What is life? (a personal view)

Olivier lets do an exercise in a common-sense, what would you call the biggest collection of sets there is then? All Qualia, all experience there ever was is and will be, from atoms to consciousness, everything? Are you just postulating that such Set should not belong to itself or that there is no such set?
I am not concerned whether such set belongs or does not belong to itself, but rather if such a set does not exist? How could it not? Imagine you had all the time needed to account for it bit by bit, you just go on counting everything till the pattern stops and starts repeating, there, you have your final set and all its subsets! If it is finite and starts repeating it is a fractal belonging is just a loose metaphor... As far as I am concerned the set of all sets belongs to nothing, no one, anything. I don't care if it is a Hexagon of hexagons...The Set sets the order of whatever belonging comes to mean in the subsets that depend on its Order. Again there is no reason to explain final Reason, no logic to explain ultimate Logic, its an oxymoron. Whatever is the case of such Set it is a brute fact!

"Belonging" and then "not belonging" just means it circles around its own tale ad infinity, that is why it is not decidable, but the sample size of information is finite. In fact, you just need one fractal of information looping around. This final fractal is a brute fact that cannot be justified. The notion of size in a fractal is relative when the size becomes circular as you zoom in or out...computers can do this trick all the time. As you zoom in the small becomes big as the bigger fades out...when you zoom out the big becomes small, as the smaller fades out into a point. I suppose the size of the sample should find its resolution limit at the plank scale...

I think the difference between us here is that I assume infinite sets, like set theory does, eg the set of all prime numbers is infinite, or the idea of "all the sets" imply in my mind infinity, since there's no limit to the number of sets one can conceive of.

You on the other hand think in terms of finite sets. So we're not talking of the same kind of sets.

Yes, that is the main difference. I don't conceive of any infinity without its very opposite, the finite. A sphere is a good example of a classic finite 3D body/geometric shape without boundaries in 2D non-Euclidian space. Same goes with all sorts of fractals/non classic geometric objects one can see in Nature. For me and this is only my gut feeling opinion, infinity only makes sense in the context of a repeating fractal...all sorts of troubles start when you take on infinity seriously. Whatever your ad or subtract multiply or divide to infinity it still is infinity...it gets worse if you jump just from numbers to properties...what would be of perception if there were infinite ever more alien properties in Reality...oof, the sheer chaos!

Oh I take infinity very seriously. I believe there are infinite forms of infinity. I also believe that man has a certain (limited) afinity to it, that we hear a sort of "call from the ∞".

You guys, don’t get lost in there

If I remember it right, the point was that the creator can't be a creation. I don't think it has to be so complicated to understand this very logic. Take a simple example, if someone make a cell phone the creator of cell phone does not become cell phone. Hope it makes sense.

Life is trying to find what's at the end of the rainbow, so we're not lost.

Do you know how a Rubik's cube works? It has a set of all possible combinations....yes another problem with our "God" it is not creative, nor are we for that matter...things are not invented but discovered. All possible things to happen given enough time will happen.
Just in the context of what I was talking about earlier, I believe that set is finite.

The most important thing one can devote his life to is the study of Philosophy of Maths. Personally, I have a ton of problems with a lot of mathematical concepts, from the easiest simple ones, negative numbers for instance, which are already a mix of numbers and subtractive operations all in one, to imaginary numbers that have an imaginary value Zed attached to an actual number, to the biggest problem of them all Infinity.
The way I see it numbers are just ratios. Those ratios have to have a limit in order to be ratios at all. If you go all the way down or up without limits, if you go with the continuum hypothesis ratios are lost and all you have are irrational uncountable numbers...now that is actual infinity, an infinity of infinities, an actual hellish nightmare!

PS - I don't do Irrationality...this is my central Axiom.

You tend to make very simple things difficult. To know your Creator all you need to do is to look at His creations including yourself. His creations are signs for those who are truly seeking the truth.
Given enough time, hopefully you will find your Creator one day. All the best!

I can complicate it yet a little bit more for you...
What would you call the Set that combines your God summed with the Set of what you call his creations, our Reality? It is a bigger set then God itself, right?
This idea implies that God can create something that it is not in his own nature and transcend itself. I found that impossible to believe.

Which is one way to prove a set of all sets cannot exist: because one can immediatly think of a bigger set.

Similarly, given any number N, one can think of a bigger number (eg N + 1) and therefore there's no such thing as the largest number of them all.

This is where Energy enters...the ratio is finite because energy is finite too.

When we talk about a set, we mean things/objects of similar nature. God is not like us and can't be part of set you are trying so hard to create in your imagination.

God is eternal and His creation is not, God is immortal and His creation is mortal. We depend on God for everything and God does not depend on us. I don't think it is an impossible thing to believe.

I have this one crazy machination in my head that energy has patterns too. It is finite, but it can be transferred without loss from one Big Bang to another.
This patterned Energy is what some mystics call "Anima" others "consciousness" and I just call it fake motion, and Parmenides comes to mind...
The whole process is a pattern that repeats, and because it repeats since it has no new information its "motion" is just a trick...hence why I think Energy has a finite Universal pattern itself...it has a ratio, one that accounts for all possible combinations...what others would also call the "Laws of Nature"...Language is tricky everybody is talking about the same things with apparently different concepts...

Nope. That's where the fundamental duality of concepts and other things chips in. A set is a concept, not a thing. It is in people's mind. Likewise numbers. And it's trivially true that we can invent an infinity of concepts. There's no limit to concepts. Infinity is in this sense our creation: a mere concept that we use in many different and useful ways.

But there also exist (at least in a realist dualist woldview) things outside our minds, which people call 'real', for lack of a better word ('objectively real'? 'non-conceptual'?). Things like real apples, real molecules, real particules-cum-waves... Those 'real' things are modeled, represented, signified by our concepts. That's one way to use concepts at least. But I cannot eat the concept of an apple the way I can eat a 'real' apple, so there is an obvious difference between the concept and the thing it represents.

So far this is trivial. Back to our discussion: we can prove logically that a "set of all sets" cannot be conceived of, because sets are mathematical concepts we can manipulate logically. It does NOT follow from there, that 'God' -- the 'real' creator of this 'real' universe -- does not exist.

My point is rather that your conceptualisation of God as "the set of all sets" may be a nice metaphor, a beautiful poetic expression. What it CANNOT be is a logically coherent conceptualisation of 'God'.

This is where we will agree to disagree Olivier.
For me, it is trivially true that you cannot think of anything outside of all possible combinations of structure in a 4D Reality. That number of combinations in a quantized space is huge but finite. Also as you well know I am not a dualist, I am sorry, we all have our starting axioms...all the best!

Scale this one way up guys...