your night sky
May 10, 2008 by elberry
Andrew K writes of infinity (re: Borges’ “They knew that in an infinite period of time all things happen to all men”):
Of course if we conjecture a universe of all possible circumstances, then all possible circumstances must be contained within such a universe. But this is simply an imposed intellectual framework, the closed system of a thoughtpiece, but certainly not a freely ordained reality. There is no possible reason all possible events must occur within infinite time. It is an unjustified inference; a confusion of the finite with the infinite. This understanding of infinity is merely the finite extended or pushed to a higher power. A mind pushing itself and its boundaries to its limits, but still contained within those limits, and producing absurdities when it imbues those limits with limitlessness, or infinity. The infinite is a beast not so easily captured.
On the rare occasions i read anything serious, i often wish the authors - philosophers especially - would start with a rigorous epistomelogical grounding. For we can only see what our minds are equipped to perceive (should this even need stating?), and our cognitive and perceptual faculties are formed by the accumulation of our emotions and thoughts, that is, by our spirit. As Andrew says above, when people pontificate about infinity they often just imagine a bigger version of finitude. Likewise, when people consider god, how can we but consider our human notions of god? It’s not as if we can adopt a non-human standpoint from which to ponder matters.
And here is the Viking in rare lyrical mood (obviously after quaffing some mead and frequenting some homosexual German brothels in his white trousers):
Statistical probability dictates: the you [insert name here] that can exist here has a finite probability of existence in other galaxies, superclusters, etc.; and thus, if the universe is infinite, then the matter of whether other duplicates of you, sitting in the exact same chair, thinking the exact same thoughts, reading the exact same livejournal entry, exist, is not one of whether such duplicates exist, but of how many googleplexes of light-years stand between you and the next instance of such a (statistically improbable) duplicate of yourself .
If you are drugged, drunk, confronting a difficult decision: somewhere, someone, bearing your name and indistinguishable (by any means known to science) from you faces the same problem (given an infinite universe, probability dictates it). Furthermore, given that your existence is physically possible, therefore, in an infinite universe, there are an infinite number of duplicates of you facing the exact same problem. If you screw up: there are versions of you doing better; if not, good going.
Let us consider the matter from a totally different angle:
There were kings, upon a time, who lavished upon a beloved entire castles, estates, buildings of the largest possible expense availible to them. Considering that, consider also what that one might think of you who has spent an infinity of stars and superclusters merely to decorate your night sky.
‘Likewise, when people consider god, how can we but consider our human notions of god? It’s not as if we can adopt a non-human standpoint from which to ponder matters.’
God can be both non-human in-himself and also human in our understandings of him. This would be both because we can only understand the reality of anything through human conditioned filters, and because God, out of that unfashionable thing called love, would presumably want to make himself understandable to humans by entering their frames of reference.
If you were an alien and wanted to be listened to by Joe blogs would you hide your horns and green skin, or not?
you have it right there, i think. Milton wrote of God’s ‘accommodation’ to man, and likewise wrote Paradise Lost, famously, “to justify the ways of God to man”.
Or as Vladimir the Russian tramp said to me under a tree on the Dover Cliffs 7 years ago “if a thing can be seen by everyone, it will look different to everyone”.
One could do worse than study Wallace Stevens to understand the complex translations between the divine & the mortal.
i assume that god is both very different to me and in a sense familiar, ‘closer than the jugular vein’ as our Muslim friends would say. Imago dei.
Your guess is close - beer, rather than mead (which is in short supply here these days.) Also, I have yet to find an actual homosexual brothel here in Würzburg, although admittedly I have been lax in seeking one.
Were you wearing soiled white trousers like a 80s pop star?
I can’t actually remember. I think I was wearing jeans, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
White jeans? With a hole in one of the knees, and potassium dichromate stains down at least one thigh? Were they held up by a length of fraying electrical cable?
No, black jeans, I think; the old dichromate trousers have disappeared somewhere along the way. I’m not entirely sure what happened to them, to be honest. My current white trousers are scruffy-looking (tho pretty new) and, so far, devoid of terrible chemical stains. Altho they’ve already gotten rust stains around the zip, which is one of the hazards of white trousers.
One of those cute German honeys you keep mentioning must have stolen the white trousers. No doubt they are mounted on her wall along with photographs of yourself and samples of your chemical meddlings. At night she strokes the potassium dichromate stains and murmurs: “Olaf, Olaf…”