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hey it's Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about understanding absolute infinity part 1 [Music] you this is going to be a multi-part series exploring the logic of infinity the structure we might say of infinity the mechanics of how infinity works and what exactly it is we're going to require multiple episodes to accomplish this because it's no small topic and it's difficult to wrap our minds around some of this counterintuitive and very paradoxical stuff and also I want to introduce it's a very juicy and interesting historical context which will come in the latter episodes this right here is the deepest thing you could possibly understand as a human being I haven't found anything deeper this will completely and utterly blow you away we're going to be looking at the question of what is existence that's primarily what we're concerned about here what is existence itself not what is the content within existence that's what I usually talk about is the content of existence that's what science usually talks about that's what everything that you ever see on TV or ever read about in the books or ever think about yourself is mostly concerned about is the content of existence but nobody really asked the question what is existence itself the substance of existence the substance of everything the substance of all the content that we see and I got news for you it's not molecules it's not chemicals it's not atoms it's not strings it's not energy it's not fields it's not mathematical equations or numbers it's not any of those things all of those are yet more content within existence none of those actually explain what existence is in this episode we're actually going to answer the question it's not going to be speculative it's not just going to be mere philosophy we're actually going to answer this question without beating around the bush we're not going to evade the question we're going to leave you the satisfying answer at least as far as is humanly possible using our intellect we're going to go as far as the intellect allows us to go right here so stick with me this question of what is existence really belongs within category of some other questions and there's different angles at which we can come at this topic from so we can ask ourselves what is distance maybe you've pondered that when you were kid and you're curious about that that's good we'll answer that today another question along those lines is what is reality that's really the same thing what is being what is truth with a capital T what is the distinction what is awareness what is consciousness what is the biggest picture possible for our understanding what is God what am i what is death all of these questions they might seem different from each other but really they're all trying to ask the same thing and the answer to all of them is the exact same answer the answer is I'm not going to withhold it from you it's absolute infinity that's it that's the answer now of course that probably doesn't do much for you because you don't really understand what absolute infinity is and how it could possibly answer all these questions so that's why we dispense of time attacking this now maybe you're the type of person who thinks that such questions are impossible to answer and you might think well Leo who are you to stand up here how arrogant of you to presume that you could possibly answer these sources questions after all there have been thousands of very intelligent human beings for since the beginning of human history tackling these questions and struggling with them and trying to answer them and they all disagree and there's no consensus and we know that there are no definite answers that have come up about from that and so therefore it's very arrogant to assume that you can answer this right now well be careful who you're calling arrogant because actually I'm coming at this from a very open inquiring position where I'm not sure whether the answer can or can't be found I'm interested in the inquiry whereas people who take the position that these questions cannot be answered notice that that actually is the true arrogance that's not humility that's arrogance in disguise because to say that these things cannot be answered that's a definitive statement that you're making so you're saying I know that these things cannot be answered and the fact is that you don't know that have you tried all the possible ways of finding these answers have you even tried a dozen different ways I bet you that if you honestly look at it you'll see that you haven't even tried a dozen different ways so be careful don't jump to conclusions about things that we really don't know let's start from the very beginning and just assume that we don't know anything and we're just going to do some inquiring and let's see how far we can get and hey you know let's leave the possibility that we might get lucky and we might stumble on to some amazing answers that we couldn't have even anticipated we would get so let's get to work before we start to philosophize here I want to read you a quote from a Roman poet and philosopher named Lucretia's and his dates were 95 to 55 BC so this was before Christ before Julius Caesar right about that time and the reason I want to quote this to you is because he hit the nail right on the head in a very few short stunts as he describes the nature of all of existence and here's what he says quote the universe is not founded in any direction if it were it would necessarily have a limit somewhere but clearly a thing cannot have a limit unless there is something outside to limit it in all dimensions alike on this side or that upward or downward through the universe there is no end and quote now that unpacks this notion of absolute is going to be a little bit more but still it's too condensed to really make sense of although he's exactly right and as we keep going you'll start to see why now let's begin our investigation by thinking about this little thought experiment and the way we're going to think about this is we're going to think the way that God might think about how to create reality now don't be put off by this word God I'm just kind of using it tongue-in-cheek here for a thought experiment so imagine that you were God and you were sitting there and you decided to create all of reality how would you do it that's an interesting way to think about this problem of existence and as soon as we start to think about it this way we immediately start to see that we run into some very fundamental problems this is what I call the bootstrap problem and the self reflection problem what is this well let's just say in a very naive sense that God is up there somewhere in the heavens and he wants to create the universe how would he do that well he would like think about it snap his fingers something would happen some sort of magic in them out pops the whole universe and all in reality something like that right that's the standard notion of the kind of religious creation but then of course we have to ask how is God doing this and more importantly where is God sitting in order to do this because we're interested here our question is about all of existence so basically all of reality and all of reality means even larger than just our universe because we don't know maybe our universe just one out of many universes out there scientists have put forth all sorts of you multiverse theories so we have to be open to that possibility so we're not just talking about our universe we're talking about all of reality here everything now notice that when you talk about all of reality that presents a very interesting problem for us because that leaves no space or room for anything to be elsewhere outside of it so if God created all of reality then where is God located wherever he's located he's outside of reality where that space where he supposedly lives or resides or where he came from well that needs to be included in reality - I mean that's supposedly real right what else would it be so see we where this problem of self-reflection and bootstrapping how do you get something from scratch what is God made out of what's the substance of God what rules does he operate under see now religion usually this is this question says odd well the you can't really understand God he's beyond our understanding but see that explains nothing and so we're just kind of like left without knowing where all of existence came from science also runs into this problem which we'll see as we go on how could anything come about from scratch and what would it even mean to explain the origin of all of existence because whatever explanation you have or whatever cause you come up with is itself subject to the question of where did that come from and how does it work so this is a very uh tricky sort of chicken and egg problem now to understand and to answer this question in this problem we're going to synthesize a lot of different domains of understanding different notions need to come together and it needs to be a pretty big synthesis of course as you might expect because we have the ultimate biggest question that we try to answer so here the different categories we're going to talk about I just wanna give you a preview so we're going to talk about limits and physical laws we're going to need to think about standards foundations and grounding we're going to need to think about arbiters who's who who's different who's that are out there perspectives and relativity if anything about duality boundaries contrasts and distinctions relationships and hierarchies form and also formlessness and impossibility power and weirdness all of these notions will come together for us to unravel this puzzle but before I start talking about all those let's do a quick thought experiment to get right to the heart of the issue so what I'd like you to do and I really want you to actually do this right now is put on your thinking cap and use your imagination to imagine for me an infinite object do that right now as best you can I know it's a tall order to fill but imagine some kind of infinite object you got it right I hope you got one okay pause it if you need to and think about it and really imagine an infinite object there's no right and wrong answers here just imagine something okay so what did you imagine well if you're probably like me or like most people than what you imagined is let's say for simplicity sake a sphere a very very large infinitely side's sphere expanding out into infinity that's good that's a start but what we should notice about that is that you actually didn't imagine an infinite object there what you imagined and this is commonly what we do when thing about infinity is you just imagine something very very large in one dimension so here you imagined a sphere which is not an infinite egg it's a finite object but you gave it an infinite diameter or radius and that's a start but notice that that's only in really well you could say it's in three dimensions breadth width and height but that's all just in space so you gave it infinite spatial dimension so we'll call that one dimension of infinity all right but that's not what I asked you for what I asked you for is to actually imagine an infinite object now notice that the sphere is finite because it has a certain finitude it has certain limits it's a fear for example and it's not a cube it's got a certain