So this is what I don’t understand about your position regarding this matter. I said the following:
You appear to agree with this, yet, despite this clear difference in semantics between these two things, you say the same label should be used for both of them. Why? I say different labels should be used because it avoids confusion. It’s also appropriate given that two different semantics, should be prescribed two different labels in any given language. The language that calls two different things the same thing, could be improved.
Perhaps you should clarify what you mean by existence here. Everything is to do with Existence. Maths is a part of Existence. It is not a part of non-existence.
The only things that can never exist, are absurdities. If imaginary numbers are absurd, then yes, they can never exist. If they are not absurd, then it is not true that they can never exist. 1+1=2, or, Infinity, or, triangles, are features, aspects, traits, or parts of Existence. Married bachelors, or any other absurdities, are not.
I thought he argued that there is no set of all cardinalities. What’s Existence then? Clearly, all possible cardinalities, are contained in Existence. The set of all cardinalities (just like the set of all sets) is Existence.
I am saying all those things, yet, I don’t see how that amounts to me saying God is imaginary. What connects these two? What is it about me saying that God Is Existence that results in me saying that God is imaginary?
It may seem that way to you, but it does not seem that way to me.
I am not yet clear on what semantic you are referring to when you use the label infinities. Do you mean that which has no beginning and no end, or do you mean that which has a beginning but no end?
Can we continue our discussion back in the thread My Agreements With Ecmandu? Also, from experience I say we have, in the least, two sets of “eyes,” the set in our skull that perceives this dimension and the set in our soul that perceives other dimensions of different energies and their frequencies. Sounds bananas to the unfamiliar but does exist and the entire reason I am reading the complete works of Plato is to find his description of the soul and its placement in the human body with which I concur. Plato must have astral projected to know what he did.
You appear to have multiple flaws in your “proof” -
The existence of sets that contain themselves as a subset - cannot exist - leading to Cantor’s “paradox” that isn’t actually a paradox but merely a false premise (presumed by Russel).
Your inappropriate use of the words “infinite” and “infinity” leading to the opposite of your stated cause
Your claim that God = Existence
So let’s take them one at a time else we get nowhere in the cloud.
Cantor’s paradox -
If you label a set, “set A”, as ALL cardinalities and you label set B as a set that has A as a subset member, that constitutes another cardinality above all within A. And that means that set A was actually not “ALL cardinalities”. “ALL plus one” is absurd - a “square-circle”.
That was the first argument I mentioned in the Cantor thread. There can never be a set that contains itself as a subset member.
So do you understand that when you try to place the set of “ALL cardinalities” within a set as an individual member of that set, you have increased the set of “ALL cardinalities” by one? And of course that means that you didn’t really place “ALL cardinalities” as an individual subset member.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re referring to here. To my knowledge, Russell’s paradox wrongly concludes that there is no universal set (you and I appear to agree that there is a universal set). Russell rightly concludes the set of all sets is a member of itself (which you appear to disagree with, but I agree with. This is where we differ I think), because it is a set. But then gets carried away and wrongly says something like since there is no set of all sets that are not members of themselves, there can be no universal set (if I have understood Russell right). The rejection of a universal set is blatantly absurd. Nobody disputes this (unless they do not reason). Having said that, we cannot deny that only a set that is a member of itself can contain all sets (I can show this in a crystal clear manner upon request). There is only one set that contains itself or is a member of itself. The set of all sets. I’m not comfortable describing this containing of itself or this being a member of itself as it being a subset of itself. But it is clearly paradoxical to say that the set of all sets is not a member of itself. If this necessarily means that it is a subset of itself, then it must be accepted that it is a subset of itself.
Yes of course I agree that you cannot have all+1. I’ve been saying that A = B. I do not make a distinction between A and B, yet you suggest that this is what I’m doing. I keep saying the fallacy comes in making a distinction between A and B. If you look at my solution to Russell’s paradox, and what I’ve said about Infinity, I think you will see this. What you do that I don’t do is you jump to the following conclusion: A does not contain itself. WHY do you do this? What warrants this jump when making the jump clearly leads to paradoxes?
The set of all sets is a set. It is a member of itself. This equals A is in A. Or A is a member of A. Or A contains A. No paradoxes. Not in labels and not in semantics. If you think there is, show me where, but bear in mind the following:
It is wrong to say B (as you’ve defined it) is in A because you cannot have two sets of all sets (which you clearly recognise, as do all who use reason). You cannot have two universal sets. But the universal set itself, has to be a member of itself. The Infinite and the Infinitesimal are one and the same, just looked at from a different perspective/angle from our subjective beginning/starting points.
