I’m saying that an infinite past is not inherently self-contradictory as you seem to assume.
This assumes that he watched from the beginning. But in an infinite universe, there is no such beginning. Any time anybody could have watched is the time between two moments in time—which is always finite.
Consider again the analogy with an infinite distance: you can’t walk it from ‘the beginning’, since there is no beginning. Any distance you can walk on it will always be finite, as it will always be the difference between two points on the line.
I agree with you that between any two moments anyone could have watched (in this dimension) will be finite… If there was an infinite amount of infinite moments WHICH HAVE HAPPENED, then those moments should be observable.
The idea that moment after moment after moment happened, TO GET TO THE PRESENT MOMENT, was an infinite amount. If any amount of moments happened, then you have a finite amount of moments. To have a finite amount of moments is to take itself out of the realm of infinity. (Finite cannot be infinite).
PS This is all about general logic and general understanding of our physical world, and the 4D existence we (seem) to live in. Things are not always as they appear, the above is in terms for the sake of discussion but can be open to debate. In other words to point out the contradiction as I am is to imply that there is an inherent gap in some aspect of what we think we understand, so the above isn’t necessarily truth but it shows that it is a logical fallacy, so one of the pieces is likely suspect.
No, because there is no time since when an infinite number of moments have happened. You’re assuming a contradiction in assuming that time can both be infinite, and there can be a point in time since when an infinite amount of time has elapsed—because such a moment in time would be (per definition) earlier than any other moment in time, and there would not be any moment in time earlier than that moment, this amounts to being a beginning of time. But then your argument assumes that these is both a beginning, and no beginning, i.e. time is infinite—which is contradictory.
This isn’t just my argument. The idea that in a temporally infinite universe, there must have elapsed an infinite amount of moments, is a well known fallacy in the philosophy of cosmology. See e.g. this paper by Quentin Smith for a refutation (I think that’s the right one, but I can’t access it from home at the moment).
Basically, there isn’t an infinite amount of time traversed anymore than there can be an infinite distance walked along an infinite line—the difference between any two numbers, and thus, the distance between any two points, is always finite. The only infinite distance would be to a point not actually on the line, i.e. a point ‘beyond infinity’. But there’s no reason to assume such a point, and without that assumption, no infinite distance.
This is a misconception, infinity is not a single thing. Infinity is larger than any real number, but infinity is not a single thing.
A good way to see it is just the basic numbers you know. “Natural” numbers include 1,2,3,ect ect all the way into infinity. Natural numbers are infinitely large… But, for every single natural number, there is an opposite - Integers contain all infinitely many natural numbers, plus zero, plus -1,-2,-3,-4 ect ect all the way to -infinity. The natural numbers are CLEARLY infinite, but the integers are CLEARLY bigger than the natural numbers, because integers are a superset of the natural numbers.
There are many different “infinities.” Rational numbers (ex: 2.1938, 9/10, -1) include all integers and ratio’s of integers. Much bigger infinity. Real numbers include rational numbers and irrational numbers (that is, numbers like pi, e, sqrt(2) ).
Real > Rational > Integer > Natural, and natural is infinitely large.
Another misconception. You can reach infinity given an infinite amount of _____! Infinite distance? Give me infinite time to travel. Speed of light? Give me infinite acceleration!
Infinity can be reached by infinite addition. It’s hard to put this without math symbols or very verbose words but:
the limit as n approaches infinity of:
n
E 1
0
is infinity.
E is supposed to be a sigma, or “sum” - this means add 1+1+1+1+1+… forever. Once you go forever, you’ve reached infinity.
“You cant reach infinity” is the byproduct of non-mathematicians teaching elementary and highschool math, not an actual rule in mathematics/physics.
Incorrect. In every second, there exists 0.5 seconds. For every 0.5 seconds, there exists 0.25 seconds. This extends infinitely: you can subdivide time into infinity, and therefore an “infinite amount of moments” happens between every interval of time. A moment does not have duration and therefore there are an infinite number of moments between two points in time. It’s literally 0+0+0+0+0.
I will say we can only measure in plank time, but that doesn’t mean things can’t happen in less.
What??
“we can’t add any time to an infinite amount” - this is wrong. I don’t even understand why you think this is the case. Infinity is not a “maximum,” and, like I said, there are bigger and smaller infinities.