color and on a certain other kind of color for example maybe you imagine a transparent sphere so in that case it has no color at all or maybe you imagined a blue sphere or a white sphere and then that means it's white or it's blue but then if it's white it's not yellow and if it's blue that it's not green you see so therefore it's finite in its color and it's finite in its shape because the sphere when it's a sphere it's not a cube and when it's a cube it's not a pyramid and when it's a pyramid it's not something else so let's take that understanding and now what I want you to do is imagine for me a sphere in two dimensions an infinite object in two dimensions let's keep it a sphere so it's got infinite space station Asoka but now give it a second infinite dimension let's say color so what that would mean and I want you to actually try to imagine this right now it's very important is that this object is sphere not only is it infinitely wide but it's got infant colors that means red yellow green blue and white and black all together and transparency altogether plus all the infrared and ultraviolet magnetic spectrum that we've never even seen before with its human eyes put all of those properties into this sphere so that it has them simultaneously so it's got infinite color so do that right now and notice that what you've got there is you've got two dimensions of infinity infinity this way and infinity in terms color so that's good but now let's take it up another notch and imagine infinity in three dimensions so what other dimension of infinity we can imagine well how about smells now be honest when you were thinking of this sphere or this object did you imagine that it has some kind of smell probably not you don't usually think of spheres or geometric objects as having smells but why not let's give it a smell so it could smell like a fish it could smell like strawberries it could smell like flowers etc etc you get the idea but now to make it infinite let's give it infinite smells so all of the smells that you've ever smelled and could possibly smell that any human being has ever known every other creature in the entire world or universe that it's ever encountered to smell put all those smells and stick them on this sphere simultaneously so do that in your mind and now you see you have a sphere in three dimensions now you can probably tell where I'm going with this now I'd like you to imagine a truly infinite object an absolutely infinite object an object which is infinite in infinite dimensions try to imagine that what might that look like give it your best shot now notice right there as you're imagining that that's as close as you can possibly get to imagining God or absolute infinity now again don't be thrown off by this word god if you don't like the word God just substitute it with reality or existence or absolute infinity these all point to the same thing but right there you just imagined it except notice that you've run into a problem didn't you because what form did this object take it couldn't fear because it also needs to be a cube and a pyramid and every other possible shape so it needs to have infinite smells infinite colors infinite shapes infinite everything infinite size and not just large so don't confuse infinity with just largeness that's not infinity infinity includes the large and the small all together every single property in characteristic possible needs to be in this object so immediately you notice a problem here is that your mind literally cannot imagine infinite object because just by the very fact that you're using your imagination and your thoughts and thoughts are mental images and also verbal labels inside your mind those are things and so whatever image you have of this thing it isn't it you see whatever image you have is not it even if you say it's nothing it's just emptiness that isn't it either because that's some kind of form in your mind see so we run it against this very interesting obstacle of how do you actually imagine the infinite and it kind of makes sense that it would be a problem because after all we're trying to imagine every possibility of everything that could ever possibly be and not be all at once using our limited brains and our limited Minds and it doesn't seem to work and maybe that's not an accident that it doesn't seem to work maybe that's how it should be all right so now you got a little taste we'll come back to that hold onto to that image let's dig into some of these different domains that we need to talk about so first let's think about limits and physical laws so notice that our reality is defined by physical laws that's how science thinks of reality and also what we call reality is basically just a set of limits by limit we mean that things are limited to being a certain way they are not any which way they want to be the planet is a certain way the Stars are a certain way the Sun is a certain way the Milky Way galaxy is a certain way all of our universe have certain laws and is a certain very particular way that science is discovering every single year so if we think about a soap bubble that's just a little example take a soap bubble and you can see that it's a limited object it has a certain shape has a certain size has a certain color has certain features and properties why is that well we think obviously it has to be that way because it's a physical object so it has a certain number of molecules in there that are making it up so this soap bubble can't just be infinitely large in diameter because as soon as it gets too large there's just not going to be enough molecules connecting with each other to make that shape work and it's just going to burst open you see and also because it's mat of water or what other chemicals you know it's not made of gold it's not orange colored it's the transparent sort of color right it's not every possible way it could be it has to be a very particular way to be the soap bubble that we know it to be and so forth for all of reality for our entire universe but it's easy to understand why the soap bubble is limited because we can appeal to things that are outside of it so the reason we say the soap bubble is limited because of physical laws and various other forces that exist outside the environment that it's in and yada-yada-yada but now let's think about reality as a whole what limits reality as a whole that's very interesting that's something science does an answer very well even though people sometimes think that it does you might say well we have these physical constants and laws like we have the law of gravitation we have certain electrochemical and magnetic laws and these basically define and constrain our whole reality and things like the gravitational and all these other physical constants that are very finely tuned which create our universe and make it the way that it is that these are what give our universe its limits but the question of course is what enforces these constants like the gravitational constant well if you ask the scientists they'll tell you we don't know or nothing enforces it it just is that's how it is these constants are how they are there's nothing more fundamental but you got to ask what exactly is a gravitational constant and where does it exist is it like sitting outside of reality and somehow constraining it no it can't be that way because as soon as you put something outside of reality automatically areia that our concept of reality expands to now include that thing that you stuck outside and so all the sudden now it's inside so the question becomes what limits the gravitational constant or whatever kind of constant you can imagine or any kind of force or any kind of any kind of limit whatsoever what's beyond that limit and then beyond that limit and beyond that limit what enforces each limit higher and higher up the hierarchy so you see we start to run into the infinite regress problem and a scientist will tell you well like you can't ask those questions we just don't know we only know what we can see and what we can figure out with our equations but see that doesn't explain anything at all because to say that the universe is the way it is because of a gravitational constant is really no different than saying that reality is the way it is because of god because in both cases you're just positing some kind of entity gravity or God or anything else and you're just saying it's there we don't know how it got there or what it's doing there or how it's enforced but it's there and it makes everything else be the way that it is but that didn't explain anything because we want to know what is reality as a whole so contrary to popular opinion science and religion both ignore this question because it's a very tricky question to answer many philosophers who are supposed to think about this stuff actually never bother to go this deep with their philosophy and to to ponder at this level they usually satisfy themselves with some kind of answer which is just some sort of hand-wavy some kind of excuse it's not really an answer well one possibility you want to consider is that maybe there is no ultimate limit and that maybe this infinite regress is not really a problem but is actually a feature of reality see a lot of times most times when human beings run into an infinite regress we say well that's clearly a mistake can't be like that but you know we're doing this investigation from scratch we're not making any assumptions about anything here we can't take anything for granted so in our investigation we are going to be accepting maybe uncomfortable truths and one of these might be that we have our infinite regress and maybe that's how it should be and maybe reality has no ultimate limit so let's just keep that in mind as we move on to cover some of these other notions so the next notion we want to talk about is standards foundations and grounding so the interesting philosophical question here is what is the standard by which anything is judged or assessed this is a very tricky topic because I'm not talking about your personal judgments of like oh that's beautiful that's ugly that's good that's evil I like that I hate this not these kinds of judgments I mean judgments and assessments of all of reality how can you assess any of it by what standard what standard shall we use to make sense of reality you see why this is tricky because the standard itself whichever one we choose is itself part of reality and part of the problem and could easily be disputed by somebody else so let's say we wanted to simplistically measure reality with a hard stick just a yardstick well that yardstick we would think like okay well we can just walk around the universe and just kind of measure from here to there we can maybe measure how many yards sticks there are across the Sun across the whole galaxy and so forth and that would be good and now we're understanding what the universe is except notice that really this yardstick is a piece of the problem it's a piece of reality itself and it only works relatively speaking we can't take this yardstick and then now somehow move it outside of reality and now measure reality from outside as though like we wanted to measure the the diameter of all of reality you notice we can't do that you see because if the yardstick was able to somehow become outside of reality a reality would automatically expand to now include that yardstick and rubber that yardstick is