Infinite world
Everybody, tell me your thoughts on this.
Let’s say All – the universe and everything known and unknown outs there - is infinite – aka limitless, unbounded. When imagining this universe that never ends and is filled with an infinite amount and variety of stuff, you can see how the boundaries and limits around everything in the world disappears. After all, by saying that All is infinite, the outer boundary of everything disappears along with the inner boundaries of all the stuff between. So this is saying there is no fundamental, permanent boundary between you and the air around you, and the ground, and the earth, and on and on. This limitless universe can be visualized as being one, due to the absence of true, permanent boundaries.
And we can say that observable universe was one at a point in time before the Big Bang, when it was a small point of infinitely dense energy. So scientists would say, yes, the universe was literally one at a specific point in time. And since then, matter has spread out, but it still has the infinite properties of being one. And of course, the infinity of the other stuff that humans cannot perceive with our senses or instruments – that is one with All too.
What are the implications of this perspective? It means you are one with All, by being part of an infinite universe. There is no boundary or limit between you and everything around you. It also means with the lack of true innate boundaries in the universe, everything in it is constantly mixing, creating the balance we see in the universe. It also means you can free yourself from a finite perspective where you focus on finite things like job, house, family, etc. You can adopt an infinite perspective and weave these important things like job, house, family, into a free-flowing infinite web that is part of the infinite web of the universe. This also means that the finite labels we apply to things are approximations of an infinite reality. We can apply labels like tree, but a tree is infinite. We can know some things about trees, but not everything. We can say, “you are a man or a woman” and be correct, but still just be making an approximation. You are a vast collection of complex infinity in your own right.
Looking forward to a good discussion.
Let’s say All – the universe and everything known and unknown outs there - is infinite – aka limitless, unbounded. When imagining this universe that never ends and is filled with an infinite amount and variety of stuff, you can see how the boundaries and limits around everything in the world disappears. After all, by saying that All is infinite, the outer boundary of everything disappears along with the inner boundaries of all the stuff between. So this is saying there is no fundamental, permanent boundary between you and the air around you, and the ground, and the earth, and on and on. This limitless universe can be visualized as being one, due to the absence of true, permanent boundaries.
And we can say that observable universe was one at a point in time before the Big Bang, when it was a small point of infinitely dense energy. So scientists would say, yes, the universe was literally one at a specific point in time. And since then, matter has spread out, but it still has the infinite properties of being one. And of course, the infinity of the other stuff that humans cannot perceive with our senses or instruments – that is one with All too.
What are the implications of this perspective? It means you are one with All, by being part of an infinite universe. There is no boundary or limit between you and everything around you. It also means with the lack of true innate boundaries in the universe, everything in it is constantly mixing, creating the balance we see in the universe. It also means you can free yourself from a finite perspective where you focus on finite things like job, house, family, etc. You can adopt an infinite perspective and weave these important things like job, house, family, into a free-flowing infinite web that is part of the infinite web of the universe. This also means that the finite labels we apply to things are approximations of an infinite reality. We can apply labels like tree, but a tree is infinite. We can know some things about trees, but not everything. We can say, “you are a man or a woman” and be correct, but still just be making an approximation. You are a vast collection of complex infinity in your own right.
Looking forward to a good discussion.
Comments (47)
Given your assumptions that we let the universe be infinite and the your conclusion. I do not see how they follow. We can have no boundaries between us and the world with the universe being finite too.
Further more, l like this principle of looking at the bigger picture but even if the universe was finite, we can still have the psychological satisfaction of being a part or being one will everything. How does what what you say below allow us any more freedom than a finite universe.
Infinitely dense energy never bangs or rebounds or does anything but keep on accepting more density if more energy comes along.
The Big Bang, if it comes from compression, would bang precisely because there cannot be infinite density.
Quoting DanielP
'Boundless' is better to say, for an infinite extent cannot be extant; it cannot be capped and thus it can't have any being as 'infinite'.
Whens
Life’s a web, of whos, whys, whats, and hows,
Stretched as time between eternal boughs.
Gossamer threads bear the beads that glisten,
Each moment a sequence of instant nows.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/360596
That is to say, everything that is must logically repeat itself in time and in space - go forward or back in time far enough and there will be an identical copy of you, the earth, this whole galaxy. Likewise go left or right far enough in space and you will find similar identical copies. In fact an infinite number of copies in both cases. This is one of the reasons why I personally do not believe in actual infinity or an infinite universe.
I agree with you. I'd call this the speculative truth. For practical reasons, we often have to understand ourselves as a meat-box of thoughts and feelings, navigating a world that is not us. I like your web metaphor. All individual things get their meaning from their relationships to other things. To understand a cat is to understand mice is to understand cheese is to understand cows. 'No finite thing has genuine existence.' We rip out a 'thing' from the web. We yank out (ab-stract) an entity with a focus that ignores its essential interdependence with respect to all other things.
