If the universe is infinite, what is outside the universe?
If things just go black when we die, how do we know they are black?
These things keep me up at night
I think of it this way. Infinite means no end, so if the Universe is infinite it has no end and goes on forever. If that’s the case then there is no “outside the universe” by definition. However, there may be multiple universes, but each of them would be infinite from the point of view of someone existing in that universe.
Nobody knows what happens when you die, but I believe it’s nothingness. For 12 billion years before you were born, there was nothingness as far as you were concerned, then you were alive for a certain number of years, and then you died. For the next 12 billion years, there is nothingness again. Why would there be something after you die? You didn’t exist before you were born, did you?
We don’t, assuming there is no afterlife then death = ego death. We’d have no individual comprehension. A trillion year would pass in an instant.
I think mark Twain once said something like “I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it”
There is a hypothetical situation where one day, far far in the future, hyper intelligent creatures will be able to resurrect consciousness. Who knows though, but it does make accepting death easier. Also for people with terminal illnesses, there have been studies showing drugs like MDMA or hallucinogens help people accept their upcoming death.
Our universe could be one of infinite other universes. However what is outside the meta universe? I don’t know. Probably nothingness.
Ever been put under with General anaesthesia?
Wiki:
unconsciousness, amnesia, analgesia, loss of reflexes of the autonomic nervous system, and in some cases paralysis of skeletal muscles
I’ve had it done four times, and I’ve been told and for all practical purposes, I was closer to dead than alive. It’s not ‘black’. It’s absolutely nothing, since all perception is shut down. It’s certainly not like sleeping in any way. They put you under and x hours later wake you up. Coming back to the land of living is faster these days, as compared to almost 20 years ago. Then it took some four to six hours from the first spark to fully awake, two years ago - about 15 minutes.
I didn’t feel time pass, didn’t feel pain, was not aware of anything. They cut me up from my pubic bone to my ribcage and operated for seven hours. If they’d told me I was under for 30 minutes, I couldn’t’ve known the difference.
And it’s simple: there was no me there. It was on hold.
BTW, it’d make more sense to talk about outside for a finite universe.
But you are now aware of that whole experience. Could you comprehend not being aware of not being aware?
Infinities are pretty much incomprehensible for our brains. There is nothing outside the universe as far as we know, or perhaps more correctly, there is no “outside the universe”.
But that fact is impossible to prove. It’s impossible to prove an infinite universe. You can assume one, but no proof is possible.
There can always be another dimension that exists outside our known experience. That is effectively outside our universe.
True. The universe doesn’t even have to be infinite for there to be nothing else.
It’s super easy: an infinite set is one such that if you start counting its elements: 1, 2, 3, …, you never get to the end! Or, from another point of view, an infinite set can be put into one to one correspondence with a proper subset of itself (at least if you assume the axiom of choice, or something),.
Mathematical infinity is very easy to comprehend. Cantor’s paradise and all that.
Physically, I think an infinite universe is easier to comprehend than a finite one. A finite one raises questions like “is there a border?” and “what’s outside of it?” while an infinite one is just the same everywhere.
I don’t know. Our planet doesn’t have a border, but it is finite. An infinite, populated universe is hard to comprehend. That you never run out of new stars, galaxies, planets, organisms.
Well, first, all you are doing is defining it, it’s up to the reader to comprehend / grok it. Being easy to define doesn’t automatically make it easy to comprehend. Second, a set of numbers is a mathematical concept, the universe is a physical thing, it’s much more difficult to comprehend a physical infinity.
As a mathematical issue, I understand zero and I understand 5 gazillion +1.
What my brain doesn’t allow me to understand is the context in which an infinite universe exist.
As for nothingness, it isn’t just a question of what happens when we die. I can’t conceive of a half empty glass. It is half full water, half filled with air.
What does nothingness look like?
Nothingness doesn’t “look like” anything. It’s just nothingness. You seem to think that when you die you continue to perceive the world in some way. Your ability to perceive the world ends when you die. Hence it’s nothingness.
What’s so hard about understanding an infinite universe? Imagine getting into a spaceship and heading out into deep space and it never ends no matter how far you go. If you can imagine that, then you can imagine an infinite universe. BTW, I’m not saying there’s proof the universe is infinite, but there’s no reason to believe it isn’t infinite, and you can’t prove it’s finite.
I sat through Waiting For Godot. I know Nothingness.
It’s not infinite. All the matter-energy in it originated at the Big Bang singularity. But there is no “outside”. For one thing, the universe is expanding by creating spacetime. It is not expanding “into” anything. For another thing, the universe on a large scale is both homogenous and isotropic. That means there is no privileged or special position or direction. There is no center, and there is no boundary. It is finite, but unbounded, the same in all directions (on a sufficiently large scale).
No one functionally attempts to describe death as “going black”, unless one is describing the death of a TV set.
Wut?? He’s “aware” of the experience only in an abstract intellectual sense. Experientially, the period of being under general anaesthesia did not happen, because his senses were receiving no inputs and the brain was recording no experience.
I like the Mark Twain quote about being “dead” for billions of years before he was born, and it having caused him no inconvenience whatsoever. To that state we shall all return.
How do conceptualize the “nothing” the universe is expanding into?
Models of an expanding universe don’t necessarily need anything for it to ‘expand into’.
Here’s one for you (which is sort of related to your nothingness/unconsciousness thing):
Take a piece of paper; fold it into a paper plane. Where did the plane come from?
Unfold it and iron it flat. Where did the plane go?
You can’t. The Big Bang model is a mathematical model supported by a large body of evidence. It’s not reasonable to expect that our earth-bound intuition should be able to conceptualize phenomena completely outside its experience.