The Beyond Philosophy
I have decided to expand my blog collection, so that I have one for each day of the week. The other blogs I have are Blogtrek, which shall be my Friday blog, and Beyond Opinion, which shall be my Saturday blog. This blog, Beyond God, will highlight religious-related items.
In this particular blog, I shall explain my philosophy of life and the ultimate. Briefly, there isn't an ultimate. No matter where you go, or what you do, or what kind of ultimate entity you can construct, one can always go beyond it. I get this philosophy from my main interest and expertise, mathematics, where one sees beyond all the time. For example, there is no greatest integer; given a number, I can always add one to it. This is true even of infinite numbers, the ones Georg Cantor defined over a century ago. The set of all finite numbers is infinite, the set of all countable ordinal numbers is uncountable, and the set of all cardinal numbers accessible through limits and taking the set of the previous cardinal is inaccessible, and so forth.
I apply this in other realms as well. For example, there is an afterlife, for death can't end everything; there is something beyond death, but we have absolutely no idea what's there. There is a supernatural but there is no way we can access it. If a medium at a seance were to actually bring up the voice of a long dead person, that voice would be natural, not supernatural.
And there is no God, or at least no God we can access. For if there were, we could go beyond it; for example, we could inquire who or what created God. Maybe it was Supergod. But then we would have to ask about who created Supergod, and so forth to infinity, and more than that, up through Cantor's ordinal numbers as well. This is what the Taoist saying was all about: the Tao that can be accessed is not the real Tao. For once you mention God, you have taken it down to your level, and you have something less than God.
So no matter what you think or come up with, we can always go beyond. And that is why I name this blog Beyond God.
In this particular blog, I shall explain my philosophy of life and the ultimate. Briefly, there isn't an ultimate. No matter where you go, or what you do, or what kind of ultimate entity you can construct, one can always go beyond it. I get this philosophy from my main interest and expertise, mathematics, where one sees beyond all the time. For example, there is no greatest integer; given a number, I can always add one to it. This is true even of infinite numbers, the ones Georg Cantor defined over a century ago. The set of all finite numbers is infinite, the set of all countable ordinal numbers is uncountable, and the set of all cardinal numbers accessible through limits and taking the set of the previous cardinal is inaccessible, and so forth.
I apply this in other realms as well. For example, there is an afterlife, for death can't end everything; there is something beyond death, but we have absolutely no idea what's there. There is a supernatural but there is no way we can access it. If a medium at a seance were to actually bring up the voice of a long dead person, that voice would be natural, not supernatural.
And there is no God, or at least no God we can access. For if there were, we could go beyond it; for example, we could inquire who or what created God. Maybe it was Supergod. But then we would have to ask about who created Supergod, and so forth to infinity, and more than that, up through Cantor's ordinal numbers as well. This is what the Taoist saying was all about: the Tao that can be accessed is not the real Tao. For once you mention God, you have taken it down to your level, and you have something less than God.
So no matter what you think or come up with, we can always go beyond. And that is why I name this blog Beyond God.
posted by Jim at 7:19 PM
2 Comments:
You say:
"The set of all finite numbers is infinite, the set of all countable ordinal numbers is uncountable, and the set of all cardinal numbers accessible through limits and taking the set of the previous cardinal is inaccessible, and so forth."
If the set of all finite numbers is infinite, would there not be a way to write the ultimate expression for all finite numbers?
No, such an expression would be infinite. Each number can be thought of as the set of all the previous numbers. The idea is that if S is the set of all finite numbers that are not members of themselves, then S would not be a member of itself, otherwise a contradiction. But then either S is a member of itself (contradiction) or S is not finite. The latter has to be the case. A revision of this argument shows the set of countable numbers to be uncountable and so forth.
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