Anyway, there's a clever version of this presented in I Heart Huckabbees.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kB_mOfvDPU
That seems like a true assessment. Why do you find it unattractive that there might be somebody far away that is just like you?
I agree with you. If the world is unbounded, then why do you think humans focus on boundaries? I wonder if there is a fear of the infinite. For instance, in physics, they say something has gone wrong when infinities are shown, such as in the infinite gravity of black holes, or some people say in the infinitely small point of the Big Bang.
Good video, looks like an interesting movie.
What do you mean that an infinite extent cannot be extant?
Thanks for the response. I don't fully understand the physics of the Big Bang, but you seem to think it was not an infinitely small point of infinite energy? What do you think it was?
'Infinity' is a sign of a formula breaking down, such as Einstein's; however, he is saved because particles are not points but have extension, this being like the 'quantum' in quantum mechanics; thus there can be no infinite density, no singularity,, plus 'infinite' is impossible, as it is not an amount, nor can it be reached, this getting more to the heart of the definition of 'infinite', which is more that it never ends…
For practical reasons. We abstract from the totality because it's instrumentally valuable. When I just need a chair for a guest, I don't need to understand how that particular chair came about within the entire history of the world, even if this is a better approximation of the total chair.
Quoting DanielP
This is because the mathematical model breaks down. The connection between pure math and nature is complicated. Popularizations can only gloss over technical complexities.
Looking at your replies I guess it may be worth pointing out that the ‘boundaries’ you talk of are necessary for recognition of any state of being. If there are no ‘boundaries’ then there is no consciousness as we’d be unable to differentiate, communicate or do anything much at all - if anything.
Think about how you’d possibly answer any question put to you without any appreciation for boundaries. A simple question like, “Are you cold?” Would never be heard by you because you couldn’t distinguish between hot and cold, nor could you ever hear the words uttered because you’d be unable to distinguish between statements and questions - not to mention silence and sound. In effect you wouldn’t have any sense of existence and little more than a vegetable.
Maybe you’re looking for some other kind of response here? If so set it out more clearly please.
I think I know where he's coming from. When I first read Kojeve on Hegel, I was filled with intellectual ecstasy. I understand him to be sharing a beautiful realization.
Quoting DanielP
Perhaps this is what Freud meant by the 'oceanic feeling.'
[quote=Wiki]
In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase "oceanic feeling" to refer to "a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling of "being one with the external world as a whole," inspired by the example of Ramakrishna.[1][2] According to Rolland, this feeling is the source of all the religious energy that permeates in various religious systems, and one may justifiably call oneself religious on the basis of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one renounces every belief and every illusion.[3] Freud discusses the feeling in his Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). There he deems it a fragmentary vestige of a kind of consciousness possessed by an infant who has not yet differentiated himself or herself from other people and things.[4]
[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_feeling
Nietzsche analyzes Christ in a similar way.
[quote=Nietzsche]
What the “glad tidings” tell us is simply that there are no more contradictions; the kingdom of heaven belongs to children; the faith that is voiced here is no more an embattled faith—it is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is a sort of recrudescent childishness of the spirit.... A faith of this sort is not furious, it does not de nounce, it does not defend itself: it does not come with “the sword”—it does not realize how it will one day set man against man. It does not manifest itself either by miracles, or by rewards and promises, or by “scriptures”: it is itself, first and last, its own miracle, its own reward, its own promise, its own “kingdom of God.” This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma.
[/quote]
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322-h/19322-h.htm
The OP isn't so radical as to 'guard itself against formulae.' But this ecstastic idea of all-is-one does [s]break down[/s] dissolve all merely apparent (for it) conflict and separation.
I think this connects to one's conception of philosophy. Should it be poetic and/or 'spiritual'? Personally I think that it must be. We care about these things. And if we want philosophy to be quasi-scientific, then even that is a manifestation of our passion for objectivity, scientificity, practicality.
Hegel is one of my favorites, and he conceived of philosophy as doing conceptually what religion did imaginatively. I think there is truth in that. Feuerbach made it clearer, I think.
[quote=link]
That Feuerbach, unlike Strauss, never accepted Hegel’s characterization of Christianity as the consummate religion is clear from the contents of a letter he sent to Hegel along with his dissertation in 1828.[7] In this letter he identified the historical task remaining in the wake of Hegel’s philosophical achievement to be the establishment of the “sole sovereignty of reason” in a “kingdom of the Idea” that would inaugurate a new spiritual dispensation. Foreshadowing arguments put forward in his first book, Feuerbach went on in this letter to emphasize the need for
the I, the self in general, which especially since the beginning of the Christian era, has ruled the world and has thought of itself as the only spirit that exists at all [to be] cast down from its royal throne. (GW v. 17, Briefwechsel I (1817–1839), 103–08)
This, he proposed, would require prevailing ways of thinking about time, death, this world and the beyond, individuality, personhood and God to be radically transformed within and beyond the walls of academia.
Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways of thinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where he presented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy against those critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certain limits beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculative philosophers of having transgressed these. This criticism, he argued, presupposes a conception of reason is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18).
In the introduction to Thoughts Feuerbach assumes the role of diagnostician of a spiritual malady by which he claims that modern moral subjects are afflicted. This malady, to which he does not give a name, but which he might have called either individualism or egoism, he takes to be the defining feature of the modern age insofar as this age conceives of “the single human individual for himself in his individuality […] as divine and infinite” (GTU 189/10). The principal symptom of this malady is the loss of “the perception [Anschauung] of the true totality, of oneness and life in one unity” (GTU 264/66).
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/
Some might find this too squishy. My view is that certain philosophical problems are the result of taking the isolated ego as an unquestioned starting point. In an obsession with personal certainty, one neglects the being of the 'I,' which is mostly a we. For me it's not about hidden spiritual machinery but the naked-yet-taken-for-granted fact (however slippery) of being in a language together. I think it's hard to overstate how historical and social human existence is.
Quoting DanielP
Quoting softwhere
A map is bounded. A territory - e.g. Earth's surface - is unbounded. Maps of an unbounded territory are mere drops in the oceanic. ( beat me to it :up: )
My point is, what is there is discuss here? I’ll await the OP’s assessment and allow you to cool yourself in the shade of my boughs (pretentious as I am ;))
I relate, if I understand you correctly. I love phenomenology. I fear that some will categorize it as mysticism, while the mystical-religious types might object that it still an 'atheism' that wants to be scientific in a high philosophical sense.
I believe you like Husserl. So do I. I recently read his Crisis and thought it was great. He's now on my list of favorites.
Thanks for the thumbs up. I like your way of putting it.
I have certainly come across many who are far too willing to dismiss Husserl. I cannot blame them tbh as on the surface it looks quite dubious. It does require a certain fortitude to understand he is talking about self-made boundaries and limits, about the grounding of Logic, whilst being someone who sings the praise of ‘sciences’.
I don’t think I could honestly say I ‘like’ any philosophers/philosophies. Some I find more interesting than others, but all-in-all I have more respect for those that do their best to articulate their findings and thoughts, so ‘philosophers’ rarely fall into that category tbh. There’s a glimpse in Husserl, but I’d hardly say he does much better or worse than any other.
Out of them all, to date, Kant has impressed me the most. Still relevant to this day even though many wish to package him as some ‘religious’ figure every now and then.
Today I’d call most philosophers either embittered individuals attempting to smuggle ideologies through under the guise of ‘philosophy’, or scholars of previous philosophers (the later I can respect if they temper their bias as much as impose their own will).
Dead philosophers are also much easier to assess than living. The living do too much ‘talking’ and not enough ‘saying’. I think it is plain enough to see from entires on philosophy forums that a large contingent ‘attracted’ to this area of interest are generally trying to create a cult from themselves. Baby steps ... I prefer godhood ;)
But it's still good! It's like Husserl blended with Hegel and Heidegger.
Quoting I like sushi
It's strange though that even a PhD in math is still suspicious when he gets philosophical. But I get it. I work in math, and lots of mathematicians are even anti-philosophical. But this leaves math and what it means hanging in the air. I suggest that the mystique of science (as opposed to squishy philosophy) primarily manifests our love of technology. 'If it ain't gear, it ain't here.'
Quoting I like sushi
I'm surprised you don't like more philosophers. I can understand frustrations with bad style, needless jargon, etc.
Quoting I like sushi
Is it smuggling though? I consider it the explicit projection of an ideology. I do think we are all biased and not as rational as we claim to be or would like to be. But that's why I like to think of an evolving conversation. I loved Lee Braver's A Thing of This World for organizing the tradition of anti-realism for presentation for an analytic-leaning audience. And this is why I love Hegel. He made this accumulative-dialectical-historical evolution of philosophy explicit.
Quoting I like sushi
I agree that philosophy types tend to be cult-leader types. I also prefer godhood. For me there's this complex idea that one becomes godlike by assimilating the genius of others. So the arrogant goal requires (strangely) a deep humility. This theme of vanity seems central to me. For me one of the marks of the wrong kind of arrogance (those mere baby steps) is not acknowledging how many of one's best ideas were stolen, inherited. The short-lived human being is nothing without the language he learned to speak and the conversations he's been a part of (often passively, as a reader.)
The cult-leader always has 'golden tablets,' freshly delivered by an angel --instant omniscience, just add [s]water[/s] a small donation.
I’ve not read much of Hegel yet. Started POS, but then my interested turned elsewhere. Heidegger ... I’ve not the time nor inclination to voice my full dislike, but I still found use in B&T. I’m still working through Logical Investigations, but I wax and wane between subject areas quite a lot. Just starting to feel the ‘philosophical funk’ awaken again.
