(January 25, 2023 at 10:30 pm)Objectivist Wrote: Yes, everything about your wording implies that there is something outside of the total of existence. You said, "The total of what actually exists appears to be quite arbitrary if the total is basically this universe or a limited range of universes." You are implying that I just picked some things to include in the total and left other things out. I did not do this. I defined the universe as everything that exists seen as a whole. What did I leave out? What rational justification is there for saying something exists but is not part of the total of what exists? I'm very careful to define my terms objectively.
I can see how you would've perceived what I said from your end. So my sin was I didn't use "universe" in the same sense you did. Mea culpa.
Still, you should've known from the context what I was saying. Because as you can see in the quote above, I didn't treat "totality" as semantically identical to "universe". Note the "or a limited range of universes" as the other thing that a totality could be.
Now, what I did imply, or rather say, is that whatever the totality may be, it seems like you could potentially add more and more to the totality, so that the totality could be more "full" than it actually is. I'm aware that due to the constraints of your worldview, you will struggle to agree that the totality of existence could potentially be different, but nothing of what I actually said was logically problematic.
Quote:How have I ruled out those "arbitrary other existents"? By means of reason. By recognizing that all concepts are open-ended. They include a potentially infinite number of
units. The concept 'universe' which is synonymous with existence is the widest of all concepts. There is nothing left out of it. It includes all existents, their relationships, their identities, their actions, all their attributes...absolutely everything including things we aren't even aware of yet. If I said that the universe was all matter, energy, space, and time, then that would be arbitrary. That would be a reverse package deal and that would be a fallacy. Objectivism holds that they are objective. They are the form in which we identify and retain knowledge of facts. They carry our knowledge beyond the perceptual concretes of our surroundings to include the entirety of existence.
Even if you defined the universe in such a manner, the question I posed would still be meaningful to ask imo. Why? Because for you, the universe constitutes all actual things. But what about things that ended up not being actual but could've been? You may not want to agree that the question remains meaningful, and that's fine. You choose what questions you want to grapple with at the end of the day. I am only posing these questions here to you, in case you wish to have a crack at them.
