David Quinn wrote:The fact that reality has no form means it has the property of having no form. Or at least that is a way we can speak about it - poetically, as it were. It also means that it has the property of not being able to be conceptualized. Nor can it possess the traits of a form - i.e. with beginnings and ends, and causes.
-
Does it follow then that you cannot aver under any circumstances what reality
cannot include? If it is infinite, that is, as you have said numerous times. It seems to me that if you can conceive of something, it
must exist somewhere within an infinite, boundless totality.
There is something lacking in your use of the word "infinite," yet I have not been able to put my finger on it. I do know it has been analyzed thoroughly in a mathematical context, and it is well known that some "infinities" are in fact larger than others. The set of natural numbers (1, 2, 3...) is infinite. The set of real numbers is also infinite. Yet there are demonstrably
more real numbers than there are natural numbers.
I think I have read one of Kevin's posts that seems to dismiss this, yet I remain uncomfortable with the way the word "infinite" is used here. It is not worked out in my mind yet why one should be able to exclude the possibility of the existence of a thing without a minimum number of qualifiers. For instance, take the trivial example of a mythological animal like the centaur or unicorn. You cannot say they don't exist. You can only say they don't exist on earth, at this time, as far as anyone knows for certain.
You can see where I could take this. You can say there is no effect without a cause. I can argue that not only must there be, somewhere, causeless effects - which then become causes - but there must be an infinite number of them, with the understanding that this "infinity" can be considered as a "smaller infinity" than the infinity of the Totality, as the Totality evidently contains all effects
with causes. It is not demonstrably nonsense to postulate that a thing can "eventuate" without being caused by anything else.
In many people's houses there is that one room, the attic, the basement, a crawlspace, or a spare bedroom, where odds and ends are dumped. It is a place where the things that don't fit nicely anywhere else are stored - the things we haven't gotten around to dealing with yet, and probably never will. The nonconceptualizability of your Totality is just such a room within your philosophy, and it is quite naturally where I am drawn to poke around.