Quoting softwhere
Maybe I wasn’t clear. I don’t ‘like’ any. I do admire Nietzsche for being a ‘non-philosopher’ and brutally honest, and Husserl for hesitating to call what he was doing ‘philosophy’. The rest, just the odd good scholar in between the Ancient peoples of the world, Descartes and Kant as far as I can see (which isn’t all that far).
Philosophers are just living black boxes. Once you pull them from the wreckage of humanity and look at what they regurgitate at you it’s often nothing much other than a bland drone of altitudes and bearings - with some caught in turbulence mistaking their view as ‘original’.
Yeah, I can wax lyrical too, so what? That is still my point. What use is a nebulous statement for a meaningful discussion? May as well consult a random recipe braindead-ironic-neuroatheist style (referring to the dead-eyed intellectually empty mouth farts from a guy whose name thankfully evades me - even if he does make some sense some of the time).
I got into Hegel via Kojeve, translated by Allan Bloom. I thought the English prose was great, and it was Hegel from an atheistic point of view, influenced by Heidegger and Marx. I'll always love this book for blowing my mind. I haven't read every page of POS. I've learned quite a bit from secondary sources. And then the lectures he taught from are surprisingly clear. His theory of art is great, and there's a great Hegel In His Own Words biography that really impressed me. He could give rousing speeches, so clear, and yet write some very difficult prose.
Quoting I like sushi
I like Division I, the basic examination of being-in-the-world. The death stuff is somewhat fascinating but suspect. I also like Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity. And then Braver's work on the later Heidegger rescues it for me from some highly suspect prose. I do think that we're dominated perhaps by the spirit of technology. Though I don't see any easy path forward.
Quoting I like sushi
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I've read Nietzsche pretty closely. He's such a glorious mess that figuring out what to make of him is like figuring out who one is in one's 20s (when I was especially taken by him.)
Husserl is fairly new to me. Derrida got me interested. Like many I've tried to cheat and work backwards. Rorty got me interested in Heidegger, Kojeve in Hegel, etc. You didn't mention Hume. No love for Hume?
Quoting I like sushi
I think there's truth in what you say. But to me that's the human condition. Philosophers are like articulate especially maniacal types. What stand shall we take on our existence? What shall we spend our time talking about? I also love fiction, music, etc. But philosophy scratches the itch to make one's orientation explicit. A kind of suspect 'non-fiction' that is also 'obviously' just heroic roleplay. We carve little identities out of words. Politics looks to me like applied philosophy, including apolitical passivity and cynicism (which I preferred for most of my life and is still defensible, really.)
But all cynicism aside, I really love good conversation. The futility or absurdity of philosophy is more interesting topic for the philosopher.
Quoting I like sushi
I like 'mouth farts.' Zizek? Peterson? As Kant saw (not that I'm a Kant expert, but I like him), we just can't resist metaphysics. We are metaphorical-metaphysical-mythological animals. Bleed us of our dreams and there's nothing left. But Kardashians selling lipstick and becoming billionaires via social media fame. I've been studying Guy Debord lately, known for The Society of The Spectacle.
https://vimeo.com/60328678
I think philosophy often has a kind of negative glamour, like the sexy gloom of an existentialist. Sartre wrote somewhere that he wanted fame to get women. I won't accuse all philosophers of this, but perhaps there is a sexual display in the trans-scientific attitudes of various philosophers. The game is to project access to some difficult but valuable object. All one has to do is understand the magic words. At the same time, I think the 'magic words' often work, that one feels relatively illuminated. If all of this is illusion, then this too seems like a philosophical view, one that sides with power via technology.
It's complex, and I have mouth-farted too much already.
I am both positive and negative about Zizek and Peterson for completely different reasons. Sam Harris I’d rank below both of them - quite far below them.
We’ll have to at it over Heidegger sometime. I’ve yet to find someone who can show me what ‘Dasein’ means in Heidegger’s own words - I’ve been told it helps to read his previous works, but honestly I’ve better things to do (a few selective quotes from previous works would be nice regarding ‘dasein’ if you can manage it? No else has been able to present anything to date to entice me).
:up:
Quoting softwhere
Alliterationcy's :cool:
I find the notion that there are an actually infinite number of identical me/planet earth/this galaxy in time and/or space to be absurd, so I tend to regard the argument I gave as Reductio ad absurdum.
Spacetime began with the BB 14 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since at a finite rate - so spacetime is logically finite.
