Literally Everything is Infinite
Hi all,
I was on a walk, digesting a lot of “Western” and “Eastern” philosophy I have been reading over the last couple months, and a mental paradigm emerged for me. Not in blaze of light or spiritual experience kind of way, but more in a small thought that grew larger the more I questioned it. I am not claiming to be the first to suggest this, though I haven’t personally heard it explored further before.
The thought is “Everything is Infinite. Literally everything.”
This will probably sound stupidly simple, pointlessly vague—but give it a shot—I believe the consequences of this have practical ramifications.
The underlying logic is that while beginnings, endings, and limits are very helpful conceptual tools for humans, they don’t actually exist in reality.
Take this assumption seriously, draw out the consequences, and see where it takes you. Please critique anything here obviously, because this is only useful a paradigm if it holds up.
Here are some examples. Each one builds on the previous one, so I would recommend deciding if you agree with one before moving on to the next:
“Zoom” is Infinite
By Zoom I mean zooming into the micro level, and zooming out the macro. We haven’t been able to find the smallest building blocks of the universe, nor the largest. Even if we did find the smallest—what is genuinely stopping us from zooming in further?
Objects are Boundless
The paradigm in a number of Eastern philosophies, along with what appears more evident as we are able to see further into the micro is that the “hard edges” we assumed defined objects, are actually quite blurred. Following on from the previous point, if we can never reach the smallest building block, then how can we define the edges of an object, lined with those smallest building blocks? Again, while being able to isolate “objects” as objects through language and concepts has incredible utility for us, it is not actually the true reality. Don’t worry, I know you’ve heard these ideas a thousand times, but keep taking it further.
Time is Infinite
What we perceive as time never had a beginning and will never have an end. You may argue that there must be beginnings and ends, because our experience begins at birth and ends at death. Though the key here is that, while the states of things transform (which conceptually seem like a beginning and end), the things themselves never do. Before you were born, you were a foetus, you were sperm and an egg, and we can regress infinitely. After you die, your body remains but gets turned into a thousand different things for a thousand different microbes. Nothing is ever truly generated or destroyed. Nothing too mind-blowing—thankyou high school physics. But if nothing we observe truly has a beginning or end, how can we assume that the universe had a beginning, or will have an end? That is actually a counter-assumption to our empirical observation of things. This is where it may start affecting how we choose to live our lives.
The Cosmos is Boundless
Just as we observed with the illusion of boundaries of “objects,” the idea that our universe or cosmos has spatial edges is an assumption without evidence. Following the pattern we’ve established so far, this means you could travel in any direction—infinitely.
Everything will Exist
If it is true that time and space are both infinite, then we have two options. Option 1 is that everything is more of the same in all directions, and has been in a perfect cycle of composition and decomposition and will repeat the exact same way endlessly through time. Option 2 is that even if there is the slightest variation over time and/or over space—stretch that over infinite time and infinite space—then you consequently end up with every possible situation and object existing. You may have to travel very far in space or time, but it would have to be there.
--note: from this point on, we move from what I suspect is very likely the case into a space where it is only most likely the case, based on previous patterns we’ve established—
The Laws of Reality are Relative to our Local Relative Universe
We are talking the Laws of Physics, Geology, Biology, Neuroscience, Engineering, whatever field you want to pick. This one may seem like a leap initially, but take some time on it.
If it is true that every possible situation and object exists (as above) - truly in the infinite sense—then the idea that all those infinite possibilities fit within the same physical mechanics frameworks, across infinite space and infinite time, is unlikely. What is more likely is that these Laws we have discovered and tested serve an incredible utility purpose for what I’ll call our Local Relative Universe.
Think of our Local Relative Universe as everything around us, both in our current space and current time, within a certain “radius.” The key here is to remember that there are no hard bounds on any of this, so you can never really cross over the “border” from our relative universe to the next. It is more like “things gradually transform the further away you get from us.” This is purely a conceptual framework that places us, spatially and temporally, at the center so we can make relative judgements (we, of course, are not at the center, because there is no center).
If true, an example of this could be that as you move very far away from us, the Gravitational Constant will change. The makeup of atoms will change. The speed of light will likely also change.