outside of reality would have to be included inside of reality see very tricky but not just yardsticks all methods all standards that we could use to make any kind of measurements or sense of reality are subject to this problem because they are all subsets of reality itself for example the scientific method or some kind of religious method or reasoning or logic or any other kind of method or standard that you could imagine is also part of the reality that's trying to be explained here and that creates a problem because it's like we're trying to reach outside of a reality to grab a hold of reality but we can't do that because the reaching outside is the reality you see and we're trying to do the impossible feat here of explaining the ultimate or the superset using a subset you see how every single method whether sign typically or anything else or philosophical is going to be a subset a small piece of the entire whole you see that it's very important keep that in mind as we keep going another question we can ask ourselves here there a fundamental one is what could ground anything how could anything be a foundation for anything else this question of grounding is very important and a good example just to illustrate what I mean by grounding is we can ask the question what's the grounding for my standing here before you I'm standing right now on my feet what we could say okay so I'm standing on the carpet so the carpet is the grounding for me but what's the grounding for the carpet well it's the foundation of the building and what's the grounding for the foundation of the building it's the earth and what's the grounding for the whole earth well we would say it's the vacuum of empty space but what's the grounding for the vacuum of empty space that's a little tricky now we might say well it's the space-time continuum that Einstein described what's the grounding for that then and now we just say well that's as far as it goes that is the ultimate ground space-time that's it but is that really it that's an interesting question another way to think about grounding is we could say well we can zoom in see if we zoom into you and to your feet and to the earth we could see that there are molecules in there and we break those molecules apart there's atoms in there but what's the foundation for the atoms well it's the quarks and what's the foundation for the quarks we split those apart and then it's some smaller subatomic particles and what's the foundation for those well we go all the way down into the deepest bowels of modern physics and it's something like string theory and these are little vibrating strings that make up everything but then what's the grounding for strength for strings what do they matter what's their substance and then we say of course you don't know there's the strings aren't made out of anything they're just little vibrating strings or we could even say they're like equations so are we now saying that mathematical equations are the grounding for everything is that really correct so here we potentially also run into an infinite regress problem you see because we can go lower and lower and lower into our foundations and discover more and more foundations underneath those and the only thing that seems to limit that is our is our limited tools and microscopes and telescopes and ability to round to count to the 100 decimal points so that just becomes an observation problem for the most part but we have to also be open to the possibility that hey maybe there is no ground for all of reality maybe there is an infinite regress and there's an infinite chain of objects going all the way down and it never ends like those Russian nesting matroska dolls and if they go on forever there's never a doll at the very end that you reach to where you say ah that's the one that's the one the innermost one the most fundamental one and there might not also be the outermost one now that's a pretty weird notion we don't like to think of reality as being the set of infinite dolls because there's actually a very interesting truth that we have to admit in that case if it truly is infinite like that in both directions or in all directions then ultimately what is the substance of everything it might have to be nothing literally so so just keep that in mind for now let's move on and talk about who's arbiters perspectives and relativity now don't be confused by this word whose I just mean who who is like you and me and your dog these are all whose and basically what that just denotes is a perspective on life that's what who is we think of the world as being constituted of these various perspectives don't we you have a perspective which is different from mine different from your spouse different from your dog different from your kids different from your co-workers and so forth very obvious but many people don't really think about the ramifications of this because that means everyone is looking at reality from their limited perspective and we acknowledge that every perspective is limited isn't it because well that's almost true by definition that's what a perspective is it's a viewpoint onto the world which means it's not the whole world is just a viewpoint and if we're very careful and honest we have to admit that really all we know of the world is just our viewpoints of the world we never see the world or the universe or reality in any kind of raw direct sense we only see it through our perspectives don't we isn't that true check for yourself right now now the very fundamental question that arises here is if that's the case who is the arbiter of what is real who is the arbiter of objective reality whose perspective shall we use as the standard to adjudicate between all the other perspectives that are available hmm this is a very deep epistemic problem because if you say well my perspective of course my perspective is the right one well how do you know well I just know it's mine it's right but then that's just another perspective if you take that perspective you see and if you say well okay what we'll do Leo is we'll just take all the most intelligent human beings and we'll we'll Greg we'll gather a consensus a consensus of all the scientists all their perspectives combined together and averaged out through some sort of democratic process that will yield the ultimate perspective that's how we'll know which perspective is correct but what is that but another perspective and even if you do that I mean it's quite obvious that what you're doing is you're taking some sort of average or is you're using sort of democratic process to adjudicate truth and reality that that just doesn't strike you as correct right because in a democracy many people are still left out in many opinions and perspectives are left out how do you know that you're including the right ones and you're not leaving out the wrong ones and why would just a majority consensus be the right way how do we know that's right isn't that just another perspective you might say well we have the perspective of science but what is the perspective of science that's also a perspective a partial perspective you might say no leo science is the right perspective we all know that right that's a perspective no Leo it's really right yeah that's another perspective you see you can't get out of this problem you're always stuck in a perspective and if you take a close look it's always your perspective you don't have access to really anybody else's perspective but yours so even this notion of Sciences perspective well that's a rather conceptual notion there really is no such notion there is your perspective and there's a perspective a bunch of other scientists individually speaking but then the side if they don't agree a lot of scientists disagree about how to view the world and what it really is so this becomes a big problem whose experience set is the ultimate one how can we claim that there even is an ultimate reality or an objective reality out there when we don't have direct access to it and all our perspectives are ultimately different and they disagree pin or hole agree not even close are we to say that all these perspectives are equally correct well no we don't want to say that we would never want to say that we want to say my perspective is correct or our perspective is correct and theirs is wrong but based on what are you saying that your perspective is correct based on your perspective can you see the vicious circularity there the question begging when you say your perspective is correct or our perspective is the best that's your perspective to somebody else their perspective is different you see now here's a very interesting thing to think about what might the ultimate perspective be like if we're thinking about God what would God's perspective be the ultimate perspective not the limited human perspective and notice by the way that we were talking about human perspectives but human perspectives you know there's a lot more than going on in the rule in the world than just human perspectives so we might think that okay Leo here's how we can solve this problem Humanity is advancing and you know technology is becoming a big thing now so we've got the internet that seems like a potential solution here if we upload all the world's information to the Internet and then somehow we're able to like hook our brain directly into the internet matrix-style now we've got access to the whole Internet and that gives me a much wider perspective than ever before millions of books injected straight into my brain and also if we interconnect all 7 billion people on the planet in this way we've got this sort of hive mind this board-like organism the super organism of minds and now we've got a much broader perspective and now we've got God's perspective right well not so fast because notice you are still infinitely far away from God's perspective in that case why is that so because scientists estimate that there are right now on this planet alive 10 quintillion insects 10 quintillion insects those are all individual perspectives so if we wanted God's perspective truly we would have to incorporate not only all 7 billion people but 10 quintillion insects and not just that but every single living entity on this planet and not just that because that would still leave out a lot of inanimate objects trees and old trees aren't inanimate but it would leave out trees it would leave out grass it would leave out rocks and mountains and everything but I mean we need to include that to really get the full God's perspective wouldn't we you might say well a tree doesn't really have a perspective so we don't you include it ah but even that in a sense is sort of its perspective that isn't how a perspective so we conclude that - and we don't really know what a tree's perspective is maybe it does have some kind of very rudimentary perspective very non-human but still we need to include that in any kind of aliens we find out that we include so not just this planet not just the solar system every single star hundreds of millions of billions of stars billions of galaxies throughout the entire universe and that would just be our universe if there are multiple universes we include everything there as well now if we did all that now we're getting a little bit closer to God's perspective you see so this is a really tricky we're very very far away from God's perspective if such a thing is even remotely possible now Albert