Thursday 7 April 2016

Infinitism: The Ouroboric tailbiting



According to Wikipedia Infinitism is the view that knowledge may be justified by an infinite chain of reasons. It belongs to epistemology, the branch of philosophy that considers the possibility, nature, and means of knowledge.

How unfortunate that the philosophers have claimed this very finite definition of a terminology, which on account of its literal meaning would imply so much more...yes endlessly more.

I'll try propose a new all encompassing indicator for Infinitism, which cannot a definition, because the Infinite cannot be finite. An attempt, which is bound to fail, because the Infinite cannot be grasped by a finite set of words. But a good description may give a hunch of what I feel it points to.

For me Infinitism relates to the concept that any aspect of existence is infinite. The Infinite is not defined by anything. And as it has no limits it must necessarily encompass all what is, for if it were to exclude anything, that would already impose a limitation on the concept.
One could argue that it also implies that anything which can be possibly thought of, must de facto exist within the view of infinitism. Any scenario of what possibly could happen to you does happen then somewhere in a parallel universe or somewhere in the infinity of time. Like Boltzmann Brains popping up in the Sea of Dirac. Tegmark pushed to the extreme. This is Everett’s multiverse of an infinite amount of parallel universes. What can be thought of, must necessarily be there, according to these scientists. Including a plethora of hellish nonsensical universes, where we repeat the same actions ad infinitum or do cruel actions all the time.

But infinitism runs into logic contradictions. Because a thesis and its mutual exclusive opposite must both be able to coexist... and yet not, because the concept that they do not coexist, must also exist within infinity. If infinity has an aspect of suchness, it would be delimited, but if infinity excludes an aspect of suchness it would also be delimited, by virtue of the absence of the aspect.

Logic is about a world of here and there, now and then, about polarities of any kind. Logic deals with a world of things. In other words logic is a set of rules for a system built on dualities.

But the very nature of existence might be non-dual. Everything being infinitely tangled up. A Supermetatautological holographic fractalnetwork of self-similarities, where only limited perspectives of a confused mind believe that there are "things" with a spacetime location.

The very nature of being may transcend logic as we know it. Because there is only a "whole" and any delimitation of a concept, any perceptual delimitation and classification of a perceived object as being "part" or belonging to a category, are by-products of the workings of the Mind and the Ego. The confusion of the seeming parts that believe they are separate from the whole.

Infinity must therefore transcend logic and mindlike comprehension. Aspects of suchness and their absence are both part of it. How? Perhaps by the concept of time and space? Infinity encompasses all times and all spaces thereby encompassing all aspects. But not every seemingly partial spacetime universe may encompass all aspects in a manifested way (though it does in a potential way).

But what then about the concept that every seemingly partial spacetime universe encompasses all aspects in a manifested way?

If this would not be possible, then infinity would be limited by an impossibility.

Again it is logic biting its own tail. Infinity cannot be grasped in words and logic. Because there are no parts. Parts are illusory. So then infinity would be delimited by the notion that parts are illusory.
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More of this chapter in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.

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