when you ask yourself where you are. You specify what comes to mind as you think of this question. If you don't include a relational aspect, then I can't make any sense of how to even begin.
I don't think that covers everything at all. But I also don't know how to proceed. This seems to me intimately related to the issue of self-consciousness.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The concept "universe" is relative to me, the creature asking the question.
I may be part of the universe, but I can scrutinize it in a way that it seems unable to do, absent someone asking a question.
Or us. It’s where we are.
A post or two in, it occurred to me that reversing the relational definition is probably the inevitable way in. We get the three usual ways to deal with the relational thing: one’s independent, the other’s independent, or they’re mutually dependent. Starting with science in mind, it feels natural to reach first for counting the external (objective, natural, public, manifest) as independent: this house defines a space and I am in a specific part of that, relative to the house; the grocery store has a known, fixed location, and I’m about a mile from there in some direction. That way of answering ‘where’ questions fails immediately for the universe.
The third option, I’m holding off on a bit.
The second option, taking ourselves as independent and thinking of location relative to us, seems to have some promise. I was confused at first that you and @Miller seemed almost immediately to start talking about solipsism, but it makes sense if that’s how you see starting from us.
I think I didn’t see solipsism here because I’m not allowing myself to assume that location is relational, or at least not relational in a way that I already understand.
I think we could start with ‘us’ and ‘where we are’, but there’s no need to rush past understanding what ‘where we are’ means. In essence I’ve been arguing that the title of the thread, “Where are we?”, is exactly the way into answering “Where is the universe?” by turning it into “Where is here?” first of all, and thinking about location (what is ‘here’?) this way first, but knowing that we’ll need to end up with a sense of location that also works for ‘there’ and ‘that stuff’ too. (Does it need to be the same sense? Unclear.)
Doesn't Olbers' paradox just apply to a "static universe"?
An infinite universe could still expand, so there'd be no such paradox.
I think the steady-state universe is one such model.
Funny you mention that. I did not have solipsism in mind, but (paradoxically or non-sensically as this sounds) I think if we are to interpret the nature of a creature, you do treat that creature as if it were the only one in existence. That's why when they mapped out our DNA sequence, they only used the DNA of one person (I believe, please correct me if I'm wrong).
We then generalize from single organism to others, under the (rational) assumption that they are like the initial creature studied.
The last sentence in this quote, is unclear to me.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think so. But look at your own examples, you relate "Where is here" to thinking about location. But in order to make sense of here, you also have to account for "there" and that "stuff". I guess I'm not getting what's the puzzle you have with the relational aspect of this.
I mean, if you can, tell me something that isn't relational and then maybe we can proceed. I can't think of a single example. Or maybe you have some different concept of relation than what I'm using.
We could be a brain in a vat, we cannot know. But we need senses to get data for our brains. The vat would stimulate the senses too, as senses all go back to some process in the brain. But if we lack all of them, we won't have a world at all. About the world, maybe, maybe not.
Our common sense intuitions do not reflect the nature of the world mind-independently. Then again, if no one is around to ask any questions and recognize things, what sense is there in talking about a world? It's tricky.
I could be a disembodied omnipresent eternal solipsistic dreaming consciousness.
We don't know if such a thing is possible. There's no instances of consciousness absent body and dreams reflect stuff we got from the world, in terms of seeing other people and ordinary objects. We then do crazy stuff in dreams, but we cannot say that a person lacking actual experience could have such dreams.
This looks like a mistake to me:
1. What does it mean for me, for instance, to have a location?
2. It means that, given something else that has a location, I have my location relative to that.
3. Okay, but what does it mean for that thing, relative to which I have a location, to have a location?
See what I mean? It’s circular in a non-helpful way to define something having a location in terms of something else having a location.
So the natural thing is to start with a location that has an extra feature, as my location does, by being an instance of ‘here’. And that seems doubly right as an entry point because here is always where we are and the universe is always where we are.
We get a little more to go on too, in my recognition that there’s always a here for me, which is not true of my jacket, which also always has a location, or my phone, which always has a location but only knows ‘here’ as its location, and only relative to other things. That’s not the way my here works, because I know what neither of those does, that I’m spatial and must have a location, and that location is always at least ‘here’, whatever it is in relation to other things.
I don’t need to deny that location is relational exactly; it’s just not obviously helpful as a place to start. If there are things we want to say about it later that have a more relational form, at least by then we should have a little more to say about what that relation is and how it works. How much could we say about the relation we tried to start with? It’s like we were just doing trigonometry and then calling it a day.
What the relation is between ‘here’ and other locations, I’m trying not to prejudge; whether other locations are the same kind of location, or locations in the same sense, as ‘here’, I’m also trying not to prejudge.
Look up and you cant see your body. Now you have evidence of consciousness absent body.
Hmm. We have a location here on Earth, as I understand it, the Universe doesn't really have a location, you can't say it's to the right of nothing or behind something else. Unless there are other universes, welp, we don't know about that.
Similar to when we say, there's no up or down in space, this is what we can't help but bring to the world.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It doesn't make sense to me to say that my jacket or phone knows its location. They just are.