Consider the alternative…consider your alternative: The set of all sets is not a member of itself. This logically implies that there is no set of all sets for the following reason:
Take x to be the set that contains all sets. Does x contain itself? If x does not contain itself, then it does not contain all sets. If we have no set that contains all sets, then we have no universal set. We cannot rationally afford to have no universal set. Thus, x is the set of all sets. It is a member of itself. x is truly infinite as nothing can be a member of itself other than the truly infinite.
The logic is pretty simple. I am surprised you object. And it is the set containing itself that leads to the paradoxes (cleared up later by ZFC).
What I explained in the beginning of this was * that you either have a redundant declaration where you say that A contains itself and you mean that A has in it whatever A has in it. The only thing wrong with that is that it is tautological or redundant or just pointless to say.
The other option in saying that A contains itself meaning that an identical but separate instance of A is contained as a member within the boundary of the first mentioned A as a subset member. That is what leads to absurdities and why Cantor said there can be no set of all cardinalities.
So before we get too far into this, which of those are you meaning when you say that “a set can contain itself”? - the first - the redundant or the second - the absurd?
And that is why one cannot be inside the other as a member. There can’t be 2 of an identical set - one containing another of itself. If a superior set supposedly contains itself as a subset member then that member obviously was not the superior set. You either have the set and nothing else or you have the set with something different.
So here we have you saying that something cannot come from nothing, because that is a paradox, and me saying that something outside of spacetime cannot exist outside of spacetime, because that is a paradox.
“Something cannot come from nothing” relies on the premise that the two concepts are mutually exclusive absolutes. This complete lack of overlap provides no bridge between the two concepts, cementing the impossibility of one coming from the other, and the two concepts are intended to exhaustively cover all states so there is no “third way” to get around this.
Physics challenges this premise due to observations that seem to indicate that they’re more like different versions of the same thing - I seem to remember some words of Lawrence Krauss to the effect that the “net” of every “something” is “nothing”, and that “nothing” has a very precise definition in physics. I have a feeling this is also covered in that “Brief History of Time” book by Hawking. So if theoretical physics is correct to challenge the premise behind the “paradox” of “something from nothing” in such a way that they are not mutually exclusive absolutes, the paradox is resolved.
I would add that the “nothing” from the “something from nothing” argument is something of a “square circle” itself. The very proposition of this absolute nothingness that the argument relies on is a declaration of somethingess in itself. You can’t meaningfully deal with such a concept without envoking its supposed mutually exclusive opposite - and yet again we’re dealing with a term only insofar as we are actually dealing with terms that we can speak of without paradox/contradiction. We only mistakenly put them together under a term that we casually use all the time as though there weren’t an inherent problem with doing so. So the argument itself is invalid: there is only something.
This is where spacetime curvature comes in - because if there’s “only something”, you’re taking this to mean that it can’t have had a beginning, before which there was “not something” (i.e. nothing), thus it must have been infinite. And yet the evidence suggests that there was a beginning, so this ought to suggest that there is something else at play here. First of all I should query whether you understand what spacetime curvature means, since you don’t think it solves all of this. Do you understand what it means when physicists refer to a flat, hyperbolic or spherical universe? Obviously a spherical universe doesn’t mean it’s literally a 3D sphere, because that’s the whole model that people have an issue with. In this context, the sphere is higher dimensional, such that in 3D it appears just normally stretching out in all directions, but the further away you go the more spacetime itself is sorta “squished together” along this higher dimension. The result being that however far you went (along what you see in 3D as a straight line), you’d end up circling back on yourself in much the same way as you would if you travelled around the world - except in 3D you wouldn’t experience the curvature (just like a 2D person wouldn’t experience the curvature of travelling around a 3D globe). Hyperbolic curvature is the opposite - with everything flying apart such that you’d never return to where you started, but the scales of the universe are so huge that these effects barely figure at everyday human scales. A flat universe is just like a regular 3D universe - you can travel any amount of distance in 3D and you’d just be travelling in a regular straight line in higher dimensions too. But from general relativity we know that mass curves spacetime, such that you are curved inwardly towards the centre of mass, which is what gravity is - you go straight but your path ends up curving. The effects of this kind of “squishing” spacetime is literally time and space curving in on itself, and the higher the mass (e.g. at the big bang where all the matter and energy in the universe was condensed) the more the curvature of spacetime itself, such that all space and time was folded in on itself into a singularity. “Outside” of this spacetime is the paradox that I refer to, since “outside” is an expression of spacetime itself. There is no spacetime outside of spacetime, else it would be spacetime and therefore in spacetime. There’s not “nothing” outside of spacetime curvature on the huge scales of the singularity because again - there’s the paradox of declaring the existence of non-existence.
