It wouldn't have an outside, if it was finite. The universe is all of it, whether finite or infinite.

We are directly above the center of Earth, and we are in the now. That is All. We can pretend to be otherwise, which is merely a part of All perceiving itself. It's nice to know that we are merely. But it would also be nice to quit pretending. I think that happens after we've been dead for a while. We must wait. Or must we? I've heard some have figured out how to consistently be here now. Me, not so much.

Carry on.

Assuming our universe is finite, what lies beyond it's edge? — Echoes

this proves that reality MUST NECESSARILY be infinite

MUST NECESSARILY be infinite — Miller

And "infinite" meaning what, exactly?

And "infinite" meaning what, exactly? — tim wood

Nothingness is a problem, and therefore reality MUST be infinite and eternal. In order to avoid the problem of nothingness.

The reason nothingness is a problem is because already have somethingness. So what's beyond it? nothingness? makes no sense. Where did it come from? nothingness? makes no sense.

Therefore: this somethingness that we currently have MUST be infinite and eternal.

Let's try it again,

And "infinite" meaning what, exactly? — tim wood

this proves that reality MUST NECESSARILY be infinite — Miller

Even if we assume the universe is infinite, still begs the question: where is it located?
And how do we explain the Olber's paradox if it really is infinite?

https://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/suborbit/POLAR/cmb.physics.wisc.edu/tutorial/olbers.html

It wouldn't have an outside, if it was finite. The universe is all of it, whether finite or infinite. — Razorback kitten

We live in our town/village/city, which is inside the country, which is inside this planet Earth, which is inside the solar system, which is inside the Milky way galaxy, which is then inside this universe. Continuing the same set of questions, inside what is this universe located?

And "infinite" meaning what, exactly? — tim wood

Keeps going forever. Which makes alot more sense than its alternative: nothingness.

It's not about having the perfect answer, it's about having the best answer.

where is it located? — Echoes

Everywhere.

It's not about having the perfect answer, it's about having the best answer. — Miller

I'd rather have the truth

Everywhere. — Miller

And where is this "everywhere" located?

Keeps going forever. Which makes alot more sense than its alternative: nothingness.

It's not about having the perfect answer, it's about having the best answer. — Miller

And are you mindful that the surface, say, of a simple sphere "keeps going forever"? Which is why I ask. And the nothingness you refer to: if that's the nothingness of logic or philosophy, then what does it have to do with the universe or any part of it? What we call nothing having nothing to do with the idea of nothing.

And where is this "everywhere" located? — Echoes

All around you.

And where is this "everywhere" located? — Echoes

It's omnipresent. It's an infinite infinities inside another infinity.

What we call nothing having nothing to do with the idea of nothing. — tim wood

I didn't say nothing, I said nothingness. They are different.

I'd rather have the truth — Echoes

You would rather have your perfect fantasy, which is not achievable.

And how do we explain the Olber's paradox if it really is infinite? — Echoes

I had forgotten about Olber’s paradox, so thanks for that.

Assuming our universe is finite, what lies beyond it's edge? Where is the universe located in the first place? What lies above and below the universe?
Even if we assume we're in a multiverse, what lies outside the multiverse? — Echoes

I like this question very much, even though it’s clearly incoherent. You could read up on cosmology and get some idea how cosmologists tame their intuitive sense of ‘space’ or ‘location’ so that they don’t get into this sort of mess, maybe learn some tricks for almost visualizing how it works, but the fact remains that the question itself is incoherent and you won’t ever get an answer to it. We have never been waiting for science to figure out where the universe is, so whatever cosmologists say, it won’t be that.

But it’s still a lovely question. Because we know it’s a question that cannot be answered, we have some new things to think about:

(1) Why would we think, at first, that we could answer such a question?
(2) Why is it so easy to ask a question that, we might say, makes no sense?
(3) Does the way the question fails tell us anything else interesting?

* And lots more, but that’s a place to start, not finish.