Try imagining reality that distant from us, where the fundamental laws of reality are different.
What Practical Difference Does this Make?
If you agree the above is actually the most likely situation we live among, you may find it changes things. It will likely be very different for different people. For me personally, I went through a few stages:
First was a sense of peace. This kind of paradigm can be applied to all situations. One of the current fears in our current climate is that of human extinction via either AI or climate catastrophe. I find this infinite kind of mindset helps challenge that all-or-nothing thinking. Even if there is a catastrophe, what is the likelihood that it will wipe out every single human, so that humanity can never recover? Even if that were to happen, how can we be certain that humans won’t emerge again? Even if all life on Earth was wiped out, if space and time are infinite, then not only is the emergence of life again probable—I struggle to see how it wouldn’t be inevitable.
The second was a sense of horror. If all possible situations exist, then the most horrifying situations we can imagine exist. This is truly horrific. The comfort I gained for this was through the identification of our Local Relative Universe. It is truly horrific when compared to our local situation, based on our local values. We cannot make accurate value judgements for situations out of our Local Relative Universe. The value judgement would need to be made from “their” point of view.
The third was peace again. For this, I draw from my current interpretation of Daoism. If all is relative, then the greatest way we can live is in harmony with our Local Relative Universe. Our scientific laws and engineering give us greater utility, but we should know that there is no end to the searches. This means there is no end to the utility we can achieve. Realizing this prompts us to focus less on the end goal of finding the “ultimate reality,” and focus more on the way we do the journey. If every possibility will already exist regardless of what we do in our Local Relative Universe, then it means this is not the universe’s only chance for “success.” However, we are here, and we do value things like truth, love and beauty—so why not live artfully and exude them?
If you do want to play with the idea that Literally Everything is Infinite, I’d love to hear how you take it even further.
“Literally everything is infinite.”
“What about finite things? Are they infinite?”
“Yes, even finite things are infinite.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know, man, I didn’t make it that way.”
(This is originally a Discordian teaching.)
Love it hahah. Also glad to find out Discordian doesn’t mean “heard from someone on the Discord chat app”
I don’t want to knock your insight, but this looks like a partial realization and you’re running too far with it.
To pick on just one of your examples, this is not true is some important ways:
We can’t zoom in or out indefinitely. The speed of light creates a practical limit on how far we can zoom out, and we don’t know what’s going on outside our Hubble volume. We have similar problems trying to zoom in, because to observe things we must interact with them, and those interactions limit what we can known due to quantum indeterminacy.
There is a sense in which there is infinite “zoom”, but it only exists in the space of concepts, because there’s an infinite regress of distinctions and deconstructions of concepts that doesn’t ground out unless we step out of ontology and look at why our minds created an ontology to begin with.
The phrasing that “everything is infinite” is weird to me, but based on what you wrote, I suspect that you’ve hit on what I might call the anti-realist insight: ontology is not fully constrained by the otherwise seemingly fixed world that exists outside your mind.
Nah, knock away. I partially posted it here to be critiqued. I want to know if it’s bull hahah.
Yeah, so I’m glad you brought up the Speed of Light as a boundary, because I think that’s a great point, especially considering practicalities. Though I do think that our current practical limits should not be used as evidence as to what actually exists in reality. Just because we can’t directly zoom in or out far enough to perceive the “entirety” of existence doesn’t mean that existence doesn’t.. exist.
We have always had limits on our perception. If we took that practical perception constraints as the hard limits on reality, then if we never invented the Hubble telescope, we would have to assume the non-existence of the majority of stars and galaxies we now know to exist, just because we finally have the tools to observe them.
As for the boundary of the speed of light itself.. I am sure this is not convincing, but if we are taking pure empiricism, how can we know it is an actual hard boundary until we reach it and experience what happens near the speed of light? We know that relative time slows down. While I don’t have enough info to make a judgement of what actually happens, I suspect that our concept of Speed is also a conceptual frame that is helpful in our own “local” cases, but breaks down as you reach that extreme (300,000 km/s). Just as Newtonian mechanics works at our level of “zoom”, but breaks down in both the quantum and very macro levels, the only pattern I’m seeing is that these hard laws are relative in a “local” sense.