If you could sit in an armchair and watch the BB unfold, what would you observe? Well GR says that time is observed to run slower in a gravitational field and we have experimental evidence that supports the theoretical claim, so:
1. One billion years after the BB, matter density is not so high, so time is observed to run relatively quickly.
2. One million years after the BB, matter density is higher so time is observed to run slower
3. One second after the BB, matter density is very high, so time seems to be almost at a standstill
4. At the moment of the BB, no-one knows what happens to time, but you can see the pattern.
Well I can try to explain what I find valuable. But I don't read German. For me studying Heidegger further illuminated Hegel and Feuerbach and Wittgenstein. Then Culler's book on Saussure fits in too. I just read that one and it further illuminate Derrida (the 'perfected Heidegger' some have said.)
Quoting I like sushi
Heidegger is already using 'Dasein' in Ontology, which I have on hand, but doesn't offer a definition, probably because it's a common German word, which he is further specifying through context and what he does with it. To escape bias, I'll just use a German-English dictionary.
https://www.dict.cc/german-english/Dasein.html
It means 'to be there' or 'to be around.' I think that Heidegger was just trying to get around an encrusted tradition and talk about the 'subject' or the 'rational animal' with fresh eyes.
I'm sure you've seen this in B&T, but it's at least Heidegger being explicit.
[quote=Heidegger / Stambough translation, top of page 7]
This being, which we ourselves in each case are and which includes inquiry among the possibilities of its being, we formulate terminologically as Dasein.
[/quote]
Since the who of everyday Dasein is 'one' rather than 'I,' I think it was a good move. To me the philosophical prejudice that we are isolated subjects in a mind-box was a primary target of the analytic.
The 'beetle in a box' point made by Wittgenstein seems to get at the same kind of thing. What we are tempted to take as a hidden interior is primarily exterior. Pinkard's book on Hegel's POS (The Sociality of Reason) presents Hegel in something like today's terminology, and seems related. I chose the name 'softwhere' for this primary object of fascination for me, the way we exist culturally, more we than I[, largely in language but also through music, etc.
Quoting I like sushi
Ah, I see. I'm am very much with you on 'the force of narrative.' I think we humans qua human exist on that level, on the level of the ideality of the literary object, some of which are the instrumental (non-)fictions of science. The scientific image is grounded in the manifest image and yet aims at the ground of the manifest image.
This is certainly quasi-philosophy, science, religion stuff. I've always been interested in the biggest picture possible. And when I propose an infinite world, i mean its infinite in respects to all potential ways to characterize it - quantity of matter, variety of matter, time, dimensions, etc. I think that yes, it may seem there are boundaries between things, and yes these boundaries may seem important in making sense of things. But I think those boundaries are temporary and ultimately fade away in a sense over time. Think about any animal making boundaries of its territory - it's temporary. The map of the boundaries of human civilizations has changed so much that it is unrecognizable over a thousand year time span.
Why does it matter? Because if we think finite, then our perspective is finite. We pigeonhole ourselves and others in these closed off finite positions - for example politics where we assume the other political side believe only in xyz, and we believe in abc, so there's so compromise. In science, if we think finite, we stop asking questions and just assume we have reached as far back as we go with the Big Bang. Those physicists pushing the envelope and peering into infinity to develop theories for what caused the Big Bang truly have a large perspective. If we think finite, well I guess we'll stop digging smaller in quantum world. I suppose the quark and those other subatomic particles are really the smallest building blocks of matter. After all, if the world is finite, there is a theoretical fundamental particle building block beyond which we cannot go smaller. If we think finite, we see only 3 or possibly 4 moves with our careers. If we think infinite, we are aware of those 3 or 4 moves and are open to the infinity of possibilities that could happen to our career.
:cool:
For those not familiar with this line of thought: Hartle-Hawking No Boundary conjecture. (Maybe no "big bang" at all, just a white hole-like Q-tunneling from a higher (false?) vacuum ... analogous to a twist that transforms a [plane] into a Möbius loop?)
If I were I’d go out right now and buy a copy of Piaget’s ‘The Language and Thought of a Child’, or any number of works on child development. Even though it is old stuff it’s still relevant today and will open up a whole host of questions related to your life experience watching our children grow up.
Quoting DanielP
We’ve become more acquainted with concepts of ‘infinite’ lately because we’re finite not in spite of our finitude. In exploring the universe we’ve moved from an infinite self in a finite world to a finite self in an infinite world. This is something Eliade does a superb job of digging into in “The Sacred and The Profane”.
I like to look at sedentary living playing a huge role in the paradigm shift from a more nomadic lifestyle - even though ‘mobile’ homes would bring the element that interests me into play. The idea is that nature is vast, boundless and limitless, and in creating a homestead and ‘shutting out’ nature to some degree we took on the role of a pretend ‘god’. We were able to dictate every corner of our abode to suit our will and creativity where in nature we were ‘ruled over’. The irony is by ‘shutting out’ we necessarily shut ourselves in too - this is the shift in our regard for the world as ‘finite’ or ‘infinite’. Also, we are in the habit of thinking about ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ in terms of magnitudes of space and time. Again, this wasn’t/isn’t an issue for tribal life because they didn’t house time in clocks or space in buildings - their world s a lost world of the ‘infinite’ in the sense of being experienced without demarcations of time or space in anything like our modern comprehension.