It depends on the relation you want to clarify. If you ask such a general question like "where are we?", you have the choice of narrowing the topic down. So, in one instance, we are on a planet in the universe. Speaking more narrowly, we are in a galaxy in the universe, the Milky Way. To be more specific, we are in a solar system containing eight planets and we are the third planet close to the sun.

We don't have evidence to say that we are in a multiverse, that is only speculation based on a mathematical supposition, which may or may not be true. From here you could specify an arbitrary line on a map and call that "your country", furthermore you can state if you belong in a town or city, all the way down to your address. That's where you are in a sense.

We now enter tricky territory because you'll say "I am here" as opposed to over there. Where is here exactly? Do you want to give an exact longitude or latitude? Are you next to a chair or a table? Are you the same person all the time, otherwise looking for you will have a temporal characteristic. And so on. In absence of a relation to something else, you can't say to be anywhere.

Assuming our universe is finite, what lies beyond it's edge? Where is the universe located in the first place? — Echoes

Space is just one of many mathematical objects and all mathematical objects exist in mutual relations of similarity, of which spatial relations are just a special kind of relation. And by the way, time is just a special kind of space, at least according to theory of relativity.

And so on. In absence of a relation to something else, you can't say to be anywhere. — Manuel

The question itself is “Where is the universe?” and so fails because it’s like asking “Where is everything?” or “Where is everywhere?” and neither of those leave anything to be related to.

But it’s curious that the title of the thread is not “Where is the universe?” but “Where are we?” (although the conversational emphasis would probably be “Where are we?”). So the question could be, “Where are we, in relation to everything?” which sounds a little different, a question about, as people say, ‘our place in the universe’, which is not a question about location at all.

And maybe the conversational emphasis is the right one. What does it mean to be the sort of thing that has a physical location? That’s a defining characteristic of us, but what does it mean to have a location? Can my having a location only be described in terms of the location of other things or beings that have a location? That still doesn’t say what it is for anything — those things, me, us — to have a location. The simplest way to block even thinking you can answer my location question by talking about the location of other things, is to ask “Where is everything?”

And that’s a very good question. Not ‘where am I in relation to (something else)’, but what is ‘being somewhere’?

And maybe the conversational emphasis is the right one. What does it mean to be the sort of thing that has a physical location? That’s a defining characteristic of us, but what does it mean to have a location? Can my having a location only be described in terms of the location of other things or beings that have a location? That still doesn’t say what it is for anything — those things, me, us — to have a location. The simplest way to block even thinking you can answer my location question by talking about the location of other things, is to ask “Where is everything?”

And that’s a very good question. Not ‘where am I in relation to (something else)’, but what is ‘being somewhere’? — Srap Tasmaner

Raymond Tallis writes about this in some detail, I'm forgetting the book now, or books.

I don't think that's possible to answer without postulating a self-referential entity and this itself is highly puzzling. In some sense, I have to be different from myself in order to refer to me and my location. For if I am completely in myself, I don't see how I could recognize other things at all. I would just be a passive creature, taking in whatever sense data the world happens to throw at me.

For if I am completely in myself, I don't see how I could recognize other things at all. I would just be a passive creature, taking in whatever sense data the world happens to throw at me. — Manuel

Don't assume you are recognizing anything other than yourself. How do you know you have senses? Did you sense them? A brain in a vat could be made to think it is a being with senses walking around in a physical world. Simply by creating shapes that appeared to be objects and triggering a feeling response when those objects come into contact with its virtual body. It would then use those shapes and feelings to "prove" a real physical world existed. But even if the world is a simulation something somewhere has to be real to create the simulation. Therefore the world is real, it's just not what we think it is. It is not what it originally appears, and is thought, to be.

We're right over here

But you‘re asking, “How I can know where I am?” aren’t you? And that’s another thing entirely.

So far we have:
(1) Where is everything?
(1a*) Where is everywhere?
(2) What does it mean for something to be somewhere, for anything to be anywhere?
(2a) What does it mean for me to be somewhere, to be anywhere?
(3) How can I know where I am?
(3a) How can I know where anything is?

