(January 25, 2023 at 7:11 pm)GrandizerII Wrote:Correct. The universe is an abstraction. It denotes the whole, which we are not aware of perceptually but we are aware of conceptually. We have two kinds of awareness. The senses bring us awareness of things within their range and for everything else there are concepts but they have to be reducible to percepts or they are just floating abstractions tied to nothing real. That's what gods are. That is what the supernatural is. They are floating, rationalistic, apriori ideas.(January 25, 2023 at 4:41 pm)Objectivist Wrote: By what means are you aware of these other universes and why are they not included in the total of what exists?
As said in my last reply, I have no awareness of other universes, so the question is moot.
As for why other universes are not included in the total of what exists, I have no idea. Just as I have no idea why this universe is included in the total of what exists. I take it you don't either, given what you told me before.
To get a better idea of where I'm coming from here, I am using reason (and intuition) to contemplate possible universes and ponder whether they actually exist or not. None of this is suggesting I am aware of any other universes, though.
You may not like how I go about this epistemically (not that I'm claiming knowledge here anyway), and may be averse to the wording I'm using, but this is how I approach this stuff as a non-Objectivist. I do not hold to the exact same premises you do.
With regards to my question about why you think actual infinity is impossible, since I didn't get an answer from you on this, I decided to google what other Objectivists had to say about this. And once again, from what seems to be the official Objectivist site, I stumbled upon this:
Quote:There is a use of [the concept] “infinity” which is valid, as Aristotle observed, and that is the mathematical use. It is valid only when used to indicate a potentiality, never an actuality. Take the number series as an example. You can say it is infinite in the sense that, no matter how many numbers you count, there is always another number. You can always keep on counting; there’s no end. In that sense it is infinite—as a potential. But notice that, actually, however many numbers you count, wherever you stop, you only reached that point, you only got so far. . . . That’s Aristotle’s point that the actual is always finite. Infinity exists only in the form of the ability of certain series to be extended indefinitely; but however much they are extended, in actual fact, wherever you stop it is finite.
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/infinity.html
As someone who's had multiple discussions with theists about the Kalam Cosmological Argument, I am very well aware of the distinction between potential infinity and actual infinity, so this kind of objection isn't new to me.
My response to this is that while you cannot get from potential infinity to actual infinity, there is nothing metaphysically impossible that I can know of that prevents an absolute infinity from being a reality. After all, by definition, an actual infinity is already infinite, so there is no problem of counting or traversing into infinity here.
The Universe is everything that exists. That's what the word means. Uni means one and versus means turning. The Latin universus means turning into one or whole. Now if you define the universe as only part of what exists then you need to say how you are aware of this other part or it's simply an arbitrary claim. If, in your view, the concept of 'universe' does not denote the totality, what does? See how the analytic-synthetic dichotomy poisons one's mind. If we define the universe as Just part of what exists, what justifies doing this. Nothing. I'll tell you why this is done. It's to make room for a god to exist and to try and escape from the law of identity and the primacy of existence but it doesn' work because it is a completely arbitrary definition, based on no objective inputs. It's just a game of manipulating words.
If you start counting existents.....1, 2, 3....however many you count it is always a specific quantity. Infinity is not a specific quantity, it's not a number. It does not exist in reality. I agree that it does have a use in mathematics to denote the potential to carry a number sequence on indefintely
We don't perceive the universe, we perceive existents. And since we know that we aren't perceiving all that exists then by the law of identiy we know that some specific quantity of existents exist but we will never know what specific quantity is. But we need a concept in order to denote the whole and that's what the concept 'universe' does. To say that there is another realm of existence outside the universe is a contradiction. If you are fine with holding a contradiction then there's no point in continuing the discussion because you have abandoned reason.
"Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads."
"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see."
"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see."