folkertThu, Apr 26, 2007 Love the illustration! Much enjoyed your grain of sand examples, with which, I think, you've given me the arguments I need to state the opposite point, namely that everything is infinite.
Everything is potentially everything until it undergoes the formality of occurring. From that moment on, every other potential form or state that the grain of sand could have possibly had is cancelled out.
In the same way that physical matter is pretty much entirely made up of empty space with only a few instances of actual substance (the nucleus of an atom is comparable in scale to a fly in the middle of a sports stadium), I think that most of the cosmos is made up of infinity, with a few desolate islands of "novelty"—things that have undergone the formality of occurring.
So, I think that we (you, me, the world, the turtle with fifty-three heads) are finite moments of extreme novelty and complexity in an otherwise infinite sea of potentiality—things that have undergone the formality of actually occurring.
A finite entity, as opposed to infinity experiences boundaries and limitations (death, not being able to fly, trees, the body, mutation, etc.), I think that life is simply a set of constraints which is where you can see it contrasting with infinity. Potentially "everything" versus "something".
We are moments of extreme novelty in vast contrast to the infinite nature of reality.
Love the illustration! Much enjoyed your grain of sand examples, with which, I think, you've given me the arguments I need to state the opposite point, namely that everything is infinite.
Everything is potentially everything until it undergoes the formality of occurring. From that moment on, every other potential form or state that the grain of sand could have possibly had is cancelled out.
In the same way that physical matter is pretty much entirely made up of empty space with only a few instances of actual substance (the nucleus of an atom is comparable in scale to a fly in the middle of a sports stadium), I think that most of the cosmos is made up of infinity, with a few desolate islands of "novelty"—things that have undergone the formality of occurring.
So, I think that we (you, me, the world, the turtle with fifty-three heads) are finite moments of extreme novelty and complexity in an otherwise infinite sea of potentiality—things that have undergone the formality of actually occurring.
A finite entity, as opposed to infinity experiences boundaries and limitations (death, not being able to fly, trees, the body, mutation, etc.), I think that life is simply a set of constraints which is where you can see it contrasting with infinity. Potentially "everything" versus "something".
We are moments of extreme novelty in vast contrast to the infinite nature of reality.
Maybe.