Einstein a little over a hundred years ago released the theory of general relativity and he proved that time think about this time itself is relative [ __ ] time itself really get this right now because this is very important to this line of reasoning of all the things that we know about reality one of the things that we think of is the most absolute and sure thing that is certainly not relative to other people and other creatures is time itself right surely time is absolute and yet Albert Einstein proved it was otherwise time is relative and people lie sometimes here are people complaining when I talk about moral relativism and they get offended about moral relativism Leo moral relativism how could that be [ __ ] time is relative physical time and space are relative that's what our science is demonstrating and we have a lot of technologies like GPS systems and so forth and a lot of successful predictions using Einstein's general relativity it's quite well supported by the empirical evidence so time is relative now what this opens us up to is an interesting possibility what if there's no mistake what if we have all these perspectives and that that's what constitutes reality and that what reality is is not some sort of objective physical world out there behind the scenes but actually it is an absolute relativity that reality including physical reality and everything you've ever known is absolutely relative it is that way from your perspective and it's a totally different way from some other perspective and that there's a there's no mistake about that that's how it actually is that's not just how it seems that's not just an appearance that's not just a subjective thing that is reality now that the rather elegant solution to some of these very tricky problems it might allow us then to bootstrap everything from nothing see because all we need to do is actually create a perspective and that in a sense is creating reality as we create more perspectives we create more reality and without perspectives we might say there is no reality or the reality is that everything is absolutely relative alright so I know that's kind of a weird notion to think about but put that on the back burner and let's move on to the next topic which is let's think about duality boundaries contrasts and distinctions these are very fundamental to how we experience reality notice that everything you know and experience is actually a set of opposites otherwise known as dualities or distinctions up versus down left versus right North versus South the top of the earth versus the bottom of the earth big versus small black versus white sharp versus dull pretty versus ugly smart versus stupid rich versus poor and even existing versus non existing really notice right now in your experience directly that the only way that you know anything or experience anything is by contrast that's how things are known that's what things are in a sense is they are contrasts from the things which they are not so if I have a dog the dog contrasts against the background I'll get around what you see him if there's no contrasting the dog in the background maybe there wouldn't be a dog and a background not just that you couldn't see them I'm not just talking about color here I'm talking about contrast in a much more fundamental way try to imagine right now a perspective which has zero contrast what do you get notice that you can't even get a perspective going because a perspective is contrasted with no perspective lack of perspective or we might say everything is right you don't even have that let alone any kind of content within that perspective you can't have any kind of content there can't be any physical objects or things in that perspective of no contrast because how would you tell it apart from everything else it would just be sort of a a whiteout or a blackout but even that isn't quite accurate because the only sense we can make of white out or black out is because they're opposites so what would you have if you didn't have any contrast notice that you couldn't even point at an object within this no contrast perspective because to point at a thing requires that the thing is contrasted from the background and whatever you're pointing with has to be contrasted from the thing because if there's no contrast between the thing and the pointing it's one see very interesting so contrast we can also call these distinctions one thing is distinct from another thing and that it's not it it's different from it so a cat is distinct from a dog why is that because the cat is this way and it's not the dog way if the cat looked and behaved exactly like the dogs you couldn't tell them apart now these distinctions are very interesting things because we tend to hold them as objectively true but this doesn't pass muster if we look at it even a little bit in depth because we know that human beings make all sorts of different distinctions for example there's the cliche example of how they say that Eskimos have what 10 or 20 different words for different types of snow because they make that many fine distinctions within snow or as us Westerners who don't live in the North Pole we only make two distinctions snow and ice sea so distinctions are in a sense relative what kind of distinctions you make shapes the kind of world that you see you see that a lot more significant that you would initially think a good artist or a good mechanic or a good carpenter will make many many more distinctions about their domain of mastery like let's say carpentry than you would to you you walk into a carpenter's shop you see a bunch of different type of wood and you call all of it just wood because you never bothered to study wood but to a carpenter he makes 20 different types of distinctions of wood and even the same type of wood he'll look at it he'll make all these micro distinctions within that take a look at this wood look at the grain in the wood look at these holes look at the knots in the wood all the sort of stuff the flexibility different characteristics of the wood see but to an uninformed person it's just wood and that person just walks into the shop and seeds wood whereas the carpenter walks into a shop he something different something more refined what if distinctions are relative as well what if all contrasts are relative after all how do we arbitrate between different possible distinctions you make a distinction that way I make my distinction this way how do we tell who is right see we run at that problem we ran into the four about perspectives and arbiters it's also interesting to think about how the opposites are joined so notice that you have a bunch of distinctions in your experience but it's not like these distinctions just live off by themselves everything in your experience is a unity so it's not like there's a cat floating up over there and a dog down there and you're you're a tree in your house over there and a car over there no it's all unified together so even though we say that black is not white and up is not down where exactly is the boundary there see it's tricky a good way to look at it is take a coin take a coin and look at its two sides you got the tails and the heads now we say that tails and heads are totally opposite things and yet when we look at the coin look at the edge of the coin where exactly does tails end and heads begin is there any clear demarcation or boundary there notice that the sides actually touch and that technically speaking heads actually is tails in tails as heads they can't be separate from each other you see maybe this is not an accident maybe there's something deep and fundamental about that maybe all these polar opposites and all these dualities have to actually be together because they're all unified in our experience they don't just float around somewhere how can anything be separate from anything else and who says what constitutes a legitimate boundary so for example there's the boundary called leo you think of the boundary called leo as being this right here or this right here right that's the boundary and if I ask you well how do you really know that this boundary here is what constitutes Leo you say well look it's very clear like the skin clearly you're you're encapsulated by this skin but if we take that line of reasoning a little bit further we ask well but zoom in on the skin the skin has all these little pores and it has little hairs do these hairs count as Leo - we would probably say yeah these hairs must count as well okay but what about one of these hairs which is like half detached so when it's half attached it's still part of Leo and you say yeah it is okay but what about when it's actually detached it stops being Leo at that very second and now it's something else and then what about the pores and the oxygen that's going into my lungs right now oxygen carbon dioxide nitrogen all this all these chemicals so these are now actually going into my lungs little tiny pockets and my lungs are holding all these so is that oxygen a part of Leo we could probably say no it's not okay but what about the oxygen my cells it's at a part of Leo and we've said well yeah that probably should count as part of Leo but see when you really get down into it you start to see that actually this notion of a boundary doesn't actually exist maybe boundaries or something we create now think about the significance of that that boundaries are not things that exist in objective reality but that these are things that we create or we project onto reality after all who's to say which boundary constitutes a boundary it might if I bring a chair to you you would say that's obviously a chair versus a table and you say that's obvious a table those are two separate boundaries those are objective boundaries to see if I take a chair at a table and I bring it to someone who lives in the Amazon to them they're not going to have that boundary between chair and table they don't they don't really distinguish these things to them it's all the same and if I bring you two chairs that are very similar looking you say they're the same type of chair but then I say all I know but they're totally different because look this chairs this way now chairs this way so see this the social boundary might be more subjective than you ever thought who's to say which contrasts in the world are of any significance and notice that it's not just a matter of drawing boundaries it's also a matter of which boundaries do we give significance to because there are millions of boundaries in the world that you completely ignore and honestly you only care about the ones that somehow affect you in some significant way that have value to you all other boundaries you ignore and science keeps making new boundaries as we learn stuff we make more boundaries more distinctions so maybe boundaries are actually relative and maybe significance of these boundaries is also relative you got to wonder what is the substance of a distinction or a boundary or a contrast so you could take a look at your hand right now look at it and see whatever background is behind the hand and just ask yourself okay so there's this contrast of the hand and the conscious of the background but then the the fact that these things are contrasting what is the actual substance of that distinction don't fall into the trap of thinking is something like atoms or molecules it's not that contrasts and things are not made of molecules molecules