So that’s how physics has realised from observation that “something from nothing” isn’t a paradox, and the above explains how this is possible.
More to the point, your fourth approach of appealing to this non-paradox doesn’t help the initial problem of “God” necessarily having to have the one property of which humans cannot conceive, in order to qualify as God.
Perfection being all within human conception, however great it might be for your human conception of perfection to exist, doesn’t help either as it doesn’t need anything divinely beyond human conception.
Infinity doesn’t help because our human conception of infinity only extends as far as the finitudes that we use to attempt to construct a tendency towards it.
So with all 4 approaches debunked - do you think that trying more and more will undo the problems with all of the above?
You agree that absurdities cannot be accomodated by existence, and all of the above approaches contain them, and all your objections don’t. Do you think it’s possible that you might eventually come to accept this?
The interesting question that the above brings to light concerns what leads to paradoxes/contradictions: do our accepted definitions necessarily lead to paradoxes/contradictions or ought we to refine our definitions based on further evidence?
The intuition that “something cannot come from nothing” is informed by our everyday human-scale observations. But must we take these intuitions as indisputable and only ever reject all further evidence against them as insufficient, or do we update our old intuitions in light of new evidence where the human-scale intuitions are turned on their head. Do the old intuitions need replacing altogether, even?
Reading the last post above made me realize that I believe I originate from nothing AND something. And that most complex questions can be answered as “both”. The brain doesn’t want accept both, but there is an inkling somewhere in me that wants to settle on both, for now.
On top of that, I believe if I died and entered a nothing state, there is no real reason why I couldn’t emerge in something again.
You philosophers should be able to answer that question without any theoretical physicist posing his untenable theories.
The very definition of “nothing” already means that something can’t come from it else it wouldn’t be nothing. It would be the something that brought about something. QED.
It doesn’t matter what any theorist wants to propose or claim. The words speak for themselves. Either abandon logic (as theorists seem to do quite frequently) or just let them know that the very concepts of the words already state that something CANNOT come from nothing. That is above any observations from science. It is a simple fact of concept.
From what I have seen, all of that “evidence” (theorists making assumptions - not Science) has been debunked with science. I am not aware of any evidence remaining that indicates an origin of the universe. I also see what James was saying about the very idea of nothingness having ever been a state is logically impossible. Again, it doesn’t take science to work that out. Science doesn’t dictate logic. Logic dictates science.
I think all of that is just distraction blather making no real rational sense at all. But if you want to try to hold onto it as your bubble go right ahead. It will not be able to prove anything of any concern. Everything proposed in that kind of ontology can be shot down - to start with the idea that there can be a sphere of all existence yet maintain a spherical boundary excluding something (or even nothing) outside. What makes it a sphere if there is no inside and outside the sphere? Saying that it is viewed from a higher dimension doesn’t change the issue. Even in an imaginary higher dimension a 3D infinite universe is still going to be infinite - not spherical.
But there seems to be many other nonsense proposals in that same narrative or ontology.
I think it only explains that theoretical physicists need theoretical glasses to correct their logical vision.
Body can obviously exist without thought, we do it every night when we sleep, this is oblivion to us, and this is where all the healing occurs. I’m not talking about dreams here, I’m talking about the true void.
I’m saying A is in A. You’re saying this is either redundant, or contradictory, without accounting for the paradox I pointed out to you (how can A be the set of all sets if it is not a member of itself? Where is the universal set that we clearly cannot reject? Or should we settle for the paradoxical belief that there is no universal set?)
That A is not B is something we’re both clear on. The redundant part is what we need to discuss further. I find myself in a position where I have to have a universal set. I can only have a universal set if it contains itself. If you have another way, then please show this. So I conclude A is in A. Its non-redundantness is in the fact that it does not lead me to paradoxically conclude that there is no universal set. Is it paradoxical for me to say A is in A? No (if and only if A is infinite…I will show this with two examples). Is it redundant for me to say A is in A? Given what I’ve highlighted regarding the universal set, no. I will ask two questions and give two examples to better illustrate and defend my position.