The 3’s don’t seem to leave a lot of room for the sort of answers that the 1’s and 2’s might require. It’s hard to imagine an answer to a 3 as anything but ‘where-in-relation-to’. Why is that? Why is knowledge so insistently relational?

If I answer the question “Where am I?” with “here”, then presumably we can ask “How do I know that I am here?” If ‘here’ is simply relational, then that’s the same as asking “How do I know I am not there, for all values of there?” But that’s just another way of not facing up to the question. When you answer “Where are you?” with “Here,” you give no location, in one sense, not even a relational one; it’s like saying, “I am wherever I am”, or “I am wherever this place is” or even “I am in whatever this place is.” Is that a location? It’s not saying “nowhere”.

Or not: ‘wherever I am’ is also relational, but marks place by reference to me. We have the same answer available for ‘all of us’ or for ‘everything’. The universe, too, is wherever it is, and since we’re in it, that’s where we are. Or, maybe better, the universe is wherever we are.

Of course we’re going around in circles, which is not necessarily bad, but it feels like we keep running past points where the questions might connect to each other. If we could say, clearly, how we can know where we are, or know where anything is, would that tell us what ‘being somewhere’ is? If, for instance, the question, ‘how can we know’, has to be restricted to ‘how can we know in relation to (something else)’ — and, of course, we haven’t shown this yet — then would be entitled to say that ‘being somewhere’ is only ‘being somewhere (relative to something else)’? That is not clear to me at all.

One other question we passed over is “How do I know I am somewhere?” or “How do I know something is somewhere?” Not ‘what is its location?’ but just ‘that it (or I) have one’. I counted this as a non-question by saying it’s just a property of us, or other things, to have a location. And it doesn’t seem to be a property of the universe. But how do we know that? Is that something we know?

Open question, then, for me. How we know which sorts of things have locations, and which don’t, how we know what those locations are, or don’t, might help us understand what having a location is, or might not.

@Manuel

Look at this way. My phone has GPS. It knows that it is somewhere, only operationally, only insofar as it knows where it is in relation to other things. My jacket does not have GPS, and knows neither where it is, nor that it is somewhere. But, unlike my phone, I know that I am somewhere even when I don’t know where that is. Now you can say that I always know a little about where I am, that I’m on Earth and so on, but do I seem to know even more than that: I know that I must be somewhere because I am spatial, and insofar as I am at all, I am located. What is that sense of being located, that’s what I want to get at, and what I think “Where is the universe?” can force you to confront. I don’t think you get to say that I know I must be located only in the sense of being located relative to other things, because we cannot claim already to understand what it means for those things to be located somewhere. And obviously we can’t say where the universe is in relation to anything else, but we can still say that it’s right here, or that it’s ‘all around us’.

Quite a bit of good stuff to go into, I'll pick out the relevant stuff.

(1) Where is everything?
(1a*) Where is everywhere? — Srap Tasmaner

Some things can be put in the forms of questions: "why is there nothing?", "what isn't a thing"?, but these don't have answers. So we say something trivial like, (1) everywhere, (1a) all around us. That leaves us with blank stares. We have to produce a question that could be given some kind of answer.

The universe, too, is wherever it is, and since we’re in it, that’s where we are. Or, maybe better, the universe is wherever we are. — Srap Tasmaner

Both are fine.

‘being somewhere’ is only ‘being somewhere (relative to something else)’? That is not clear to me at all — Srap Tasmaner

Well, what then? I can say "I am here", that doesn't tell you much. It's true that relations themselves don't explain the question, but if we don't include them, then we can't speak of where we are in any sense I can think of.