are themselves a contrast you see notice this is very tricky because any kind of physical object that you might pause it as the substance of a distinction is itself a distinction very interesting so what the hell is the distinction then I'll let you mull that over as I keep talking and by the way what about distinctions from God's perspective are there any so from your perspective you make a bunch of distinctions and I make my own kind of distinctions and so does everybody else what kind of distinctions does God make does he make no distinctions does he make all possible distinctions does he cherry pick which distinctions he makes are some distinctions more important to God than other distinctions what is reality but a collection of distinctions can you think of any object or anything that even constitutes reality which is not a contrast to something else and therefore a distinction so maybe what reality is is just distinctions interesting what then would reality be to God because God's perspective would have to include everything we would think but if a perspective is only made out of distinctions what does that mean for God now here's a mindfuck for you what if there is no difference between existence and non-existence because after all existence the non-existence is what it's a distinction can you grab that with your mind try to grab it who arbitrates between the significance between existence and non-existence so of course we want to say but Leo existences is surely different from non-existence these things are clearly objectively distinct they're very different things but be careful here who's saying that from whose perspective from your perspective aren't you biased isn't it the case the reason you find the distinction between existence and non-existence so damn significant is because you think of yourself as existing and you fear non-existence above all other things so in a sense you hate non-existence you're completely opposed to it everything in your life you do goes against non-existence so that you may exist isn't that true and isn't it true that that is your perspective and that could be a relative perspective so what about God from God's perspective is there a significant difference between existence and non-existence mm-hmm imagine God's perspective as being the most unbiased the most objective objective and close here the most objective perspective possible like a very honest judge in a courtroom mmm interesting see one of the mistakes that science makes is that science tends to latent Lee assumed that boundaries are objective things and that's just not the case at all there is no canonical set of boundaries for all in reality what science does the science draws relationships and interconnections between different boundaries that it itself draws and that it itself says are significant and descriptive of reality and yet all of these boundaries are relative very interesting so now we're going to do is I'm going to take a quick intermission because what I've discovered is that when I talk for longer than an hour standing here it's quite exhausting because I can't move I just and it one spot very still to be right centred on the camera so I'm going to go grab a drink and take a break you stay here because we still need to talk about more and all of the seeds to be talking about at the same time because your mind needs to connect all these dots together and then maybe it'll have some sort of a deeper insight so you stay here and I'll be back in a minute alright I'm back let's begin our investigation and continue where we left off so let's think now about the domain of stuff called relationships and hierarchies this is important so notice that in our dealings with the world everything we see around us is composed of relationships and everything we describe scientifically is also relationship based now of course I don't mean relationship as in intimate man-woman relationships Here I am talking about relationship in the most universal sense so if you have two objects we can say that they are in relationship with each other they hold some kind of relationship like the relationship of my head to my body is that my body is on top of my head and the relationship of me to the earth is that I am located on the surface of the earth and we are both the earth and my body exhibiting gravitational force on each other and in fact my body as its here we know scientifically is exhibiting gravitational forces on the planet Pluto even though the planet Pluto is no longer a planet and we can even take it so far say that every single atom in the universe is exhibiting a gravitational force on every single other atom in the universe even thousands of light-years away so that is the extent to which we talk about relationships here now interestingly enough though we don't just take all relationships into account we in fact dismiss virtually all relationships that exist and we only focus on the ones that personally matters to us so the question we should be concerned about here is who's selecting which relationships are of significance and which ones we should be focused upon and it's important to notice that which relationships we pull out from reality to work with or to care about or to speak about that these are just a tiny tiny less than 1% of all the possible relationships that exist and that in fact if you look at it objectively all objects are infinitely related with all other objects in our universe and within reality that's in a sense what it means to be a part of reality is to be in a certain relationship with it and with every other member of the entire system now because we're biased and we have certain values and needs as human beings we only care about a tiny sliver of all those relationships and even science notice only cares about describing certain types of relationships and notice that what science is really is the systematic study of the relationships between certain types of variables or phenomena that's one way to look at science in a very abstract sense you take two different variables you say ah these must be related somehow and then you find a relationship through a mathematical formula but the things you're picking out to find formula for what are those but a finite number of things out of an infinite number of things which exist you see so this kind of puts this whole business of pulling out relationships into perspective fundamentally we have to wonder what makes one relationship more important than another and if we look at it very objectively we have to admit that it's nothing other than our own biases so of course to me as a human being and to us as humanity and to us maybe a scientist there are certain things we care about more than others but ultimately and perhaps from God's perspective these relationships are all relative now of course the objection comes up but leo some relationships are clearly more fundamental and more important than other ones like gravity for example it's very important phenomena and the relationship that it exhibits on all other objects is very very important and much more important than other types of stuff but we have to be very careful about that because that might just be our bias sneaking in there and skewing our view of what's really going on remember that we failed to find a ground for anything so to say that some relationships are more foundational than others well that is a problem because we never found a foundation in the first place also remember that we concluded that boundaries are relative and that these are also things that are being drawn so if boundaries are relative then which object I see out there is relative to my perspective and then of course if the objects are being defined by me then the relationships are also being defined by me there are no relationships out there really it's all functioning as one unified Symphony if you want to think about it that way in some poetic language how can you really say that one thing is more important than another thing when Cygnus itself is subjective you're defining which things you call things and which things you don't call things if everything in our universe is infinitely interconnected then this opens up an interesting possibility that there might not be such things as hierarchies in the conventional sense now by hierarchies what I mean is like what a scientist does when they study and create hierarchies so entire a scientist will go and study the animal kingdom and then come up with different hierarchies for the mammals and the reptiles and the birds and so forth and draw all sorts of interconnections say well these came before those and these depend on these and so creates a hierarchy and this is generally what human beings do is we create all sorts of categories like this hierarchies and we mess them in each other and say well this one's more basic this one depends on that one like that but that might also be a bias of how we do our science we tend to do our science in a very reductionistic sort of manner and we say like well we can take an animal like a bird and then we say well that's not really that foundational let's break the bird down into cells let's break those down to molecules into atoms those are much more foundational and the physics that put all these things together that's all foundational the bird itself is not foundational that's what we would say but we have to be very careful about that because to do that kind of analysis we have to lose our holistic view of what's going on with reality because really all of reality depends on every other part of reality and interestingly enough science often likes to speak of reality as though it's a deterministic system which means that everything is governed by very strict rules and that if we were given the initial condition of our universe we could just run that we would get the exact same everything I would be standing here talking just the way that I am right now if we rebooted the whole universe from scratch given the exact same initial conditions now there seems to be some debate between scientists about whether reality is deterministic or it's not deterministic we're not sure let's just keep that as an open question but if we think of reality as a deterministic system it's actually very interesting because then what you realize is that there's no fundamental element that's most important really you might think that this bird or take a kangaroo you might say well a kangaroo is a very arbitrary thing you know obviously the laws of physics and gravity and so forth that these are the foundational things of reality and then a kangaroo a bird other creatures these are all variable they may or may not come about from gravity but actually if everything in our universe is infinitely interconnected then what that means in a sense is that if I gave you a kangaroo and you do nothing else about our universe none of the laws none of the constants nothing you in theory could reverse engineer our entire universe from that one kangaroo because that one kangaroo in a way that I give it to you can only exist given everything else in the universe being exactly as it is so this sort of flipped this idea of hierarchies on its head and it flips this notion of reductionism on its head from certain perspectives reality makes sense when we reduce it then from other perspectives it does not and one thing we have to wonder is from God's perspective