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.
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!