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Originally Posted by ManWithAPlan
@filtherton - who says only tangible things can be infinite? The way I see it is you have 3 levels of abstraction: tangible, observable, conceivable.
Let us reserve tangibility to our concrete perceptions. We can see and feel a yardstick. It has an innate spatial length.
Let observable be the set of properties which we can observe though are not innate to an entity. Like a cycle, a planet's orbit, a trajectory, the passage of time, a wheel's rotation
Let conceivable be the set of concepts which we can imagine with our minds but not experience directly for one reason or another.
Seeing as how our lives are limited, we cannot experience infinite time. We also cannot experience breathing underwater without the aid of SCUBA gear... we cannot experience being a bird. But that doesn't mean those things don't exist.
As our senses are limited, we cannot experience infinite length or distance. We also cannot see all the way to china from the usa, but that doesn't mean that china doesn't exist.
We can however talk about these things, including infinity, so it must exist. If there is no example of it in the universe, it exists only conceptually. but if there is no experiential example, then it can still exist on one of the other two levels; we just can't see it.
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Right. I don't dispute any of this. All I'm saying is that everything ever conceived of exists (or did), at the very least, on a conceptual level. It's a trivial observation, and we could just as well be talking about invisible elephants.
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"Why" implies teleology. Can you prove that things have a purpose? If not, then you can't ask that question. Something might be infinite simply by coincidence.
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Philosophy implies teleology. Without an assumption of purpose, all you have is a bunch of untethered statements with no explanatory value at all. So while it is quite possible that something with the property of infiniteness came about as a coincidence, the mere mention of this possibility doesn't make for a compelling case for the existence of infinity.
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To revive an old challenge - If the universe is not infinite, then what do we call the thing in which the universe sits? Is that infinite? Does a non-infinite universe imply multiple universes? Are they infinite? If so, does that not mean that the thing that contains them has to be infinite? And ultimately, if the universes are not infinite, what acts as a boundary between them that prevents us from saying that they are really just one universe?
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Here's that teleology thing again. Why would you assume that the universe sits in anything?
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I've also just thought of something that I think pretty much ends this debate:
Infinity exists. Time is infinite.
Time is always measured from a frame of reference.
If the universe is infinite (in time), and has no end, then time within the universe is infinite and infinity exists.
If the universe is finite, there must be another frame of reference which can admit that*, which seems to me has to be infinite**
* Meaning, can see the beginning and end of the universe.
** Unless that thing also comes to an end, in which case there must be something else, etc.
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Why would there need to be another frame of reference to admit that the universe is finite? To paraphrase: If a universe begins and ends and there's no one around to admit it, does that universe ever exist?
Your argument here depends on some pretty arbitrary notions about what must exist outside of the universe.