However, to think the infinite is necessarily incompatible with sentience represents yet another type of rhetoric/shoebox thinking.
I'm curious about the word "however"; what does it mean, in this case?
I wouldn't necessarily disagree with the proposition, but at some point we encounter a threshold of applicability versus a range of potentials evading actualization; as
Sideshowbob↑ reminds, there is a question of faculty. Much like whether or not we have the technology to accomplish certain feats otherwise likely permissible according to physics, it is difficult to conceive of the scale at which sentient compatibility with infinitude is possible without invoking unknown physics. In terms more philosophical, something about Augustine and a rock goes here. (The really fun part is observing that, at some point, the only religionistic, theological, or artistic resolutions of the omnipotence paradox are fallacious and, in some cases, evasive unto themselves.)
The question of whether or not God is irrational depends entirely on irrational definitions of both God and what is irrational,
e.g., "because life has always been such". Life, actually, is perfectly rational; human beings, however, are irrational; if God is irrational "because life has always been such", then the argument presumes we might assert definitions regardless of how the rest of reality behaves, which, in turn, is the sort of proposition that does not so much wither and fail under the slightest of scrutiny, but was already dead on the table when we walked in.
Who has the highest understanding of the painting?
It seems worth noting that the question is answered differently according to the terms by which "understanding" is assessed.
A painting is actually a good example. There are, for sake of simplicity, "two" aspects to consider, here, the actual physical science of the painting, to the one, and the artistic context, or meaning, of the painting, to the other.
There is also a range at which the physical science affects context and meaning, such as what the paint is made of and what that represents in an anthropological context.
And there is also a version by which the answer is the art historian because the "painting" as a whole is nearly irrelevant to science, and that part is important to note because sometimes the devil in the detail is a matter of definitions. And, generally, what science can tell us about the painting finds its significance when interpreted through the art historian, as such.
• • •
How is that even possible? When you're trying to represent something, don't you obviously begin with the details that are apparent? Once you've described what is apparent, how can you know whether or not there's anything you've missed?
I actually think the answer is rather quite evident: We perceive [
Object A], which appears to include [
Function B], except what we know of
A does not explain
B. The potential range of explanations includes that
B is unrelated in any essential way apparent to us, but there also exists the possibility that our understanding of
A is incomplete.
And at that point, I think we might be onto something. Oh, right. That's something else, but still.
Anyway, such as it is: How precisely must one describe to you the shape of the breach and physical processes by which it occurred before you believe the water rising to your knees is some manner of flood? And it's true, there are a couple of obvious retorts. My point being that, within such a simplistic range, we're probably missing a few elements if we can afford to muck around in it like this.
Well, okay, that something else kind of is important here: It does seem to me part of the context here involves a Proposition that is, by its very scale, ineffable and defiant of observation.
This is not, in philosophical frameworks, so uncommon. The question of "God" compared to, say, "Justice", or "right" or "good", is by its particular scale very possibly a unique question.
You know that saying about how learning something only tells us how much more we don't know?
I'm hardly the biggest fan of chatter about "highest truths", which vagary
insists on
evading quantification, but still:
"How do you know there are missing details if you can't represent them?" Quite simply, because we can observe their effects. We could observe a dead canary long before humanity ever learned how to identify carbon monoxide according to the math.
Part of it is that these discussions take place under influence of some perceived or asserted stake. I am sitting here, staring at an excerpt I have
set aside↱ for other purposes, but we might in the moment moment consider discussion about how "Western Protestantism", in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was transforming in ways that deferred less to "inherited confessions" and relied "more on self-evident propositions organized by scientific method"
(Noll, 4). How many people do you know who will scoff at that use of the term "scientific method"? No, really, that's the whole point in raising the excerpt.
Because the next thing is to simply observe that Musika is actually working in that range; the most hazardous footing in such endeavors, of course, involves how anyone defines scientific method, or establishes what is self-evident.
Nor is it strange that your question about representation and apparent details should evoke memories of Donald Rumsfeld; I have always presupposed, even before the idea of neocon poetry ever occurred to me, that something akin to the difference between known unknowns and unknown unknowns had its place in scientific consideration. Then again, neither is it hard to accept that there are, in fact, unknown knowns; these are related to the present considerations in part because a known fact can remain obscure because we hide it from ourselves, and most apparently, as you might expect according to thematics, by our definitions. But they are also kind of beside the point for the moment. Meanwhile, consider the basic sketch of the scientific method; many philosophical postures would presume themselves much more developed than they are, pretending to analyze test data, for instance, when in fact they are somewhere between ranging amid information on the way to asking a general question and organizing some more formalized research.
____________________
Notes:
Noll, Mark. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.