So you're tying space to a location, here, namely where your body is. There is a sense my body is in my city, in my house, but I could be off in metaphysical space, thinking about "thing in themselves" or thinking about the novel I am currently reading. So where would I be, if I'm totally lost daydreaming?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Which is, the relation of my location... in the universe, on Earth? The relation is between me and something that is not me, in some very vague sense.
I'm not saying you don't have a legitimate puzzle here, these things happen. I'm not understanding the problem too well. That makes sense too, many of these puzzles are hard to even talk about. In my experience.
Here the is situation in 2021. We know of a single universe (hello there, neighbor), of finite age. It has a history. Here we are. Neat!
That is all that we can shown to be true as I type this sentence.
If this turns out to he the WHOLE PICTURE then, obviously, the next question will be: how did our universe come into being?
Jesus the Christ is the best answer to date. In my opinion.
My location, then, is to be defined relative to a thing that is not me. But not just any thing. If I am a member of a club, my location cannot be defined relative to the club. Why not?
Quoting Manuel
Not where my body is, but where I am; I am not my body, but a person, a living, thinking organism.
Yes, I think so.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I assume you're using the club as a metaphor for the universe. I'd ask, how do I know I'm a member of the club? Am I the club itself? Well, no. If I was the club itself, I couldn't ask questions about it, because I would be the club, presumably lacking consciousness and contextual awareness.
For me to be a part of the club, I have to be quite isolated from it, enough to form some kind of cognition that allows me to contemplate these things.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I agree that you are not your body.
Tell me this though: If I am in my room, intensely daydreaming about a novel, where am I? I am not present to the situation of my body, as when someone says "he's not here at the moment" or "he's in Neptune", meaning he's not here with us at this moment, paying attention.
But if you insist that this makes no sense, because I am were my body is, not where my thoughts are at any given moment, then the body becomes an essential component of the identity of here-ness we are trying to understand.
No, no, a club. The International Brotherhood of Amateur Philosophers. That’s a thing that’s not me, but we can’t define my location relative to it. Or relative to 7. Or relative to ‘conformity’. Or relative to July 3rd, 1807.
Quoting Manuel
But not just as a body, but as my body, and only so long as I am a going concern. Once I’m dead, what you’ll call ‘his body’ doesn’t tell you where I am.
Not to the number 7 or conformity, we agree.
Hmmm. How far off is the International Brotherhood of philosophers from you? 1000 miles to the east, 200 kilometers to the west? There is a relation here.
As to July 3rd, 1807, you didn't exist, I assume. But go back far enough in (space)time, and we would find that date. I am closer to Tuesday than I am to Wednesday and quite far away from July 3rd, 1807.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Correct. So experience is crucial here and we don't know if experience could exist absent a body, which is spatio-temporally located somewhere.
If they have a building where they meet, that might also be called ‘the club’, so there’s some ambiguity there, but I meant the club as an abstraction, an organization to which human beings belong. I don’t belong to the building.
The point of the examples was that if you want to define ‘location’ in terms of some thing, it has to be a thing we think of as having a location, and that’s circular, and not in helpful way.
My hope was to start with a location that is special in some way, and ‘here’ is such a location. My thinking was, roughly, that here is where I encounter the rest of the cosmos, interact with it. Here is where the air I breathe is (even if it came from elsewhere in a tank), here and only here is where I can act (I can only act elsewhere through someone or something else), here is where my senses are operative (even if the light that reaches my eyes came from millions of light-years away), and so on. I intended to look at ‘here’ as something like the immediate environment of an organism, the realm in which things that are not me are available to me, to be used, encountered, wondered at, for me to take or destroy, and where I am available to such things, to be changed by them, to be helped or hindered. Here would be where things mean something to me.
And then the idea was to proceed from understanding what ‘here’ is to understanding other location terms like ‘there’, ‘elsewhere’, ‘where’, ‘somewhere’, and so on, on the basis of ‘here’. We never get to say that the universe is there, or elsewhere, right? We’re always within it, and we are always here, so the question — for me — was whether those ideas are the same, or related to each other, or what. For instance, some location words like “here” are flexible in their boundaries, and can encompass as little as my knee to as much as the whole universe.
Again, it’s easy enough to see why a question like “Where is the universe?” is ill-formed and unanswerable. But why is it so tempting, and can we approach the idea of location in such a way that we are not tempted to think of the universe as there, somewhere? It’s one of those perfect nine-year-old philosophy questions that we are too sophisticated to understand.
Quoting Echoes
North of the north pole. :meh:
These words - concepts really - have some overlap related to location, trivially. We have similar, though probably not exact, intuitions as to when here becomes a there. I have a rubber ball in my hand, it is here now as I am about to throw it, when does it become something which is no longer here?
Is it at the moment in which I no longer feel it in my hand? Or does it have to be on the floor for me to consider it over there? We decide, ultimately.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I can only say that although I am a part of the universe, I can't be identical with it. If you want to use the word "universe" to refer to the Earth, and "here" specifically, you are free to do so and not wrong at that.
It may be that questions like these blur the borders between questions we can ask and questions which we can't ask, because we lack the capacity to articulate and understand them.