Before the Zero

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

A related term from political theory is "*pluriverse*". In 'The Concept 
of the Political', Carl Schmitt develops the thought that the political 
always requires a clear distinction between friend and enemy. In 
contrast to other societal domains, like the economic or the beautiful, 
the political is, according to Schmitt, unavoidably the most essential 
to identity in any social context. On the level of states - and here 
it's important to know that for C.S. the concept of the state is 
secondary to that of the political ("Der Begriff des Staates setzt den 
Begriff des Politischen voraus") - this means that, because of the 
necessary distinction between friend and enemy, there can never ever be 
one sole and unified world-state. (If global peace & paradise break out 
tomorrow morning - which is, perhaps, not impossible but highly 
improbable - , it will have nothing to do with states and/or the 
political.) And thus the political world is not an universe yet a 
pluriverse.

"Die politische Welt ist ein Pluriversum, kein Universum."

Carl Schmitt: Der Begriff des Politischen, 1932, 7. Auflage, p. 54, 
Berlin 2002: Duncker & Humblot.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pluriverse


On 02.04.2016 05:36, David Morris wrote:
> http://www.sanskritimagazine.com/indian-religions/buddhism/origin-of-world-and-multiverse/ 
>
>
> Numerous Bhuddist sutras posit infinite parallel universes with 
> infinite other Bhuddhas. See Indra's net, a spiders web holding drops 
> of water at each intersection. Each intersection holding the image of 
> all other droplets and their reflected images. It it an image of the 
> infinity mirror times infinity.
>
> David Morris
>
>
>
> On Friday, April 1, 2016, Doug Millison <dougmillison at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     Enjoying the group read so far.  I am especially curious to hear
>     what readers think about ways that GR may reflect the theorizing
>     that has developed into the ongoing discussion about the multiverse.
>
>     "All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact."
>     -David Deutsch, THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY in the chapter called
>     "The Multiverse" (2011)
>
>     From the same chapter: "....Whenever we observe anything - a
>     scientific instrument or a galaxy or a human being - what we are
>     actually seeing is a single-universe perspective on a larger
>     object that extends some way into other universes. In some of
>     those universes, the object looks exactly as it does to us, in
>     others it looks different, or is absent altogether. What an
>     observer sees as a married couple is actually just a sliver of a
>     vast entity that includes many fungible instances of a couple,
>     together with other instances of them who are divorced, and others
>     who have never married...."
>
>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
>     ....The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of
>     finite and infinite possibleuniverses, including the universe in
>     which we live. Together, these universes comprise everything that
>     exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, and the
>     physical lawsand constants that describe them.
>     The various universes within the multiverse are called "parallel
>     universes", "other universes" or "alternate universes."....
>

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