Some of this confusion might be because when we deal with real numbers, all infinities are undefined and treated exactly the same. But as soon as you have two functions and aren’t restricted to real numbers, well, look at x and e^x. It’s clear that for any given x, e^x is greater so if x is infinity, e^x is greater than infinity (otherwise known as a different infinity).
What is the “begining” of a circle? A circle is not infinite. Time is not necessarily a circle, but not having a begining does not require something to be infinite as a circle demonstrates.
And there are an infinite number of moments between the origin and now. But, you are right in that there has been a finite amount of time. Understand, though, that retrogression into the origin requires infinite travel. It’s like how the speed of light is finite, but to reach it you have to accelerate infinitely.
“Time” cannot have a begining in as much as a box cannot be inside of itself. “Beginning” implies time! Within time, things have beginings and ends. “Outside” of time - well, think of things as static and unchanging. They can’t change, otherwise that’s time. Perhaps not our 4th timelike dimension, but time.
See above.
Anything defined that way. Including a magical unicorn made of magic and hyperdimension-bows. Sound rediculous? It is, but that’s because I invented something that fits the requirement rather than observed something. You can imagine where this leads…
“Who??” What in the name of all that is good and holy made you add “who” to this statement? Why would it be a “who?” What is a “who” that can exist without time? Do you realize what the implications of a “being” that intervenes in the universe, which is also “outside” of time (short story: impossible to have free will - I hope you don’t also believe in divine punishment).
Last note, matter is just energy in a form that distorts space time (aka has mass), so something “outside of time” is necessarily not matter. You don’t have to say “outside of time and matter” because you can’t have matter without time.
So what I gather is that you’re saying is that because time had to begin and _______, therefore god. This is a malformed syllogism because it’s missing the second premise. The first premise is also faulty, because you haven’t demonstrated that time had to begin. I’ll fill in the second premise you left out - that “things that begin have to have a creator” - but wont attack it because you didn’t out and out state it.
Time did not have to “begin.” Time is. Things in time begin and end. No requirement to begin debunks anything you can put into premise 2 to reach “therefore god.”
No. Integers, natural numbers, and rational numbers are of the same cardinality; the reals, however, are genuinely ‘bigger’. The way you see this is by checking whether you can find a one-to-one corrspondence between two sets: if you can associate every integer to a natural number in an unique way, there can’t be more integers than naturals. And that you can do this is clear: for instance, you can simply associate all positive integers to the even natural numbers, and all negative integers to the odd ones. Every integer is paired up with a natural number, and none are left over: there are as many integers as there are natural numbers. Such a mapping can also be found for the rationals, so there’s no more of them than there are of the naturl numbers, too. This only fails for the reals.
> Never heard of him, does he have a similar theory?
If you really have never heard of Aquinas, I think there’s a problem. Knowing who he was and the arguments for and against his theories is a pretty basic part of philosophical knowledge. You may be a pretty smart person, but I think you need to do some basic reading in philosophy. You should learn what other people have said about the topics you want to think about. Start by reading these articles:
Then maybe you should read an introductory book on philosophy.
If I line up a row of apples and I put a stone beside each one, and in all cases I have an apple beside each stone and a stone beside each apple, wouldn’t you say that I have the same number of stones as apples?
Well, I can write down 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8… as long as I want, and write down 2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16… beside them and there will always be a number in the first row beside a number in the second row, and vice-versa. Hence by the same logic as my stones and apples example the set of integers is the same size as the set of even integers. It’s more complicated to make a correspondence between integers and rational numbers, but it is possible. It is NOT possible to do the same with integers and reals; there are more reals than integers.
One of the definitions of an infinite set is that it can be put in one to one correspondence with a proper subset of itself (like I just did with integers and even numbers).
PS. It is etc., not ect.!! etc. is short for et cetera. Sorry, but people using ect. is a pet peeve of mine (unless of course they are talking about electroconvulsive therapy).
If time began with energy, then there is no infinite negative time problem. With our human limitations we think about what came before, but there is no before. That is one of those things that is easier to represent mathematically than to think about.
If the net energy of the universe is zero, then there is no paradox in it starting. If time is somehow associated with mass and energy, then there is no problem with time beginning with them.We don’t know this, of course, but it isn’t unthinkable.
