Actual Infinities

[Alex K]

My trouble is that I don't even want to state without caveat that the exchange of virtual paricles is something that exists in nature.

[houseofcantor]

My trouble is that I don't even want to state without caveat that the exchange of virtual paricles is something that exists in nature.

Intellectual integrity is a bitch, huh? Have you ever just wanted be a creationist? 

[I_am_not_mafia]

My trouble is that I don't even want to state without caveat that the exchange of virtual paricles is something that exists in nature.

Intellectual integrity is a bitch, huh? Have you ever just wanted be a creationist? 

Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

[Mudhammam]

Nestor, while I tentatively hold to moderate realism; however, I do think the term 'existence' is itself problematic. I find it to 'be' an almost inescapable term of art that molds itself to accommodate a variety of ideas. Or maybe an existential condition of life. I do believe that the Schoolmen made important and subtle distinctions between ideas, forms, concepts and abstractions that get glossed over in Philosophy 101. The professors tend to jump from Aristotle to Descartes as if nothing happened in between ancient and modern traditions.

(cont.) Lately, I’ve wondered (begin recent speculation here) if someone could dispense with ‘existence’ as a descriptive term altogether. For quite, some time I’ve taken to the occasional practice using E-prime (http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm). For example, instead of saying “It is cold outside” or “That’s a pretty sunset,” I would say “It feels cold outside” and “That sunset looks pretty.” I have found that using that semantic structure a speaker/writer must more precisely pair subjects with objects using mostly phenomenological language.
As it relates to the ontological status what those most modern people refer to as abstractions, I ask two questions: 1) Do the objects of knowledge have causal import apart from the knowing subject? And 2) Can different people independently know of the object of knowledge?  If so, then I say it qualifies as ‘existing’ in the traditional ‘objective’ sense of the term.

I didn't mean for this to develop into a rant but... one thought just led me to another and...

Existence certainly is a slippery word. There seems to be something circular in our distinguishing various, for lack of a better term, "levels" of reality; between our perception of particular objects and our understanding them in a universal way. We begin with a lush experience of internal and external impressions: sights, sounds, feelings, etc. Our brain develops patterns through which we begin to recognize similarities and differences in objects, from whence we classify the world by genera and species, i.e. animal, man, Socrates. From here we discover that there appear to be certain regularities in the world and rules which govern thought, and that by rigidly applying the latter in conjunction with a methodical study of nature, we can begin to unveil her secrets (and for each solution we attain a new set of problems emerge). As we collectively press further into the depths of our experiences, a conception of reality emerges in which the objects of sense are akin to something like a bubbling soup of particles jostling this way and that on account of interacting "forces"; these being essentially no different than those from which these very ideas and perceptions arise in the brain. And yet an actual bubbling soup - say a bowl of chicken noodle - consisting of a pleasant taste and smell, possessing a texture, emanating heat, perhaps invoking a memory, etc., appears nothing like the conception of those atomized bits of concreta derived from the sciences. We have our conceptions of the world, arrived at through the narrow prism of our everyday senses, on the one hand, and those which deliver us to an understanding of the complex, mechanistic, inner workings of those objects of sense. And all of this must depend on relations which we can only take for granted: those contained within our ideas - of, for example, a necessary connection between cause and effect; a continuous stream, rather than discrete jumps, of instants or units in time which are perpetually, and paradoxically, in the process of becoming as they vanish, raising a further problem in that the past or the future are rendered no more "real" than any of our other thoughts...  the present "now" passes into non-existence the moment it arrives from a non-existent future. So, what can possibly be said to exist without condition? Or does all existence as we are entitled to participate in it involve some relation to another, some framework that must ultimately depend on arbitrary definition? It seems to me that every difficult question in philosophy boils down to an interaction problem, real or perceived: being-non-being, body-mind, eternity-time, infinitude-finitude, etc. And for me, here's the rub: we process everything through these patterns in the brain, and yet nothing "out there", as far as know, exists as it does in thought - which is to say, there are no concrete universals - there are no two objects exactly alike in every respect, but only particulars, and yet our knowledge consists in abstracting from our particular impressions universal ideas to conceptualize the world, to render it intelligible, to enliven it with meaning. And this somehow is supposed to reflect an objective, external reality. So... now what?

[Angrboda]

Uh oh. You've spilled the beans now. Chad will be along shortly to chastise you for your nominalism. Just you wait.

[Neo-Scholastic]

I found it rather poetic actually. I would add to the dichotomy between discovered and invented. There may not be any concrete universals but there may be discoverable universal objects of knowledge apart from invented mental artifacts...just a line of reasoning that I'm pursuing.

[Mudhammam]

Chad, I'm finding words to be in short supply at the moment, so hopefully this makes some sense but... what about the possibility that universals are but a linguistic sleight of hand, and that what we in fact conceptualize as applying to all of an object's so-called class are merely abstract particulars. So, there is no universal "red" or "man" that we all understand in exactly the same way, but - say, in the case of man - only those bits and fragments which we gain from experience and then combine to render the form of a particular man, though generically represented, perhaps using our first or "most lively" impressions as an archetype, and that this is rendered differently from person to person. So when we speak of "red", we both understand the idea, but each of us is limited to the particular shade or shades we have gained from our private experience. Then again, there are classifications - such as necessity, contingency, possibility, impossibility - and quantity, as in numbers, which don't seem at all subject to variance from one's conception to another, but rather refer to objective facts of reality, though not in any physical sense... So I don't know what those are supposed to signify in reality if truth or what can be said to "actually exist" is understood as a proposition, or set of propositions, that correspond(s) to an object or objects that either was/were, is/are, or will be.

[jenny1972]

Chad, I'm finding words to be in short supply at the moment, so hopefully this makes some sense but... what about the possibility that universals are but a linguistic sleight of hand, and that what we in fact conceptualize as applying to all of an object's so-called class are merely abstract particulars. So, there is no universal "red" or "man" that we all understand in exactly the same way, but - say, in the case of man - only those bits and fragments which we gain from experience and then combine to render the form of a particular man, though generically represented, perhaps using our first or "most lively" impressions as an archetype, and that this is rendered differently from person to person. So when we speak of "red", we both understand the idea, but each of us is limited to the particular shade or shades we have gained from our private experience. Then again, there are classifications - such as necessity, contingency, possibility, impossibility - and quantity, as in numbers, which don't seem at all subject to variance from one's conception to another, but rather refer to objective facts of reality, though not in any physical sense... So I don't know what those are supposed to signify in reality if truth or what can be said to "actually exist" is understood as a proposition, or set of propositions, that correspond(s) to an object or objects that either was/were, is/are, or will be.

have you considered the idea that an intelligent being might exist somewhere within all that mystery and why do you assume that God must be infinite to exist , because religious people claim that God is infinite and had no beginning is that why ?

[Mudhammam]

have you considered the idea that an intelligent being might exist somewhere within all that mystery and why do you assume that God must be infinite to exist , because religious people claim that God is infinite and had no beginning is that why ?

Sure... Many intelligent beings reside within all that. You... I... That's the starting point. What would be gained by imagining that extraterrestrial or otherworldly intelligent beings exist too?

[Edwardo Piet]

Extraterrestrial beings do exist. The probability that we are alone in the universe(s) is basically zero. For this to be the only planet with life in the entire universe(s) is so ridiculous it would also make it seem as though we had been put here.

I'm willing to wager that the probability that this is the only planet with life is pretty much 0. Like so close to zero it's basically zero.