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:
“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?
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.
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.