Speakpigeon said:
First, personally, I don't know the answer to your question.
untermensche said:
If I asked you if god is a real or imaginary concept would you have the same problem?
If I asked about the flying spaghetti monster would you have the same problem?
That's irrelevant.
No it is not.
Yes, it is. That I don’t know is a fact that I know. There’s no point arguing about it.
So your insistence on arguing just shows you don’t understand the issue.
Your argument is just a stupid metaphor and that’s apparently all you can do. Take everyday expressions literally like a good Bible thumper and use metaphors like Jesus would have! It’s just pathetic. You are irrational.
And, it was already all explained in my post:
The question is whether it's a fact that I don't know.
And the answer is, yes, it's a fact.
As it is a fact that I don't know whether God exists or not and that I don't know whether the flying spaghetti monster exists or not.
I know the fact that I don't know.
So, why would knowing a fact be a problem for anybody?
See?
So, you’re not debating anything. You’re just repeating yourself like a mechanical prayer mill.
Those are imaginary made-up concepts just like infinity.
There is no difference.
There’s a difference. Infinity could exist even if God didn’t. Infinity could exist even if the Flying Spaghetti Monster didn’t.
But you are like Saint Thomas. You haven’t seen infinity with your own eyes so you’re sure it doesn’t exist.
What is idiotic is that you are pushing even further than Saint Thomas. You are saying that infinity not only doesn’t exist but could not exist. You think that since you haven’t seen infinity with your own eyes then no one could see it and therefore it couldn’t exit.
You’re the True Believer. You should set up a church to convert the heathens. Well, in a way, it’s already what you’re doing here. All your posts fall into that category of the sermon on the hill.
So, I have to repeat that: I don’t know whether infinity exist or not. It’s a fact that I don’t know that. And because unlike you I’m a rational person, I think this implies that infinity could exist. Not that it exists. That it could exist, which is best expressed by saying that the concept of infinity is not logically inconsistent. So, I think infinity could exist because I don’t know that it doesn’t and nobody has provided any conclusive argument that it could not exist.
To even think infinity could be real is to be able to imagine experiencing it in some way.
Can you support your claim? Because it's clearly not true.
I can easily support it.
If we can't even imagine how a concept could possibly be experienced there is no way we could possibly claim it is true.
LOL. This is just a REPEAT.
If we claim some building has infinite floors we have to somehow be able to imagine how this is even possible.
Floors without end?
To build it would take materials without end, in other words more materials than exist in the universe.
LOL ^ 2!
This is irrelevant. The past is not a building. There’s no reason to assume that for an infinite past to exist it would be necessary that it had been built up from the present moment backward up to infinity. You’re again using metaphors. That’s all you can do. It’s irrational. It might be good rhetoric but it’s for the idiots and on a par with commercials for washing powders.
Trying to just imagine a real infinity quickly becomes an absurdity.
See, you’re not prepared to debate properly. I already showed how this is a red herring but you prefer to ignore what I said. So, here it is again:
There's a clear difference between "imagining" and "conceiving". I don't know about you but I can conceive of the number pi and yet I could not imagine it.
And I can conceive of an infinite past and yet I cannot imagine it.
And we certainly think pi is real though it is defined as a series containing an infinite number of terms. Scientists think pi is real because they use pi in physical laws and engineers build things using equations containing pi.
An infinite past can be conceived as an infinite series Tn: Tn+1 = Tn – Δt, where Δt > 0 and each Tn is one moment. So, we can conceive of an infinite past even though we cannot imagine it.
This view of an infinite past is also the default view. That’s the conception people have without enough bothering to think about it. And you can’t do it?!
So, can you explain what would be wrong with this definition of an infinite past?
Speakpigeon said:
Second, I don't believe anyone knows it, so I don't believe you know the answer to your own question, although it seems to me your post strongly suggests you believe you do.
untermensche said:
I know it has as much chance of being real as the flying spaghetti monster.
Speakpigeon said:
Can you support you claim? I'm sure you could not.
All concepts that were just invented and not discovered or inferred from actual data have the same chance of being true. None are more likely to be true.
And we are supposed to take your word for it?! Well, I don’t.
First, your belief that you can assess the likelihood of concepts being true is delusional and you don’t provide any argument to the contrary.
Second, all concepts have to been invented first. And all the concepts that we may think today true to the world had to be invented before they might have been “discovered”. Your point is just idiotic and vacuous.