As the other person pointed out above - in reference - the Humean worldview has more relation to this more ‘raw’ experience of our world. We’re not empty receptacles of information - no tabla rasa - we impose ourselves on the world and project our view outward, perhaps more than we are under the ‘rule’ of what is extraneous to our ‘felt’ bodily limits.
You do sound like you’d be more interested in ideas regarding panpsychism - that’s not really for me as I find the terms used more obtuse and misleading than even Derrida or Heidegger!
The problem is how this fits in with everything else he says in terms of ‘Dasein’. It’s contrary and I suspect he was quite purposeful in how he was trying to hoodwink the reader. Huge lumps of text he wrote in B&T were frustratingly pointless. I don’t trust writers if they lead you on a merry dance to say something that could’ve been summed up in a couple of paragraphs. That said, it is forgivable on occasion, but when 80% of the entire text needn’t be there I’m not impressed.
Derrida is an even worse culprit, but at least he pretty much admitted what he was doing so I can forgive that - Heidegger was merely playing at rewriting Husserl’s ideas (likely because he assumed Husserl’s work would be buried and forgotten). Derrida is far more interesting, but far more post-modern. I have a feeling he could’ve done better trying to be explicit rather than playing with words to show how words can be played with.
There is ‘language’ beyond mere ‘worded language’. It is frankly foolish to ignore this. That is not at all to say that ‘worded language’ is hugely important - or how else would we be communicating now!
That's what I love about philosophy. It goes for the biggest picture and also the deepest picture.
Quoting DanielP
Quoting DanielP
I agree, and some of my favorite philosophers are focused on time, on the way our 'maps' or human structuring of the 'territory' evolved and evolve historically, basically like a long human conversation. Our individual bodies die, but our stored knowledge and accumulated transformation of the earth means that each generation inherits what all preceding generations left behind (well, what wasn't destroyed or lost.) To me this indicates increasing complexity in the conversation, which is ecstatic if we can bear it. And if we can find the time and will to assimilate it.
This Hegel quote talks about what I meant by 'deepest' picture possible.
[quote=Hegel]
What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm
To me philosophy at its best is the opposite of merely going along on the surface of things, which is our ordinary mode in daily life. Of course we have bills to pay, but for me one of the reasons to keep those bills paid, etc., is to be able to live & think philosophy.
:clap:
Quoting softwhere
:up:
I've had a love-hate relationship with Heidegger for years. I'd write him off and yet be pulled back.
For me a decisive moment was reading translators of Heidegger whose English I liked: Theodore Kisiel, John Van Buren, and William McNeill.
William McNeill translated the short lecture version of The Concept of Time. As you may know, this is sometimes called the 'ur-B&T.' In 22 pages the basic ideas are laid out, in a prose that verges on poetry. Then Kisiel wrote The Genesis of Being and Time, tracing its development through Heidegger's earlier lecture courses and quoting letters, also translating History of the Concept of Time, which is close in content to B&T (as you may well know already.) Van Buren translated Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity. This is nice because it's short, of similar intensity throughout, and shows Heidegger's terminology still in development -- but still working on the same themes.
Quoting I like sushi
I still haven't read all of B&T. I was also disgusted by those chunks. I may never decode some of them. But then the chapters that do make sense to me are IMO as good as it gets in philosophy. Even if I can find only 300 pages of Heidegger that I'd be brave enough to paraphrase, those 300 pages are golden. The longwindedness of B&T may be related to him being forced to squirt something out to get a job. The earlier parts seem 'mastered' and to have come naturally. Maybe the rest was more of an improvisation, a work-in-progress.
Quoting I like sushi
Derrida can indeed be a pain, but Limited Inc is a work that stands out to me for its clarity. What first got me truly interested in Derrida was his treatment of Saussure as presented by Bennington in Derrida. Recently I discovered Jonathan Culler, a refreshingly focused writer. Not only did he write a great book on Saussure, he also wrote on Limited Inc.
http://www.colby.edu/music/nuss/mu254/articles/Culler.pdf
I love Derrida for the concept of iterablity and all that it implies. Not only that, but that was my path in. He is sometimes too indulgently artsy for my taste. But I tolerate it. Reading his biography lately (by Peeters) was illuminating. He gave Sartre hell, but I think he connects to some key passages in Nausea. I see him as truly fascinating by the wonder and depth of what it means to write and read.
Quoting I like sushi
It's my understanding that Husserl didn't approve of Heidegger's work, and not because it was theft. Indeed, in the introduction to Crisis, the translator David Carr stresses that addressing historicity was a deviation from Husserl's past work (which I have only experienced through secondary sources.)
