Are you saying that the universe is finite but that there are infinite possibilities of occurance in it?
In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.
Many humans have tried to explain to us that we cannot understand concepts that are beyond us, concepts such as infinity (because we are finite systems), or for that matter unconditional love (because we are conditioned).
I beg to disagree; we are an intelligence that can self-metamorphose by its own and on its own. We are a kind of mind that can not only create the tech singularity because we will it, we can do much more than that, we can bring about our own transformation via our own mind singularity which can and maybe/probably will give us the capacity to break through the conceptual barrier we are now facing.
One reason it might be hard to accept infinity (per the argument above), is that we as humans have no direct way of experiencing it.
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.