How Long is Forever?

Which one is the real you?

I think there is noth­ing more frus­trat­ing as con­tem­plat­ing the fea­si­bil­ity of infinity. It can be argued that if spon­ta­neous human com­bus­tion does indeed exist, that it is likely caused by the unfor­tu­nate per­son dwelling on an infi­nite regress for too long.  At least, that’s my hunch!  I should be clear from the start and explain that I do not con­sider infin­ity itself to be a fal­la­cious con­cept, but that it is often a sign that there may be some­thing very wrong with the rea­son­ing at play.

Infin­ity exists, at least ana­lyt­i­cally.  If I make a com­puter pro­gram that has three parts, ABC, and have the end of C link back to A, then I have just cre­ated infin­ity.  If I point two mir­rors at each other, per­fectly aligned, then there is infin­ity between them (I think the only way to actu­ally view this is with a two-way mir­ror pointed at another mirror).

In real­ity, how­ever, infin­ity is only an assump­tion.  The com­puter pro­gram above ide­ally por­trays infin­ity, yet will surely only be run for a finite amount of time (like, until the com­puter breaks down).  Also, the light being bounced between the mir­rors will lose it’s energy and fall out of the vis­i­ble spec­trum.  We can’t know absolutely for sure if the mir­ror align­ment is infi­nite, although we can assume it to be so.  Assump­tions are dan­ger­ous, they are leaps of logic, and thus poten­tially quite fallacious.

You have been warned, I take no respon­si­bil­ity for any fiery deaths that result from read­ing this post!  I highly rec­om­mend you get an icepack from the fridge before read­ing further…

Before Infin­ity…

What caused the fluctuations?

Dur­ing my first year of uni­ver­sity I was intro­duced to the Cos­mo­log­i­cal Argu­ment for the Exis­tence of God.  It basi­cally means that since every effect needs a cause, the effect of the uni­verse exist­ing must have been caused by some­thing or some­one before it.  The­ists assume that this some­one is God flick­ing on the switch.  The imme­di­ate prob­lem with this logic is obvi­ous: who, then, cre­ated God?  If God did not need to be cre­ated, then there is a con­tra­dic­tion at work since we now have a causeless-effect (God).  Aris­to­tle liked to call God the Unmoved Mover.  St Augus­tine noted that this leap in logic is nec­es­sary, because if God needs a God, who also needs a God, then there would be an infi­nite regress that would never be able to start!  How can it start?  Who started it?  Who started them?  On and on we go.  Yet: we are here.  So, it seems that exis­tence is finite and was started in an exotic way that seems to bend logic.

I think that all this argu­ment serves to achieve is to prove that exis­tence itself is an absurd para­dox.  At the risk of a False Dichotomy (a topic I will be cov­er­ing in a later entry), there seems to be two pos­si­bil­i­ties:  a. there was an uncaused effect; b. there was an infi­nite chain of cause and effect.  Both make no sense, (a) seems to be an impos­si­ble con­tra­dic­tion and (b) seems to never start thus how could it exist?

Maybe the uni­verse is akin to that com­puter pro­gram I described above.  Per­haps God fell asleep and caused the uni­verse to exist in his dream.  As long as God does not wake up, the uni­verse will be eter­nally loop­ing which sat­is­fies (b).  As for (a), it seems that you can cause an infi­nite loop to exist, like press­ing “Run” on that com­puter pro­gram, or start­ing to dream.  Alas, I am not bright enough to solve this conun­drum.  We still have the same issues lurk­ing in the solu­tion.  Why did God fall asleep in the first place?  Why is his dream loop­ing?  The very qual­i­fi­ca­tion “as long as” means that the infin­ity being describe is actu­ally a veiled finity.

I con­sider the Cos­mo­log­i­cal Argu­ment to be fal­la­cious because it can­not resolve itself log­i­cally.  The argu­ment is use­ful in iden­ti­fy­ing an illus­trat­ing the para­dox, but poorly resolves into any­thing sensical.

The Ulti­mate Real­ity Show

Con­sious­ness is a hard thing to pin­point in the brain.  Some have argued (with vary­ing degrees of tongue-in-cheek) that per­haps there exists a lit­tle man, known as the Homuncu­lus, who sits inside your head watch­ing real­ity unfold in the the­ater of the mind.  It is the Homuncu­lus that inter­prets your vision and makes sug­ges­tions to the rest of the brain on how to react.  A prob­lem arises once you try to explain how the Homuncu­lus him­self sees the show.  Does he also have a lit­tle man inside his head?  The fal­lacy here is that the expla­na­tion doesn’t really explain any­thing.  It just adds a mid­dle man who suf­fers from the same mys­tery that we are try­ing to resolve: how come we can com­pre­hend vision?  The Homuncu­lus is a cute and attrac­tive the­ory, until we notice that there is an infi­nite regress at play, then it becomes an absur­dity that fails Occums Razor.