[quote= Carr, page xxxv]
The question of historical genesis is explicitly banned from phenomenology per se in Husserl's writings up through the Cartesian Meditations. Yet in the Crisis it suddenly makes its appearance as something the author obviously thinks is important.
[/quote]
Quoting I like sushi
Could you elaborate on this?
Yes. That’s kinda the problem.
Even a rough sketch might help me locate what you're getting at. I do think that there's no clean separation of word from deed. Much of our language use is as automatic as animal noises.
‘Worded language’ isn’t a necessity of being a human. The case of The Man with no Language’ made that clear enough. I call it ‘kinesthetic language’ but that’s just to distinguish from the common use of the term ‘language’.
I found this.
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/03/books/all-language-was-foreign.html
Fascinating! Thanks.
[quote=article]
A human being without language would seem to be a 19th-century phenomenon; at least that's what people tried to tell Susan Schaller. But one day in the late 1970's Ms. Schaller, while working as a sign-language interpreter in Los Angeles, encountered a 27-year-old deaf Mexican man who seemed bright and curious but who, as she quickly discovered, had no language whatsoever. No sign language, no written or spoken Spanish or English. The man, whom the author calls Ildefonso (a pseudonym), was an illegal alien who had worked at a variety of jobs all over the United States but had somehow managed to get by without knowing how to add or subtract or even how to tell time.
Ms. Schaller, fascinated, was determined to make linguistic contact with him. She succeeded; the man suddenly connected "cat" -- the picture, the sign and the written word. And he was hungry for more. For her, Ildefonso's breakthrough was every bit as exciting as Helen Keller's discovery of water at the well.
In essence Ms. Schaller's book, "A Man Without Words," is a meditation on the wonders of language. Without language, there is no way to understand the passage of time. Ildefonso had no idea what a birthday was. In order to get to work on time he memorized how the face of the clock looked. Ms. Schaller began to realize how crucial language is in the organization of our inner selves, how it influences our perceptions about the world. To teach adjectives, the author began with colors. When she hit the color green Ildefonso was horrified. Eventually Ms. Schaller realized that, for Ildefonso, green represented the immigration officials who frequently captured him -- the color of their trucks and uniforms, even the green card he didn't have. Without language, the color came to symbolize all that was frightening. Without some language system, some explanation, history and geography cannot be comprehended unless one has lived every moment in time and traveled every foot of ground. There isn't even a way to illuminate the concepts of deafness and hearing.
Seven years later, Ms. Schaller tried to re-establish contact with her student. Convinced his was not a unique case, she searched for others like him as well. She discovered that several teachers had worked with deaf people who had no language, many of whom were from different cultures or who had astonishingly protective parents. She also pored over studies of so-called wild children, consulted treatises on language such as "The Man With the Shattered World" by A. R. Luria, and talked to the physician and writer Oliver Sacks, who urged her to continue her pursuit, and who ultimately wrote the foreword to this book.
When Ms. Schaller finally finds Ildefonso, he is working as a gardener for a hospital in Los Angeles and the proud holder of a green card. His gardens are characterized by order and symmetry. He is an eager student, and his signing has advanced by light years. He tells the author he now tries to find people to interpret the evening news for him. And he has developed a philosophical bent from all those years of observing: "There is enough in the world for everyone to have a little garden," Ildefonso tells Schaller. "Everyone could be content. But some people want gigantic houses and gigantic gardens, so they fight and steal and buy up all the land and others can't have anything."
Over dinner, Ildefonso tries to demonstrate how people without language communicate -- he has a younger brother, deaf, also without language. He wants to show the author what his life was like before the miracle of language, but he is incapable of regressing to his previous state. And so he takes her through back alleys to a tiny room where she discovers a virtual lost tribe: people who have no language.
No one has a name here; introductions are really descriptions. And each person has peculiar ideas about cause and effect in life. One has discovered that the number 1986 seems to satisfy authorities and believes that those shapes are endowed with magic. But as the people tell stories, it can only be done through mime, each movement an invention. One person might repeat a gesture but, as Ms. Schaller realizes, most communication is trial and error. She witnesses a testament to how slow and painful the evolution of language must have been.
I added to original post above.
Also, think about this alongside cases of feral children where they’re never able to obtain a full ‘worded language’. I’m pretty sure this is simply due to items in the human world being alien to them whereas for others, like the Mexican guy, they already live in the human world and can then at least come to appropriate social concepts and conventions with use concepts.
If he was deaf AND raised by wolves I doubt very much he’d ever have stood a chance of acquiring language so late in his life. The key element of language being ‘common experience’ and a ‘common social environment’, rather than ‘word symbols’ (be the auditory or visual).
Yes, this makes sense to me. At the same time, I think symbols are necessary for conceptual sophistication. I'm guessing that some primitive unformalized language of gesture would be hard to avoid.