I know that I must be somewhere because I am spatial, and insofar as I am at all, I am located. What is that sense of being located, that’s what I want to get it, and what I think “Where is the universe?” can force you to confront. I don’t think you get to say that I know I must be located only in the sense of being located relative to other things, because we cannot claim already to understand what it means for those things to be located somewhere. — Srap Tasmaner

That sense of being located is what you feel, when you ask yourself where you are. You specify what comes to mind as you think of this question. If you don't include a relational aspect, then I can't make any sense of how to even begin.

I don't think that covers everything at all. But I also don't know how to proceed. This seems to me intimately related to the issue of self-consciousness.

And obviously we can’t say where the universe is in relation to anything else, but we can still say that it’s right here, or that it’s ‘all around us’. — Srap Tasmaner

The concept "universe" is relative to me, the creature asking the question.

I may be part of the universe, but I can scrutinize it in a way that it seems unable to do, absent someone asking a question.

The concept "universe" is relative to me, the creature asking the question.

I may be part of the universe, but I can scrutinize it in a way that it seems unable to do, absent someone asking a question. — Manuel

Or us. It’s where we are.

A post or two in, it occurred to me that reversing the relational definition is probably the inevitable way in. We get the three usual ways to deal with the relational thing: one’s independent, the other’s independent, or they’re mutually dependent. Starting with science in mind, it feels natural to reach first for counting the external (objective, natural, public, manifest) as independent: this house defines a space and I am in a specific part of that, relative to the house; the grocery store has a known, fixed location, and I’m about a mile from there in some direction. That way of answering ‘where’ questions fails immediately for the universe.

The third option, I’m holding off on a bit.

The second option, taking ourselves as independent and thinking of location relative to us, seems to have some promise. I was confused at first that you and @Miller seemed almost immediately to start talking about solipsism, but it makes sense if that’s how you see starting from us.

I think I didn’t see solipsism here because I’m not allowing myself to assume that location is relational, or at least not relational in a way that I already understand.

I think we could start with ‘us’ and ‘where we are’, but there’s no need to rush past understanding what ‘where we are’ means. In essence I’ve been arguing that the title of the thread, “Where are we?”, is exactly the way into answering “Where is the universe?” by turning it into “Where is here?” first of all, and thinking about location (what is ‘here’?) this way first, but knowing that we’ll need to end up with a sense of location that also works for ‘there’ and ‘that stuff’ too. (Does it need to be the same sense? Unclear.)

And how do we explain the Olber's paradox if it really is infinite? — Echoes

Doesn't Olbers' paradox just apply to a "static universe"?
An infinite universe could still expand, so there'd be no such paradox.
I think the steady-state universe is one such model.

The second option, taking ourselves as independent and thinking of location relative to us, seems to have some promise. I was confused at first that you and Miller seemed almost immediately to start talking about solipsism, but it makes sense if that’s how you see starting from us.

I think I didn’t see solipsism here because I’m not allowing myself to assume that location is relational, or at least not relational in a way that I already understand. — Srap Tasmaner

Funny you mention that. I did not have solipsism in mind, but (paradoxically or non-sensically as this sounds) I think if we are to interpret the nature of a creature, you do treat that creature as if it were the only one in existence. That's why when they mapped out our DNA sequence, they only used the DNA of one person (I believe, please correct me if I'm wrong).

We then generalize from single organism to others, under the (rational) assumption that they are like the initial creature studied.

The last sentence in this quote, is unclear to me.

In essence I’ve been arguing that the title of the thread, “Where are we?”, is exactly the way into answering “Where is the universe?” by turning it into “Where is here?” first of all, and thinking about location (what is ‘here’?) this way first, but knowing that we’ll need to end up with a sense of location that also works for ‘there’ and ‘that stuff’ too. (Does it need to be the same sense? Unclear.) — Srap Tasmaner

I think so. But look at your own examples, you relate "Where is here" to thinking about location. But in order to make sense of here, you also have to account for "there" and that "stuff". I guess I'm not getting what's the puzzle you have with the relational aspect of this.

I mean, if you can, tell me something that isn't relational and then maybe we can proceed. I can't think of a single example. Or maybe you have some different concept of relation than what I'm using.