is it really the case that hierarchies exist or are hierarchies perhaps something that the human mind projects upon reality that's interesting to consider perhaps from God's perspective everything is equally important after all what sense does it really make to say that well this part of reality isn't very important as if you could take a piece of reality and and throw it out and still keep everything else the same see the human mind because it likes to simplify reality because you can't deal with the complexity of reality likes to think as though we could change circumstances around and make them however we want and we can just get rid of kangaroos birds this this not none of that is essential we like to think about some stuff being essential stuff not being essential but I would submit to you that perhaps from God's perspective everything is equally essential including of course of stuff you don't like maybe even the stuff you hate and see this is one of the bribes that we have as it egos as individual human beings is that of course as an ego we have to survive and to survive we have to dislike certain things which threaten our survival so again we have a bias here and as egos there certainly are things that are very important essential to us and other things which we can take or leave but is that true from God's perspective is that true from the perspective of the entire system of reality I would submit that all of reality needs all the pieces nothing is expendable nothing is unnecessary nothing is unimportant so let's keep that in mind as we move on to the next domain which is let's think about form and formlessness this ends up being a very important and it starts to also tie in with distinctions and contrasts and that original example that I talked about that infinite object so consider that all the objects that you've ever known in your life are formed objects even formless objects like you might think well electricity is not a formed object or a cloud you might say well that's not a formed object no that's still totally formed object what I mean we mean by formed is that it has some kind of shape and form to it or it's a distinction as opposed to it being formless which literally means it has no form not that it's a more like a cloud not that it's vague but that it's actually formless form is synonymous with being finite to have some kind of form you have to be some kind of way like my hand has this form and it is this way and if it wasn't this form it was some other form then it would be that thing and not my hand so my hand is also in this sense finite now the formless what might the formless look like well the formless might be something infinite something whose characteristics are not defined in a particular way you might think of the formless as the potential versus the actual whereas the formed is the actual the formless is the potential like maybe I have the potential to draw a painting but since I haven't drawn it yet I haven't committed this intention to a particular painting as a form it remains as a potential and therefore it's not actualized but also it's sort of still there there's all sorts of possibilities there that are open notice that all forms are distinct and everything that's formless is indistinct so we've touched on this before and that turns into a very interesting duality and notice that even the distinction between the formed and the formless is also a distinction and it's also you might say a kind of form very interesting so keep that in mind and now let's talk about the final topic and then we'll tie all this together and this is the topic of impossibility power and weirdness so the question here is how can anything be impossible for reality a lot of times we like to think about reality but we forget that when we're talking about reality as a whole which has no limits on it from the outside that perhaps to it everything is possible and this is difficult for us to accept because when we live in our ordinary world we know that odd finite objects have certain possibilities and certain power that is limited and there's a the law of conservation of energy you can't get something from nothing right so if you have some energy in a battery you can only use so much of it to get stuff done and then it will deplete and you don't have perpetual motions machines and if someone told you about a perpetual motion machine you would say that's impossible but then people make the mistake of carrying that logic over to the whole of reality and this is the problem because this means that then when we start talking about some very weird ways in which reality of the whole could work they say well that's impossible because they think that there might be things for reality as though it's like a human being like oh well certain things for reality are impossible and are difficult and we'll put the word difficult in close here as though reality doesn't have enough power to be infinite or to be a certain way but if you think about it why should it be any more difficult for a reality to create one atom versus a trillion atoms or to create one human being versus a trillion human beings or to create one planet versus a hundred billion planets and if you're willing to buy into that line of reasoning then maybe it could be true that reality could even be infinite and that would be no more difficult than for it to be finite because after all how are you judging this difficulty or this limitation in power where is this coming from this is just coming from if you admit your own human experience and you're a limited human being and the objects around you you see are limited but that doesn't necessarily have to be decay for reality as a whole because as we've talked about already the limits of reality we never found a limit we never found any kind of reason why there ought to be a limit and in fact it makes no sense why a limit could exist because how would that limit be enforced and then the other question here is well that's just very weird a lot of these notions have been talking about some very counterintuitive how could reality be so weird and see a lot of people get trapped about proper understanding of existence or reality because they don't appreciate that weirdness is also a relative thing after all who are we to say and judge what is normal and what is weird can you see how this is completely culturally determined it's determined by your own private experiences it has no absolute meaning you say that well this is normal and we'll do what you're talking about is weird and it's not normal but that's a completely subjective judgement I mean after all if you take a human being from 5000 years ago and you take that human being and maybe somehow you take a time machine you you warp them into our present time and you tell them about all the stuff that's going on in the world and you show them all the technology we have he would be flabbergasted just absolutely floored by all the stuff he sees all of it would seem very weird and if you can remember when you entered this life all of life felt weird to you there is nothing normal normal is just a sense that you develop based on a past accumulation of memories and consistent phenomena you've seen and then that's what defines your set of normal and what that is of course it's completely relative what's normal to you might not be normal to a kid who grew up in Africa to a kid who grew up in the Amazon to a kid who grew up on a Martian colony normal would be completely different for these people and normal is completely different for people across time from 5,000 years ago to a thousand years ago 200 years ago - today - what's going to be the case in 10,000 years normality is going to completely fly out the window I mean really think about this today you're sitting at home and you're watching porn on your computer and you're jerking off to that and you have an LCD screen this LCD screen is part of a computer which is doing millions of calculations per second just to display your porn and you're sitting there jerking off to this thing this thing is being powered by a nuclear power plant which is getting its power from nuclear fission and this is happening while you're sitting on top of a ball of Earth which is spinning around the Sun at 30 kilometers a second the Sun itself is spinning around the center of the galaxy at 200 kilometers a second this whole thing is happening and you're sitting there drinking off and you think that that is normal and now you're saying that wallah Leo you're talking about some sort of paranormal ability you're going to talk about infinity that's so weird Oh what is what is weird and what is normal there's nothing weird about existence at all just the very fact that you exist is a very weird thing if you've ever thought about it it's extremely weird everything is weird the only question is how complacent have you become about it that's really what we mean when we talk about weirdness and normality so that's a completely relative notion so now let's take all these different domains and put them all together imagine if you will that actually there are no whose in reality there is no ultimate who either God is not some grand who sitting up in the clouds or outside the of all reality God is actually the absence of whose what that means is that reality is absolute groundless it has no ground and that's no mistake that's exactly right because it couldn't possibly have a ground and what that means is that reality is an infinite regress of infinite regress --is in infinite dimensions with no limit reality is absolutely relative in that it is so relative everything is so relative that it's absolutely so and the relativism goes full circle from relativism into absolutism now a lot of people don't like this idea of relativism and they start to dispute it and they refuse to accept it but I'm not just talking about some light form of relativism like moral relativism I'm talking about metaphysical relativism I'm talking about the very structure of what anything could possibly be it must be relative absolutely so because who would there be to arbitrate nobody there's nobody to arbitrate anything all perspectives are just perspectives and from God's perspective which is the no perspective perspective well that's a very interesting perspective we need to think about that a little bit more so reality what I'm saying here is sort of like a cemetry of all the possible asymmetries it's sort of like a hodgepodge of every single possibility that could be expanding out to infinity where the whole and all the parts are really one and to illustrate this so that you really get it because I want you to really grasp this I want to give you two very powerful analogies for understanding absolute infinity the first is the infinite sandbox analogy and what this is is this imagine if we have an infinite block of sand which is just a gigantic block of sands just stretching out forever like in the vacuum of empty space we just have a bunch of sand from the beach and it's there it's like in this giant block now we can make sand castles out of that sand but this gets way trickier and interest more interesting than that rather than making sand castles using some kind of tools think of the sand castles as already being a part of that block of sand can you use your mind's eye to see that in this infinite block of sand we have the sand castle whatever