. I am a little under the weather so forgive if this is a bit brief when it deserves a longer reply (I'm not at best a man of many words anyway).the universe is everything
Not to say that either you or Chaz are materialists, but this is certainly the most irrefutable stand point of the materialist: all that we normally perceive is only ever able to be proved to be of a physical nature, and that the sovereign detectable item of this is the universe itself, in that it contains all else that we can percieve and that it virtually determines the fact that we perceive at all outside of the fact that we will (it is unknown whether or not the universe itself wills, much less that it wills us into willing - the major ingredient lacking it would seems that distinguishes it in our thoughts from the concept of God).
I just need to go back to your three point summation of my last response before proceeding with an answer:
When what we have regarded as everything becomes superseded by a larger delineation of things it becomes a thing. Example: Your family may mean everything to you as a child, but later when an adolescent 'friends and family' will be everything, and later still, all of humanity will mean everything to you. My argument is for the existence of many universes.1. You do not claim the existence of many Everythings ("cosmoses"), but the existence of many "universes".
A physical thing, whether part of a physical whole or portion of it. Space-time whole is certainly a more accurate way of describing it physically2. A universe would be an observable whole; or maybe a physical whole; or maybe a space-time whole.
My argument says not just might be, but must be.3. And you think argue our universe is just a very big physical thing. And that if there is one such thing, there are bound to be many such things (or just that there might be?).
So, this irrefutable standpoint of materialists (what's the better word?) leaves us with nowhere to go if we stay true to their idea that the universe is only physical. That aside, it would be a very far stretch to say that a materialist doesn't speculate that there are many universes, and so we can allow ourselves to investigate on their behalf if this may be more than speculation. This will require a further investigation of the nature of things in general. So far I've said that where there is one of a thing there are invariably more of like kind, and like good materialists we have to accept that there is no opposite observation to this, and that therefore the existence of solitary one-off things is as unreal as flying pink elephants. Another observation of things is that from our perspective the larger things are to us the less there are likely to be; there are less galaxies than stars, less stars than dust, less dust than atoms. Also, the further things are in size from our perspective, the less easy they are for us to observe: atoms and galaxies need the aid of instruments, except for a few faint galaxies that can be seen unaided. Thus it is logical to say that due to the fact the universe is so very large it is likely that we only see one, all be it only from within. On the other end of the scale, we have so far seen (or likely seen) only one Higgs boson, but in this instance we don't conjecture that there is only one Higgs Boson in existence because we would not have enough of them to associate the property of matter to the important particles that make the universe. It is in our practical interest to assume this but not in our practical interest to assume there are many universes.
The fact there is a decreasing scale of the numbers of things the larger things are to us from our perspective is a concern for my argument; because if the number of things in a group of any given type of thing reduces with increasing, scale then eventually we would get groups of things with only a few in number , or only one, or perhaps none.
To be cont...