Even if there is no infinite time paradox, I still see that there is an infinite past paradox. If you replace my above ideas from there being an issue with time to there being something funky with an infinite past, then from what I see the paradox is still there. Then again it’s how you look at time. In one way, time is a measurement, but also, if there is no ‘time’ then how is there a rising and falling of things? How can you watch things change? Time MAY be written in to the universe that way see, thus an infinite time paradox may still exist.
It seems self-evident to me that if nothing is there, nothing CANNOT lead to something. Unless there is SOMETHING to the nothing, in which case you don’t actually have nothing.
Hmm, yeah basically I thought of this somewhat on my own (or it was inspired) and only heard of basically 1 or 2 sources talking about it. I never have heard of Thomas Aquinas until now or the idea that it is a basic idea of philosophy. Thanks for sharing.
No time since when an infinite number of moments have happened, I completely agree with this. This basically IS my argument, except for the idea that the past is just a succession of moments within linear time. I don’t understand where you say that I assume that there is a beginning and no beginning. I am not saying this: I am pointing to the fact that these two are incompatible. One or the other, and I am going with there was a beginning and this time/the past was not infinite, at least in the linear sense that we seem to be experiencing.
I plan on checking out that paper by the way, and I hope it’s not too heavy.
But you’re arguing that there’s a paradox in the need of an infinite succession of moments having elapsed to get to ‘now’ if there is an infinite past. That’s just not so. There’s no paradox in there being an infinite past and no beginning, since there’s no point within the infinite past since when an infinite amount of moments could have elapsed. Only if you assume a point before all points in the infinite past—a beginning definitionally—you have an infinite amount of moments elapsed since then, telling you that a beginning and an infinite past is incompatible—but this is trivial. Your argument doesn’t show a problem for an infinite past, but it’s a very common error to think that it does.
Maybe the link you provided will give something which clicks with me on some level, but I don’t see the flaw in my argument.
Here’s a question for you: If you can have an infinite succession of moments before now, and we are still progressing into the future, then how is it logical/mathematical to say that we are now at infinity+1, infinity+2, etc. as we move into the future? (I mean, you can say casually ‘infinity times infinity’ but when you get into the reality of the situation, if you ever have ‘reached infinity,’ that is it. It is already beyond any number.) I sense I may be not grasping some fundamentality of what you are saying… possibly not easy for you to explain to me as I don’t really have much of an advanced base in math.
Hmm. Given my recent understanding of irrational numbers (pi) I am less convinced of my original answer. The problem I would have said (and still am not really unconvinced of ) is that an infinitely long line is only conceptual. (In what seems to be our physical universe at least)
An infinite amount of pi numbers are “available,” but we can’t reach the end ever. Although, saying that we have gone through an infinite amount of successive moments in the past is to me the same thing as saying that all the numbers of pi has been calculated. The past is no longer a conceptual infinity, but there has been an infinite length (of time) behind us.
In a way, if there were able to be a witness of all past moments, then there is able to be a witness of all pi numbers. In what seems to be our physical dimension (not going outside of it) this looks to be an impossibility.
Let me stop you right there. The argument that I’m making is that even given an infinte past, there isn’t an infinite succession of moments before now. Again, that’s because there is no time in the past since when an infinite succession of moments have elapsed.
Try to really imagine the case of somebody walking along an infinitely long line. If he is at some point, this doesn’t imply that he has walked infinitely many steps to get there. In fact, there just aren’t infinitely many steps to walk, since he can’t walk the line ‘from one end’ to where he is: there is no such end.
What you’re saying is this. Since the walker can only walk along the line, and he is now at some point on the line, and since the line goes infinitely far in either direction, in order to have gotten there, he must have traversed an infinite distance. But that’s flawed, since it assumes that the walker has started walking ‘at one end’. But there’s no end for him to do that.
Actually, the simplest physical model of our universe in accordance with experimental data is one in which it’s flat, which also means it’s spatially infinite. So this infinite line may exist in our universe; it’s just impossible to traverse it ‘from one end to the other’, since there are no ends.
Zero-syde, here is my response. Hopefully you can provide future responses in (mainly) layman terms because I am not a mathematician.
-What is meant by different infinities.
-You say, “You can reach infinity given an infinite amount of _____!” and also, “Infinity can be reached by infinite addition.” If you can, then answer me one question: What is pi, precisely? Conceptually, it is infinite. But in practically speaking (for me and you), we are not going to ever reach it.
