Spiral

Karma: −8

Spiral 31 Jan 2024 23:49 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Carl Feynman’s comment on: Literally Everything is Infinite
Love it hahah. Also glad to find out Discordian doesn’t mean “heard from someone on the Discord chat app”

Spiral 31 Jan 2024 23:48 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Literally Everything is Infinite
Nah, knock away. I partially posted it here to be critiqued. I want to know if it’s bull hahah.
Yeah, so I’m glad you brought up the Speed of Light as a boundary, because I think that’s a great point, especially considering practicalities. Though I do think that our current practical limits should not be used as evidence as to what actually exists in reality. Just because we can’t directly zoom in or out far enough to perceive the “entirety” of existence doesn’t mean that existence doesn’t.. exist.
We have always had limits on our perception. If we took that practical perception constraints as the hard limits on reality, then if we never invented the Hubble telescope, we would have to assume the non-existence of the majority of stars and galaxies we now know to exist, just because we finally have the tools to observe them.
As for the boundary of the speed of light itself.. I am sure this is not convincing, but if we are taking pure empiricism, how can we know it is an actual hard boundary until we reach it and experience what happens near the speed of light? We know that relative time slows down. While I don’t have enough info to make a judgement of what actually happens, I suspect that our concept of Speed is also a conceptual frame that is helpful in our own “local” cases, but breaks down as you reach that extreme (300,000 km/s). Just as Newtonian mechanics works at our level of “zoom”, but breaks down in both the quantum and very macro levels, the only pattern I’m seeing is that these hard laws are relative in a “local” sense.

Re: the phrasing—possibly “Everything is Boundless” would have worked better for what I am postulating?
Please correct me if I am misinterpreting Anti-realism, but a quick quote from Wikipedia: “Anti-realism in its most general sense can be understood as being in contrast to a generic realism, which holds that distinctive objects of a subject-matter exist and have properties independent of one’s beliefs and conceptual schemes.”
I suppose the issue I take with my interpretation of this is that I am definitely not suggesting that reality is an illusion. Though, yes you are correct, I am suggesting that the perception of objects being “hard-edged objects” is a conceptual frame, and not actually reality. While this framework provides us with excellent utility in most of our lives, it does lead to specific ways we relate to the world—especially in relation to the burden we place on ourselves as individuals and as a species to be the “only light in the universe.”
Perhaps in a Pragmatist sense, the main reason I think this Boundlessness framework is worth exploring is, besides wanting to know the truth, it pushes us to relate our existence in the universe in a very different (and I think ultimately positive) light.

Spiral 31 Jan 2024 23:25 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Ariel Kwiatkowski’s comment on: Literally Everything is Infinite
No, I don’t take this as mean. Criticism was a big part of why I wanted to run it by LessWrong :)

I agree that we are able to draw specific boundaries around “things,” e.g. chair, world, a single day, a single consciousness, a single life—and that they are very helpful conceptual tools, especially it is how we experience reality at our “zoom” level of perception. However when we zoom in to the micro, we have never found the exact edge of something—the point of where an object ends.
While I do think this boundary thinking is very rooted in the Aristotelean conceptual framework that lays out the foundation of much of the rest of our conceptual frameworks (especially in West), I’m sure that people and animals all over the world function with a very similar model, as it naturally provides a lot of utility. But the conceptual model we view the world with does affect how we can relate to it. Consider Thomas Kuhn’s Paradigm Shifts—everything seems obvious within the conceptual framework we have, and we consider things to be “obviously not true” if they don’t fit our current model. But that doesn’t mean that our current model truly fits reality.

You are correct that I may not have communicated this well. Or maybe that it simply isn’t true. It makes a lot of sense the more I think about it, however I will keep thinking about how to communicate it better and how it can be challenged. I am also very aware of the “anything goes with Eastern philosophy” stereotype, don’t worry, but the more time I spend with Daoism in particular, and have the ground assumptions of my Western upbringing challenged, the more it actually makes sense to my lived experience.

What is making sense to me, more and more, is to view the “hard edge” of a chair as a slow transformation from chair molecules and space into other molecules and space. But the same can be said for anything else.
I think if I was going to ask a key question, it would be “how do we actually know that there is a beginning and and end to space, or to time?” These boundaries are things that seem to be assumed, but we certainly haven’t found them. And based on the “pattern” of slow transformations over objects I mentioned above, it would seem to be the “pattern” suggests that boundlessness or infinity is actually the default state of things, and that boundaries are a conceptual invention.