So infinity has the same likelihood of being true as Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
And people who think infinity is something real have the same likelihood of proving it as proving Superman is real.
Probabilities are empirical data based on past observations and can turn out to be wrong, and do prove wrong often enough. So, your argument just shows you don’t understand much. As far as we know, no probability could possibly prove that something doesn’t exist. And things in the past that rational people and experts would have said had little or no probability of existing turned out to exist (or so we believe today), like space-time, curvature of space, electrons, quarks, galaxies, the Big Bang, and zillions of other things that are today taken for granted.
You have no argument here. All you do is repeat your beliefs as a mantra while rotating your prayer mill and spewing metaphors by the shitload.
That is why you don't even try. You understand it is absurd folly to try to prove infinity is real. It can't be done.
Er, no.
I wouldn’t even try to somehow “exhibit” infinity as I would a gold coin because I don’t know how I could do that. But that’s clearly very different from thinking infinity could not exist.
And again, I provided as rational definition of an infinite past as an infinite series Tn: Tn+1 = Tn – Δt, where Δt > 0 and each Tn is one moment. This is good enough for most people to prove we can conceive of an infinite past even if we cannot imagine it, experience it, let alone exhibit it. There’s nothing to discuss and yet you keep going using inept Superman metaphors while shaking your prayer mill.
And since it can't be shown in any way to be real it is only an act of faith for a person to think it could be.
No. I would be an act of faith to believe the past is infinite.
There’s a clear difference between believing it is and thinking it could. I guess your English is not so good that you could make the distinction. I would suggest you go back to school.
To think an infinite past could exist is rational.
What is irrational is your idea that it couldn’t exist. What is irrational is to think anything couldn’t exist.
It is an invented, not discovered concept.
I don't even know how that's supposed to be relevant. All concepts have to be invented before we have a chance of discovering whether there's any reality out there that could correspond to them, and often we think we did just that only to realise that was probably not the case, like the concept of the Earth being at the centre of the world, and a litany of scientific concepts that have since been discarded.
So tell me a way we will "discover" infinity? Where do you suppose we might "discover" it?
Please be specific.
That’s irrelevant for two reasons.
First, you could have asked the same idiotic question to somebody in Ancient Greece proposing the concept of the electron. And how could anyone at the time have explained how to go about discovering electrons?
More importantly, we’re back to the distinction between believing something exist and thinking it could exist. I don’t need to have any good reason or evidence for thinking that something could exist (i.e. that its existence is not logically impossible). All I need is that I don’t see any contradiction in the definition of its concept. As I don’t see any contradiction in the concept of an infinite past, I think an infinite past could exist.
If you have no possible way to even discover it to think it is real is ridiculous.
Again, your making the wrong assumption that I would believe that the past is infinite. I don’t.
If your English were good enough, you would have understood by now that I think an infinite past could exist, not that I believe that the past is infinite.
So, can you support your repeated suggestion that I think or believe that infinity or an infinite past exists?
untermensche said:
To think such a thing is possible is to think the flying spaghetti monster will show up one day.
Speakpigeon said:
Can you explain how that would work?
To believe that it is not logically impossible that there are Aliens out there is to believe they WILL show up one day at our door?! Are you insane?
So you have some concept you can't demonstrate is real in any way but you believe it is real.
And you think that is my problem.
Thinking an alien will come is just thinking something similar to ourselves exists somewhere in the vast universe.
That you see this as equivalent to believing that imaginary concepts are real is telling.
So, you do believe that an Alien is going to pop up at your door, do you?!
To recap:
You use irrelevant arguments: You use arguments against the belief that something exists that you apply against the conception that it could exist. You clearly don’t notice that there’s a difference between belief and conception, and between exist and could exist.
You use metaphors: conceiving of an infinite past is somehow similar to believing in the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And you think an infinite past is somehow similar to a building. Using metaphors as argument is totally inept but you don’t seem to realise this. You could well use your metaphors in a Church but here you need to provide arguments or facts. But you don’t seem to do those.
And you just repeat in lieu of providing the supporting argument required.
You also suffer of the same condition as Saint Thomas. If you haven’t seen it with your own very eyes, then it cannot exist. And you think it’s an argument!
You also ignore a lot of what I say, picking the bits you think you can chew. If you want to debate on the OP, then do it properly.
Your English is also not good enough so you don’t know the distinction between believing that something exists and thinking that something could exist. You don’t see the distinction between imagining an infinite past and conceiving of it. You may want to retrain yourself from scratch in this department.
EB