sand castle we can imagine it's already in that sand can you see that we don't need to carve it out unless we really wanted to we're just going to use our minds eye here we're not going to carve anything out can you see that in this block of sand there are all sorts of potential shapes there's a circle there's a sphere there's a there's an ellipse there's a star you know three-dimensional shapes of all kinds there's all kinds of sculptures you could carve a house out of it a castle whatever you want the Statue of David in full size could be carved out of that sand and in a sense it's already in that sand we don't even need to carve it out so that's what reality is like that's what absolute infinity is sort of like is that all the possible shapes are already there and they don't even need to be cut out you see the Statue of David is there in a sense we could say that on every Beach on this planet there is a statue of David in the sand already you don't have to go there and carve it out it's already there and not only that but can you see how many different kinds of sculptures are in this infinite block of sand infinite right every possible sculpture that you could carve ever if you had a million billion years is already there the only question is do you want to invest your time to actually carve it out if you really want to make it very obvious see our minds tend to be materialistic and so we want to card it out in order to consider it real but consider that from God's point of view it doesn't really matter whether the sculpture is actual or potential because again actual and potential this is another dichotomy another distinction that human beings make to us it matters if we carve out the statue or not but from God's point of view it's already there see but now let's take it one step further imagine that rather than just having particles of sands because after all sand is is sand it's a very specific type of substance because reality is not sand so let's make it closer to what it actually is take this sand particle because it's finite it has certain shape and properties and let's make this an infinite object so this particle of sand rather than being hard and brown and squarish and and all this kind of stuff let's make it infinite by making an infinite of course it has to be formless so it has no form so you can't imagine it as anything and in fact it makes no sense to call it sand anymore because what we mean by the label sand is a particular type of object with certain properties but here we're removing all that so now imagine this block of sand I'm still going to call it sand but now it's called infinite sand so this block of infinite sand now out in the vacuum of empty space and now look into it and see that it contains every single thing that could ever possibly be and it's already there and that it doesn't even matter whether it's actualized or not because actual or potential is really identical if you were the Statue of David in that infinite sand from your perspective you would feel like you exist as a statue but at the same time the space you're occupying could also be taken up by other statues you see all those potential objects and sculptures are all encased in that block of infinite sand it's all there and that's what we mean by absolute infinity can you see how total that is in accounts and includes absolutely everything it even doesn't exist or non exist or not exist it both exists and doesn't exist at the same time can you see because again that's another duality that we think in terms of but in terms of this incidents and it even has every little particle sand even has the property of existence and non-existence it has to include those because it's infinite and of course it's not a particle anymore it doesn't have size it's not small or large it's not large and it's not small it's both and neither at the same time it's everything you see it's every possibility superimposed upon itself and that's what existence or reality ultimately is from God's point of view it's just pure potential from your point of view it is a particular way because you're like that Statue of David in the sand being a particular way and so it's allowed to be both and neither at the same time so your point of view doesn't really conflict with God's point of view although when you are attached to being a statue of David well you're not at that time also allowing to realize that your the whole thing it doesn't mean that you've disconnected yourself from the whole thing you still are the whole thing but because you've chosen to identify with being a statue of David well that's your freedom to do that and so there you are and you have created your perspective and everyone is allowed to create their perspective but also at the same time your perspective is still part of the entire whole you never separate yourself out from it you see you see the the elegance and ingenious nough second analogy which will make it even clearer imagine a zip file a zip file is an interesting thing a zip file is a file which is one file into which we compress a bunch of other files let's say I have a hundred photos I want to compress them so it's easier for me to to email them to somebody all compress them into a single zip file now the question is does that zip file or rather is that zip file one thing or is a hundred things it's both you see that's its function that's what makes the zip file useful is that simultaneously it's both and the zip file has this interesting property that we can unzip it or then zip it back up when it's zipped app back up we see it as one when it's unzipped all the files come out we see it 100 but really when you look at that zip file it's always both it's always one and it's always a hundred even when it's compressed or uncompressed can you see that it depends on which perspective so to speak you look at it from now we because we care about using the files we have a preference for uncompressing these files and we say well it could be an uncompressed a compressed eight but actually for a certain perspective it doesn't really matter which state it's in the information is all in there see and then how you use it is up to you depends on what your objectives are for certain situations it's good to uncompress for others it's good to keep it zipped that's how reality is except what I want you to picture in your mind now is an infinite zip file as if file that contains every possible file you could ever create ever ever ever ever all of them are created inside and souls zipped up and it also zips up in there every single property that could ever be every smell every color every shape every form everything existence and non-existence it's all zipped up together and you might ask yourself well does this file exist the file zips itself up to such an extent that it both exists and does not exist at the same time and you might ask well where is this file located on some computer like God does God have a computer that holds the zip file called reality no the computer and the zip file are all zipped up together into one it's all one and there's no space there's no there's not even a vacuum for for where this zip file is located you might think all the zip files just floating out an empty space no space is zipped up in the file a vacuum the notion of a vacuum is lift up in the file it's all in this file what this file is it's an infinite collection of every single possible contrast or distinction or finite shape that could ever possibly be all zipped up together and now to really bring this home I want you to actually look around you right now look at your hands look at me look around you look at your dog look at your cat look your spouse in the eyes and notice that what you're seeing right now is exactly what I'm describing not describing something far out there you know in the ether I'm describing exactly what's happening right now what you're seeing before you is this at the collection of finite contrasts which are actually simultaneously infinite my hand right here is infinite at the same time as it's finite what I am what leo is is just an animated Statue of David so to speak in this zip file in this block of infinite sand which is of course animated and it's talking right now and here it is doing everything it's doing and it's just kind of playing out as a movie but all of this is infinite every single piece of it is infinite it has no ground this hand if you zoom into this hand you can keep zooming into it forever it will have no end and if you keep zooming out of the universe it'll have no end you can just keep zooming out forever forever and ever and ever and ever and the substance of everything is ultimately nothing nothing nothing is everything that's the zip file like nature of reality can you see it look around you and actually connect what I'm saying to what's going on in your direct experience right now try to see the infinity here the infinity is not somewhere else it's right here that's what existence is existence and non-existence are right on top of each other they're not separate things infinity by its very nature must contain all finit ease can you see you can't have infinity but not have something else you might say well Leo how come I'm sitting here right now this particular way and not some other way because if you weren't here this particular way if I wasn't here in my particular way speaking the words that I'm speaking then absolute infinity would not be absolutely infinite see me you and everything around is a consequence of the fact that reality is just everything it's so everything that it also has to be nothing because to truly be everything it has to go full circle and become nothing because if you exclude nothing from everything you don't have everything you see and in a sense everything cancels everything else out that's what I meant by it's a it's a cemetry of all asymmetries I'm a particular asymmetry you're a particular a symmetry but it's all balanced out in the end and it's all just one little fragment of absolute infinity and this is all not happening in time and in space it's all happening simultaneously like one giant nuclear explosion but even an explosion is not the right word because you think of an explosion happening quickly but still across time reality is not a Big Bang event not really it's just simultaneous everything it's like a it's like God loaded up a shotgun with everything imaginable and then fired it at himself in the face all at once and at the same time it never even happened you see like it's really hard to come up with analogies for this stuff because all analogies are finite and all analogies take place within space and within time so you have to kind of jump ahead and see where the analogies are pointing you to here's a beautiful poetic way to think about it Finity is a precipitate of infinity in the same way that rain is a precipitate of a loud actuality is a precipitate of potentiality limit is a precipitate of unlimitedness form is a precipitate of formlessness reality as we know it is a precipitate of God but even to call these things precipitates is really not quite right because you get the image of like rain coming out of a rain cloud and then it actually has to come out here to really precipitate finitude from infinitude nothing needs to happen you don't need to actually carve out the statue from the sand it's just already there all you sort of