You say, “this means add 1+1+1+1+1+… forever. Once you go forever, you’ve reached infinity.” The problem is you can’t ever actually do forever. Conceptually, maybe. Practically, no.
I say “we can’t add any time to an infinite amount” because we can’t actually get to infinity.
Don’t know what you are saying here.
I understand the circle analogy, and I see what you are saying. I think though you are taking the idea of the circle and then using the same concept for a line with two arrows at the ends denoting infinity. The thing is, that line is only conceptual. Have you ever actually looked at an infinite line, without it being ‘described’ with one or two arrows? The answer is no, and that is what I mean. An “actual” infinity is conceptual.
Time isn’t necessarily linear, at least in its ultimate reality, or in other dimensions. It could be a circle, it could be more like a 3D thing… a past-to present linear model of time isn’t the only conception of time. Thus, “outside of linear time” doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be any sort of progression/“progression” of events.
“Who??” What in the name of all that is good and holy made you add “who” to this statement? Why would it be a “who?” What is a “who” that can exist without time? Do you realize what the implications of a “being” that intervenes in the universe, which is also “outside” of time (short story: impossible to have free will - I hope you don’t also believe in divine punishment).
I sense stout atheism in this response. My personal experiences are at “worst” agnostic, to believing in some order of spirituality/divinity/etc. To me, this is a question of extra-dimensionality (some sort of dimensions beyond what seems to be our “usual” 4d universe). To me, something which created something out of nothing (matter), as well as CREATED TIME, entails a likelyhood of intentional design rather than simply randomness. I don’t want to turn this thread into a debate about religion however, there are plenty of other threads for that. However, it is one implication for me assuming that I am correct.
Perhaps not matter, or perhaps not matter as we know it.
A part of the reason I am not outright stating it is because, while for me I think this is likely the case, from my conclusions an extra-dimensional place with the capabilities to birth time and space is a possibility. An extra dimensional place is feasible purely from what my ideas/conclusions are, even if that is not what I think.
PS It isn’t necessarily true that my above principles are absolute. They may seem as absolute truth given what seems to be a consistent 4d universe but they don’t hold fast in and of themselves given the inherent paradox that I pointed out. I am using them as absolute truth insomuch that it is easier to explain my ideas. I suppose if you have been following this thread, I have said this enough and this is the case for future posts unless I say otherwise.
On Cardinality: ok, conceded, but the central point about different infinities stands. Bad example under scrutiny, but it does illustrate the point.
I’m going to use a tone that shows the fault in this logic, but understand that I don’t at all mean it personally. I say this because sometimes people find this line of argument offensive. It’s just really useful to show the fault here.
Basically what you are saying is that you know all about something that you can’t possibly know anything about. I mean, we really only know something by observing it. Even the die-hard faith based theists acknowledge that they “feel” god (and thereby observe him), and that is how they know he is there.
Show me nothing. Go on, show me a nothing.
It’s physically impossible to observe “nothing” therefore all you can do is make wild, unsupported conjecture about it.
Why can’t something come from nothing? Show me a nothing that prevents something from coming from it. Show me a property of nothing that prevents something from coming from it, and then show me the evidence that this property exists. I’ll save you time: you can’t.
So any argument that’s contigent upon a property of nothing is a nonstarter. Prove the property of nothing (you can’t) and then we’ll talk.
It may well be that something always comes from nothing. Nothing might well always convert into something. We can’t say it does or does not, because we cannot possibly observe this. Heck, nothing might in fact be the start of something.
Of course, you can always arbitrarily define a nothing that has x or y property, but if you define a nothing into existence and then claim that that nothing is what existed “before,” then you have a really elaborate tautology. “I define nothing as something that nothing can come from, therefore nothing can come from it.”
Why should we assume that the “nothing” you define is the “nothing” that (presumably) actually existed “before” the something/universe?
This leaves us with the same problem attributed earlier in the thread to Hawking. Anything that deals with “before” the universe is just wild conjecture, because whatever “was before” does not comport to any of the rules - logic, physics, etc - and we can’t deduce or infer anything about it.
P.S> I actually do know it’s etc, et cetera, but it’s been a habit since grade school. I mis-learned ect before I learned what it actually meant.
