Heaven is infinite how can it be crowded?
Spirits, ghosts, and that kind of stuff
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
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Heaven is infinite how can it be crowded?
What's bigger, an infinite space or an infinite number of people?
I like this! My studies in esoteric and occult philosophy say this is entirely possible. In fact, even probable. There's a occult concept called an egregore, which is when the collective belief in something is so strong, that Something comes into being. I can see the gradual growth of human (and other?) consciousness on this planet eventually leading to various Gods and spirits.
"When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth."
I'm sorry, but only science can say what's possible. Philosophy just says what some philosopher thinks is possible. It doesn't actually answer the question, it just produces a hypothesis to consider. Only observation and experiment can tell us whether a hypothesis actually holds water.
There is a lovely book called INFINITY AND THE MIND that describes (to steal a quote from OMNI) how some infinities are larger than others:
Infinity and the Mind - Wikipedia
Book review: Infinity and the Mind - Branch and Bound
branchandbound.net
I know that an uncountable infinity (e.g. the set of all numbers) is "larger" than a countable infinity (e.g. the set of integers). Since the number of people is an integer, that would make it a countable infinity, while something continuous like space would presumably be uncountable. So in that sense, it would be bigger, insofar as that has any meaning.
Caveat: The total number of people who have ever existed and will ever exist, while extremely large, is still likely to be a finite number, wouldn’t you say?
Well, the hypothetical question I was answering posited an infinite number of people. It also posited an infinite space, so if that space is more or less uniformly populated with inhabited planets, then there would be an infinite number of such planets and therefore an infinite number of their inhabitants, even if the total number who ever would exist on any single planet is finite.
But only X number of people anywhere can be born at any time so it's never infinite
On any one planet, no. On the infinite number of planets that would exist in an infinite universe, yes. Any finite number times infinity is infinity.
Fair enough but we live on Earth so only Earth matters from our pov. That will of course change immensely the day we do find life of any kind on some distant world.
But that wasn't Steve's question. The question was, "What's bigger, an infinite space or an infinite number of people?" So you're changing the subject now.
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