need to do is just see it in your mind's eye as such and of course your mind's eye is the very object that's there your mind's eye is not something sitting behind the scenes I'm not telling you that this stuff is happening in your brain your brain is all part of this what you call a brain which we call space which you call time which you call reality all this is just contrasts within this cloud of infinite potential and you might say well who is experiencing it and of course that's the beauty of it is that nobody nobody is but you'll say but I'm experiencing right now it feels like I'm experiencing it yes exactly but in the very place where you feel like it's being experienced that it actually is at the very same time it is not here's a brain twister for you have you ever wondered that maybe what you consider existence is actually non-existence so you say right now you exist and everything you see exists but how would you know that you're just very familiar with in so you call that existence but what is actually at the same time non-existence as well I know it doesn't really make much sense but then again ask yourself how would you know what non-existence looks like or feels like maybe non-existence feels exactly the way that you're feeling right now maybe existence and non-existence are actually superimpose right on top of each other because there's nowhere else to be and nowhere else to go because reality by virtue of the fact that it's one unified thing there's no place to escape it to see you can't go on a holiday to the Bahamas and escape reality wherever you go that's where reality is existence or non-existence can't be in different places but of course because we're so preoccupied with existence we only tend to focus as human beings on existence are you seeing this this is epic what I'm telling you is epic when you really get it what I'm telling you that reality is a groundless infinite singularity and that it contains absolutely everything reality is not a physical system it's not about brains or molecules all that stuff is just content within reality all of it is existent to non-existent at the same time what reality really is at a substance level rather than molecules and atoms or particles it has a system of contrasts everything is a contrast to everything else and what are these contrasts consisting of nothing these contrasts are not made out of molecules these contrasts are contrasts and the nature of being a contrast the very substance of a contrast is nothing what this amounts to is reality being a holodeck the Star Trek holodeck you know that it's a holodeck without an actual deck just the hollow it's just the stuff in the holodeck but then when you ask yourself but where is that coming from what mechanics are creating it the answer is absolutely nothing it's just a hologram the whole thing is just one giant hallucination that's what it is a hallucination is just a collection of phenomena or contrasts without any substance underneath them and now you're going to say but how could there be contrasts without any mechanism creating them or any substance to them that's impossible that's too weird but this is where I bring you back to that point about weirdness being relative and impossibility not being a problem for reality as a whole in fact this is the most elegant and direct solution you see reality is so powerful it has so few limits it's so unlimited in other words that is a mechanical it actually does not need a mechanism for it to be appearance is the mechanism of what you call reality finding other mechanisms the way science likes to do is not really going to the core of the substance of reality that's just exploring more content within reality it never actually boils down to what the content is made of its just content upon content about content because science doesn't want to admit the irreducibly mystical nature of reality it's a mechanical miss if you think about it this is how it must be it's the only way that you can encapsulate everything into one because if you're always positing some other mechanism you need an explanation for that mechanism and so on ad infinitum and that's what we find in physics is infinite levels of hierarchies up and down from atoms to universes with no end in sight and yet still nothing is explained you don't actually explain why the stuff is there whereas what I'm telling you explains why it's there because it both is there and isn't there simultaneously it is simultaneously everything in nothing and this explains absolutely everything there is nothing left unexplained by this it's total total total total total total so total that you can't even fathom how freaking total it is it's so total and then what's left for science to do is to go out there and explore all the content science could spend a billion years researching every little nook and cranny of reality finding new content within reality but what the substance of it is it will never explain because it's what I just told you and that's exactly how you really should expect it to be because how can you expect science which is a limited finite process within reality to be able to reach outside of reality to explain it it makes no sense whatsoever even in theory let alone in practice do you get it I really want you to get it this is the most remarkable thing you could ever possibly get it's just remarkable you're alive in it right now it's happening right now it's not a theory it's what's happening right now can you see that to grasp this is to be dumbstruck to really grasp this is to is to go weak at your knees and fall to your to your knees on the floor and to start weeping like like a little girl that's what it means to to know this because you've solved all of the existence you've coggan eyes everything you know the heart of God and when you really get there that's how it feels it's not an intellectual oh yeah I think I understand it's not like that it's like oh it's an insight that kills you it's so powerful it's an insight that melts your heart that obliterates every single belief in every single notion that you've ever had in your whole life about who you were and what's going on here it's that profound I could stand here and talk for an hour and I would not be able to convince you of how profound it really is when you actually have this insight for yourself that's how total this is once you get this insight your life will never be the same again now you might think oh my god leo now I finally understand know the sad part is that you don't understand what we've done in this episode is we've gone to the limits of what the intellect can do we've gone to the limits of conception conceptualization I've given you a concept you don't really understand because if you really understand I'm telling you it would literally kill you and you would be sobbing tears if you really understood the significance of what has been said here what needs to happen is that you actually need to have a direct experience of this and experience beyond all experience you need to actually become God what I described to you is God's perspective the non perspective perspective it's the absolute aspect of all of relativity is to see that everything is relative absolutely so and to to actually live as that it's to stop being you as a human being because to be you as a human being is just to be a little Statue of David within the larger scope of things but as you cling to being the little statue of David you can't be and realize your full infinite expansiveness so your job is to find any way you can in life to experience this whatever that takes for you everything that I said here is not the truth it's just words it's just finite distinctions and concepts because that's all I could ever do this is where the road ends and then you have to go off on your own to see the ultimate truth for yourself where there are no words because words attempt to reach outside of reality to grasp that reality but we've seen that that can't work because your mind cannot grab on to infinity because your mind is Finiti how can Finiti grab on to infinity and yet while that's true simultaneously Finity is infinity but you need to actually get that and not just hear it for me or just to think about it or just to imagine it because everything you're imagining is not infinity it's very finite and it's very limited so you can think of everything I said here has not a scientific discourse not a philosophical airtight argument this is just poetry I'm up here doing poetry and the question for you is is whether you can register the poetry and whether it can strike the right chord in you so that you can have the particular kind of experience that poetry is supposed to elicit in you that's all this really is I'm not doing science here I'm not really doing any serious philosophy here to think that you can that you can grab this with science or with philosophy or with religion or with anything else is to delude yourself you're taking all your mind stuff way too seriously and you're failing to register the point that this will never happen through your mind is this paradoxical hell yeah the very essence of reality must be ducks I hope you can see that paradox is not proof of our failure here paradox is actually evidence that we've succeeded because we've had to join every single distinction that ordinary conventional human experience is built upon we've had to join all those in particular we've had to join existence and non-existence together and that's something that the rational mind can't handle very well because the rational mind operates upon dichotomies but then of course it doesn't understand that these dichotomies are its own fabrications and if we want to get underneath all fabrications we have to destroy all the dichotomies to see not from our perspective but from God's perspective and now you can start to appreciate why science misses absolute infinity and why religion misses absolute infinity you're not going to get to absolute infinity through a collective effort you're only going to get there yourself you're not even going to get there with me it's not you and me that are going to get there it's only you who's going to get there of course once you do get there you'll discover that you were me the whole time and that the collective was you the whole time and that was really all just you I hope that you get to experience this at least one time in your life for yourself because this is the ultimate experience of life that's it please click like button for me post your comments down below share this with a friend and make sure that you stay tuned next week for part two of this series probably next week maybe it won't be next to go I'm not quite sure yet but probably next week or if not next week then sometime soon I'll shoot the part 2 which is going to have a lot of you see historical interconnections about absolute infinity and I want you to get those two because it's some pretty beautiful stuff so we're going to continue down that road but the very heavy metaphysical lifting we've all done here today watch this episode several times and really follow along with some of the arguments that I presented to you go through the logic so that you really understand because after this you should not have any more philosophical questions after this you should start to actually work to have a direct experience of this alright stay with me for more you