It would be dif­fi­cult to find some­one who would actu­ally argue that the Homuncu­lus exists (then again, there are some pretty crazy peo­ple out there).  The argu­ment is often made in jest and reflects a sim­plis­tic com­pre­hen­sion of why we see.  Chil­dren would find it far more inter­est­ing than the dry sci­ence of neu­rons and the optic nerve.  It is pre­cisely because of the regress that few would ever take the notion seri­ously, nev­er­mind the imprac­ti­cal­ity of hav­ing some­one lit­er­ally locked away inside your head.

I Think Think­ing is Impossible!

“I only look like I’m thinking…”

Descartes is famous for doing some­thing seem­ingly quite obvi­ous: prov­ing that we exist.  Of course we exist, how else could we even debate if we exist or not unless we exist in the first place?!  He put it quite sim­ply: I think, there­fore I am.  Doubt that?  Well, who’s doubt­ing?  You are!  Alright, great, so we exist, what about every­thing else?  What about my body?  My fam­ily?  My world?  He was not able to covinc­ingly explain the rest of exis­tence before his untimely death from pneu­mo­nia in 1650.

Gilbert Ryle, about 300 years later, wrote in the late 1940’s that Descartes famous slo­gan seems to be flawed when you ques­tion where thought itself comes from.  In his bril­liant book The Con­cept of Mind, he argued that the ori­gin of thought seems to be infi­nitely regres­sive and thus it is some­what para­dox­i­cal that we can ever act upon our thoughts at all.

[If], for any oper­a­tion to be intel­li­gently exe­cuted, a prior the­o­ret­i­cal oper­a­tion had first to be per­formed and per­formed intel­li­gently, it would be a log­i­cal impos­si­bil­ity for any­one ever to break into the circle.

- The Con­cept of Mind, page 30

It can­not be true that we do not think for the sim­ple rea­son that we DO think.  I think Ryle is being funny here, and is pre­sum­ing vic­tory over Descartes a lit­tle too soon.  If any­thing, Ryle spot­ted a regres­sion which, to me, indi­cates that thought must arise from more sys­tem­atic sub­con­sisous actions, which may extend sev­eral lev­els deep, but cer­tainly not endlessly.

A meme is a portable thought that jumps from mind to mind in a some­what sta­ble man­ner, with the abil­ity to evolve and expand over time.  I could argue that I caught the meme “EPIC FAIL” from Jim, who heard it from Sandy, who heard it from Jason, who heard it from Mar­garet, on and on.  How­ever, the chain HAS to stop some­where!  Some­one had to be the first per­son to scream out EPIC FAIL!  Your per­sonal thoughts are likely the same thing.  You may be think­ing about some­thing because you’ve heard about the sub­ject in var­i­ous mag­a­zines and some of  your friends expressed their opin­ions on it.  Your brain is also doing some amaz­ing work pre­sent­ing these mem­o­ries to you for con­sid­er­a­tion.  It has to stop some­where though.  At some point in the phys­i­cal process, a thought is born from a non-thought (where and how, precisely, is beyond the scope of this post and my exper­tise, but if some­one is a neu­rol­o­gist and can explain this process, please leave a comment).

Finite Infin­ity

Pick a num­ber, any number!

Infin­ity exists in con­cept, but rarely (if ever) actu­ally man­i­fests into real­ity.  Typ­i­cally, real­ity pulls data from infi­nite sets when it needs to.  Think about num­bers: from –infin­ity to zero to infin­ity.  The uni­verse has access to any num­bers it could ever need, but does not use every num­ber at once.

When an argu­ment seems to require eter­nity to make sense, it is often pru­dent to rethink it all and seek a more prac­ti­cal solu­tion.  Most infi­nite regresses, if not all of them, are only there because we lack vital knowl­edge that would explain their ori­gins.  Some things, such as exis­tence, may never have a log­i­cal expla­na­tion because we can­not go back to when it all began, if it began, and watch it all unfold.

I could prob­a­bly go on for­ever, but then you would never be able to leave a comment…