Their perspective of the infinite seems to be clearer than simple modern infinite spacetime. It's interesting that Einstein himself thought spacetime was finite. But then again, his specialty was big stuff, not the weird quantum world.
Thanks for the suggestion on the book for kids.
Quoting softwhere
Were those guys all living about the same time in Germany? Similar philosophical bents?
Quoting I like sushi
Here's a thought. What about an infinite self in an infinite world? In fact, if one could divide a human body infinitely, essentially a human being a small infinity.
That's the enjoyment of philosophy, to take some basic assumptions, and then test them out. See where they play out, even if not conventional.
Philosophy asks questions like where did we come from, where are we going, what is our purpose within the cosmos? Even if someone is way out there, it is still interesting to discuss.
When did you get interested in philosophy?
What does that mean?
Well put. And, for what it's worth, I think that philosophy makes and has made progress. 'Know thyself' can be understood as directed at the 'global' subject, by which I mean humanity as the protagonist of history, and that history as a self-creation that is also humanity's self-consciousness. In time we come to know ourselves as time. But that's just one story, one conversation among all the possibilities you hint at.
Quoting DanielP
I guess I was about 16, which makes for 20+ years of studying it. A conversation that stretches over centuries comes slowly into focus, neither religion nor science but scratching both kinds of itches at once.
Hegel and Feuerbach came earlier. Feuerbach is largely remembered as the bridge between Hegel and Marx, but I think he's underrated. Wittgenstein and Heidegger were early 20th century greats. What connects all of them is their understanding of how social and historical we are as human beings. We aren't trapped in our heads like pieces of 'mind' mysteriously stapled to pieces of 'matter.' Or, at the very least, they show where this initially plausible framing of the situation goes wrong and is no longer illuminating but in fact conceals what makes that framing possible in the first place, what I playfully call 'softwhere.' (I've been reading John Gordon's book on Finnegans Wake. )
????? ???? (fiat lux) ... :fire:
I was looking into Pantheism when I found this forum. ie the concept that god is the universe, I am part of said universe and part of said god, and will be when I pop my clogs.
However I saw this thread and it interested me.
I think the initial post comes down to a question of what exactly space is, and how does it evolve.
Lets say that space is not infinite, but has no definable edge. A definable edge or infinity is a mathematical construct, which is not necessarily helpful. There is however a definable edge to the visible universe, and if we were to travel there, would likely see more galaxies not observable from our current location.
Space is virtual and made up of individual parts all momentarily connected to a certain extent, constantly coming into and out of existence, on the large scale as we observe space is expanding at an accelerating rate. This can be explained by various Ricci flow models.
Space and time emerge from a underlying membrane where neither space and time exist. This membrane connects all points/things in space time to a certain extent, see ER=EPR conjecture and emergent gravity and time theories. The membrane itself occupies zero space but connects everything to a certain extent, it allows only information flow. How does anyone feel about this :)
The unbounded universe can be visualized as being made up of an infinite number of smaller interconnected parts, due to the presence of a underlying membrane.
What we can say is the universe is constantly evolving.
Cosmic Cyclic Cosmology allows for multiple big bangs. Also inflation theory which has replaced the original big bang theory in cosmology now, does not have all the mass in the universe appearing from a singularity with infinite mass.
"And of course, the infinity of the other stuff that humans cannot perceive with our senses or instruments – that is one with All too."
Really, anyone got a warm feeling :)
"
What are the implications of this perspective? It means you are one with All, by being part of an infinite universe. There is no boundary or limit between you and everything around you. It also means with the lack of true innate boundaries in the universe, everything in it is constantly mixing, creating the balance we see in the universe. It also means you can free yourself from a finite perspective where you focus on finite things like job, house, family, etc. You can adopt an infinite perspective and weave these important things like job, house, family, into a free-flowing infinite web that is part of the infinite web of the universe. This also means that the finite labels we apply to things are approximations of an infinite reality. We can apply labels like tree, but a tree is infinite. We can know some things about trees, but not everything. We can say, “you are a man or a woman” and be correct, but still just be making an approximation. You are a vast collection of complex infinity in your own right.
"
Mostly agree :)
The seething quantum membrane from a which a Big Bang might have spontaneously emerged.
Quoting flummoxed
Feel pretty good about it, thanks for the post.
Quoting softwhere
Thanks for your perspective, softwhere. Sorry for late reply. Wife got a job, and kids are still young and suck up lots of attention.
I got another question for you all. Instead of focusing on the possible infinite nature of the world, what if the world is whole/complete and always moving towards wholeness, completion? And thus a fully whole world would have to contain everything up to infinity. And when we seek to be whole individually, we are doing something very natural and in the flow of the cosmos. Indeed if we have a worldview in which the world is whole, we are more easily able to be whole ourselves.
I'm gonna open up a new discussion on this "whole world, whole person." No need to reply to this post.