SolitaryWalker
Tenured roisterer
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2007
- Messages
- 3,504
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 5w6
- Instinctual Variant
- so/sx
This is where I am a little unsure of whether you're correct. You are dividing the question into black and white, material and immaterial, real and not real. What if the finite world is just a subset of the world you choose to call "infinite"? (I'm not even sure if infinite is the right word to describe it.)
So when you're floating on the deck of a boat on a black glassy sea and a whale's fluke pops above the waves, you can say that you "saw" the whale. You can't see all the whale because it won't surface completely, but you saw PART of the whale in truth... and you can try to conjecture what the rest of the whale looks like, although you'll never really know for sure because you aren't in the whale's domain.
This isn't exactly right as an example, because "God" would be part of EVERY domain, not just confined to the ocean; but if the tangible world is just a subset of all that exists, wouldn't it be possible for something from the larger set to intrude momentarily on the tangible world?
I think our conflict here is that I am positing that the tangible world is a subset of "all reality," where you seem to have "all reality" broken into an observable world (finite) and an unobservable world (infinite).
No, its not black and white. Thoughts are immaterial, but in order for them to make sense they have to fit the framework of what can be sensed. (Seen, touched, heard, felt, tasted.). Can you fathom a thought that can not be converted into something that can't be seen? Wooden-Iron! That's synonymous with literaly unimaginable! Or in other words, when you imagine an idea, right there--you presuppose that it is something that can be seen (sensed).
Another example of how something that is immaterial can be within our sensation. Physicists in the 20th century discovered that the fundamental essence to atoms is just raw force(energy), the force is not material, but if we obtain proper technology we may see it. Though this is the real matter, not the crude tables and chairs, not even the atoms that they are comprised of.
If what we understand to be reality truly is just part of the bigger picture, and we don't live in a 'sub-reality'. We have this problem..
If reality is infinite, yet our world is finite, in infinity there can not be plurality. Because only one essence can be infinite and if it is infinite, it takes up all the space that there is. Hence, there is no space there. Yet in this world we have space.
We cant talk about how the infinite world is, or infer from that all is God(pantheism) because we can't fathom what infinity is. Its not that we see just parts of it, the case is that we cant grasp infinity for what it is, this is why we have to break it down into what we can fathom. Something that is transduced through the medium of space, time, matter, heat and color.