Hey Chris, I’d agree that the abstraction still exists. That’s why I said outside of the qualia. I think there’s an argument to be made that to say it has meaning necessarily gives it meaning. But I don’t know that we can actually form an exact concept in order to give meaning to it. If I look at my child and say this person has meaning to me, I’m not sure there can be a “this person” in any real sense. If I asked myself, what exactly am I referring to as “this person” I’d get lost in an endless regression.

We try to say this or that exists here or there. But how can one really describe a point amid boundless infinity? We can say it is in front of me, but really it is infinitely far away. We can say it exists now, but what is now amid eternity? What does a second or an hour mean? We can say an hour is 60 minutes, or a minute is 60 seconds, but there is no fundamental measure for time, and so though we can define them as relative one another, we can attribute them no actual value.

So we can say that this or that has meaning and identity relative to some other thing, but at bottom it is all shifting sand. I guess you could say it has meaning unless we think too hard, since it seems so obvious. But I guess it’s kind of liking pointing to myself as an entity. It’s easy to do this, and it seems obvious that I am a definable “something”, but if you start to explore me, I’m mostly empty space indistinguishable from all the empty space around me.

Lol I think at the core it’s all so insubstantial that there isn’t even enough substance for you and me to disagree on. Does it have meaning or does it not, even this is at bottom is indistinguishable and relative, so that’s precisely why I’d conclude it doesn’t have meaning, if that makes any sense.

I think the reason infinity messes up all measurement is this: all description occurs on a scale between poles. There’s big on one side small on the other, light and dark, hot and cold, beginning and end, etc. If we take beginning and end, and do away with them, there’s no way to say at what time a thing happened. It can be closer to or father from any other point on that infinite scale, but it cannot be closer to or further from one of the absolute limits, and therefore it can have no absolute positioning. If things could get infinitely hot, how could you argue to me that the sun is not in fact cold? You could say it’s hotter than you or me, but you could never say it’s objectively hot. How can we say that the universe is big if there are infinitely larger things? It’s actually infinitely small and infinitely large, and so, best I can tell, measurement is completely meaningless.

Thanks for taking the time to read and leave this thought-provoking comment!