Re: the phrasing—possibly “Everything is Boundless” would have worked better for what I am postulating?
Please correct me if I am misinterpreting Anti-realism, but a quick quote from Wikipedia: “Anti-realism in its most general sense can be understood as being in contrast to a generic realism, which holds that distinctive objects of a subject-matter exist and have properties independent of one’s beliefs and conceptual schemes.”
I suppose the issue I take with my interpretation of this is that I am definitely not suggesting that reality is an illusion. Though, yes you are correct, I am suggesting that the perception of objects being “hard-edged objects” is a conceptual frame, and not actually reality. While this framework provides us with excellent utility in most of our lives, it does lead to specific ways we relate to the world—especially in relation to the burden we place on ourselves as individuals and as a species to be the “only light in the universe.”
Perhaps in a Pragmatist sense, the main reason I think this Boundlessness framework is worth exploring is, besides wanting to know the truth, it pushes us to relate our existence in the universe in a very different (and I think ultimately positive) light.
It is not established whether the universe is infinite. However, there are unambiguously a finite number of words in this text box. This post is false.
So I genuinely don’t want to be mean, but this reminds me why I dislike so much of philosophy, including many chunks of rationalist writing.
This whole proposition is based on vibes, and is obviously false—just for sake of philosophy, we decide to ignore the “obvious” part, and roll with it for fun.
The chair I’m sitting on is finite. I may not be able to draw a specific boundary, but I can have a bounding box the size of the planet, and that’s still finite.
My life as a conscious being, as far as I know, is finite. It started some years ago, it will end some more years in the future. Admittedly I don’t have any evidence regarding what happens to qualia after death, but a vibe of infiniteness isn’t enough to convince me that I will infinitely keep experiencing things.
My childhood hamster’s life was finite. Sure, the particles are still somewhere in my hometown, but that’s no longer my hamster, nor my hamster’s life.
A day in my local frame is finite. It lasts about 24 hours, depending on how we define it—to be safe, it’s surely contained within 48 hours.
This whole thing just feels like… saying things. You can’t just say things and assume they are true, or even make sense. But apparently you can do that if you just refer to (ideally eastern) philosophy.
No, I don’t take this as mean. Criticism was a big part of why I wanted to run it by LessWrong :)
I agree that we are able to draw specific boundaries around “things,” e.g. chair, world, a single day, a single consciousness, a single life—and that they are very helpful conceptual tools, especially it is how we experience reality at our “zoom” level of perception. However when we zoom in to the micro, we have never found the exact edge of something—the point of where an object ends.
While I do think this boundary thinking is very rooted in the Aristotelean conceptual framework that lays out the foundation of much of the rest of our conceptual frameworks (especially in West), I’m sure that people and animals all over the world function with a very similar model, as it naturally provides a lot of utility. But the conceptual model we view the world with does affect how we can relate to it. Consider Thomas Kuhn’s Paradigm Shifts—everything seems obvious within the conceptual framework we have, and we consider things to be “obviously not true” if they don’t fit our current model. But that doesn’t mean that our current model truly fits reality.
You are correct that I may not have communicated this well. Or maybe that it simply isn’t true. It makes a lot of sense the more I think about it, however I will keep thinking about how to communicate it better and how it can be challenged. I am also very aware of the “anything goes with Eastern philosophy” stereotype, don’t worry, but the more time I spend with Daoism in particular, and have the ground assumptions of my Western upbringing challenged, the more it actually makes sense to my lived experience.
What is making sense to me, more and more, is to view the “hard edge” of a chair as a slow transformation from chair molecules and space into other molecules and space. But the same can be said for anything else.
I think if I was going to ask a key question, it would be “how do we actually know that there is a beginning and and end to space, or to time?” These boundaries are things that seem to be assumed, but we certainly haven’t found them. And based on the “pattern” of slow transformations over objects I mentioned above, it would seem to be the “pattern” suggests that boundlessness or infinity is actually the default state of things, and that boundaries are a conceptual invention.
I present the opposite view in my criticism of infinities. Infinite claims require infinite evidence!