Is it not the case in mathematics that the subset of any given infinite set, is in fact infinite?
Is it not the case that the set of all sets is itself a set?
Consider a room wherein which if you exit from its left, you enter it from its right and vice versa. If you exit from its ceiling, you re-enter it from its floor. From any direction that you exit this room, you re-enter it from its opposite side. Granted, you can never exit this room. Does this room contain itself? Is it not the case that the only reason you cannot exit this room is because the room fully contains itself?
I have three folders on my computer (1, 2, and 3) I try and make a folder on my computer that contains all folders on my computer. I call it A. I put all the folders into A. I then panic. A does not contain A. I have not accomplished what I set out to do. I ask my computer to somehow do this for me. My computer says it did it. I don’t believe it. I open A, I find folders 1, 2 and 3, and A. I then click A, and find the same thing again, and again, and again ad infinitum. Can I fault my computer for claiming that it has made me a folder that contains all folders on my computer? Surely not. Now assume I open A and just find 1, 2, and 3. Can I fault my computer? Of course I can. Where is A I ask it? What’s it gonna say? That the move would be redundant? Is this better or me finding A within A?
Can you tell me how you can have a universal set that is not a member of itself?
Can you tell me how you can non-paradoxically reject the existence of a universal set?
What other move is there to make other than to acknowledge that there is a universal set, and it is a member of itself?
When I use the word nothing, I mean nothing in the absolute sense. I don’t mean it in the sense that there is nothing in this room (which I semantically actually mean there is nothing but air in this room). If you are not using it in the absolute sense, then you are not saying something can come from nothing. You are not committing to a paradox. But that ‘thing’ that is not absolutely nothing that you refer to…(if this is what you are doing) it is still a thing, is it not? Surely you are not claiming absolute nothingness, 0 potential, 0 space, absolute nothingness, can yield…something. If it yielded something, then it was an it. It was something to be called an it. It was not nothing.
Nothing/non-existence carries as much meaning as a 20th sense or a round square. Except, a 20th sense is an unknown whereas a round square and non-existence are both absurdities. A 20th sense may not be absurd (we don’t know) but a round square and non-existence are both certainly absurd, precisely because they have never existed and can never exist. They are impossibilities just as you being in two different places at the same time, is an impossibility. They are things that are definitively not true of Existence.
Of course I can accept that there is evidence to suggest that our universe has a beginning. Empirical matters are open to interpretation. The interpretation that we make of them must be in line with pure reason and the semantics that we use. Otherwise, they would be entirely meaningless and nonsensical to us (like round squares). So if that’s what the evidence suggests, we accept a posteriori that the universe had a beginning. We cannot however accept that the universe came from absolutely nothing. Because that is paradoxical. That is not open to interpretation. The semantics of ‘nothing’ are clear. It is such that something cannot come from nothing. Just as it is such that something cannot be two different things at the same time.
It is not our definitions. We do not create semantics. We label them. That’s why we have different languages and why we can meaningfully communicate amongst ourselves and any other self-aware alien race (provided that we discover what labels they are using for what semantics). Semantics are the way they are because Existence is the way it is.
We do not come to understand matters of pure reason by way of experience. A triangle is not a three sided shape because we experience seeing triangles. A three sided shape is a triangle because that’s just the way Existence is. Something cannot be in two different places at the same time, because that’s just the way Existence is. These are matters of pure reason that the empirical fully adheres to and cannot touch. How can we possibly make sense of that which is semantically non-sensical? Dogma is indeed bad, but semantics are infallible. This is not a dogma. This is just the way semantics are. To believe triangles have three sides and refuse to budge from this is not a case of being dogmatic. It is a case of being rational and persisting with it. What’s the alternative? Irrationality? That we question semantics? I don’t mind questioning our labels for semantics, but how does one question semantics? Does one say a triangle is perhaps not three sided? Nothing is not actually nothing? One is not actually one? There is not actually there?
Do you acknowledge that there are things about both Infinity and Perfection that you objectively understand such that their rejection leads to contradicting the semantic of Infinity and Perfection? For example, do you acknowledge that x is not perfect if x is not Omnipotent? Or that x is not a perfect existence if there is even one instance of evil or imperfection occurring within it? Or that x is not infinite (if it has a beginning and an end). If so, then clearly you have some objective understanding/awareness of Perfection. Again, I do not deny that our understanding of Perfection will always be incomplete. But again, this does not amount to 0 understanding of God/Perfection. Not all of God/Perfection is beyond our understanding/comprehension.
