Absolute nothingness is only impossible from the perspective of something
Why is there something rather than nothing?
In answering this question, one must contemplate absolute nothingness, that is, the non-existence of everything. This "concept" is often deemed oxymoronic. For something to exist/be true, it must be
a thing. If absolute nothingness is a thing, it would entail its own non-existence, which would mean absolute nothingness would be true and untrue at the same time: a contradiction. If absolute nothingness is not a thing, then it cannot exist/be true.
So, question answered, right? Absolute nothingness is impossible! Not so fast. If there "was" absolute nothingness, there would be no definition, no contradiction, no nothing (pun intended).
Absolute nothingness is most definitely impossible, but that is of no consequence. You see, absolute nothingness is only impossible if there is something to begin with. So, to say "there is something, because nothing is impossible" would be circular reasoning.
I think my argument can be simplified to this:
Thus, we are left without an answer to why there is something rather than nothing. Yet, I do not think this entails any paradoxes, nor does it allow for skepticism about whether something exists or not. All that is threatened is that there may be no ultimate reason for existence; it may be that reality is a brute fact.
In answering this question, one must contemplate absolute nothingness, that is, the non-existence of everything. This "concept" is often deemed oxymoronic. For something to exist/be true, it must be
a thing. If absolute nothingness is a thing, it would entail its own non-existence, which would mean absolute nothingness would be true and untrue at the same time: a contradiction. If absolute nothingness is not a thing, then it cannot exist/be true.
So, question answered, right? Absolute nothingness is impossible! Not so fast. If there "was" absolute nothingness, there would be no definition, no contradiction, no nothing (pun intended).
Absolute nothingness is most definitely impossible, but that is of no consequence. You see, absolute nothingness is only impossible if there is something to begin with. So, to say "there is something, because nothing is impossible" would be circular reasoning.
I think my argument can be simplified to this:
Absolute nothingness is impossible, but it would not be impossible if it were not for the existence of something.
Thus, we are left without an answer to why there is something rather than nothing. Yet, I do not think this entails any paradoxes, nor does it allow for skepticism about whether something exists or not. All that is threatened is that there may be no ultimate reason for existence; it may be that reality is a brute fact.
Comments (263)
This is entailed by "nothingness is impossible" (i.e. there cannot be not-something), no?
Why is there something rather than nothing is one of the Christian/Muslim apologist's favorite standbys. It is meant to provide an irresistible inference to god. More sophisticated apologists now just ask, why is there sentient life?
Quoting Ø implies everything
People find this aesthetically unattractive and insist on more pleasing stories. I came to this view as a small child and all that I've seen and read has not led me to an alternative narrative.
This inference is only valid if one assumes there is something to begin with, which makes it a circular argument.
I am of the view that there is no "normal" reason for reality, but there is a reason for why there must be no reason. Thus, with this belief, there is a meta-reason for why reality exists. I do not want to spoil anything more, but this gives you the general picture. Is this contrary to your beliefs, or specification of them?
I struggle with these sports of sentences. What does it mean?
In general, I don't think humans have the capacity to understand reality beyond certain parameters. What we can do is generate ideas that are of use and appeal aesthetically. We can prevent suffering. We can work together. Beyond that...
There's a meta-reason for reality. Okay, as for non-meta-reasons for reality; what options are there? There's reason 1, reason 2, etc., and then there is the option of there being no reason.
Now, this last option is true, and if we left it at that, reality would be a brute fact in every sense (and also paradoxical I believe). However, there's more to it. You see, there is a reason for why this last option is true. A reason for a reason, or the lack thereof, is a meta-reason; so, we now have meta-reason for reality. But what is the reason for this? Well, that would be some self-referential reason. I think one could formulate this ultimate self-referential reason in such a way so as to include the meta-reason, though in order to make the full explanation as clear as possible, I think it is prudent to separate them.
Now, that's all very non-specific and might thus be of very little value to you. However, my more concrete ideas are at this point too undeveloped for it to be productive for me to elaborate.
Quoting Tom Storm
It could be I agree, depending on the exact meaning of your statement. There are parts of reality that must be understandable in order to allow for any certitude, and I believe (because I am optimistic) that certitude regarding non-trivial matters is attainable. Without this certitude, everything of value is lost to the absurdity of absolute skepticism. How can I know something is good for me if I don't even know I exist? Of course, one could make the conscious choice to not give a damn about the technicalities and roll the boulder anyways, and this might be what I have to resort to if my project fails.
What about the interior of the empty set? Non-syntactically speaking. But physically, there are fields everywhere inundating empty space.
Quoting Ø implies everything
Simplified? You're kidding. Convoluted, it appears to have philosophical substance. Does it really?
I have no idea what any of this means. Sorry. This may well be on me.
Quoting Ø implies everything
No one is arguing for absolute skepticism.
Quoting Ø implies everything
Is anyone arguing this?
Quoting Ø implies everything
This is my choice. I'm not sure if I subscribe entirely to absurdity and the Sisyphus metaphor, but it has more going for it (in my assessment) than religion or abstract metaphysical speculations.
Quoting Tom Storm
My response was not argumentative, it was a monologue. I was simply explaining my motivation, I was not explaining why anyone was wrong.
Quoting Tom Storm
The passage was so non-specific that there is not much meaning to be had, so it is more on me. I believe the passage is meaningful to people who are thinking about the same kinds of things I am currently, as there's a context in which the non-specificity collapses into something quite concrete. If you are not dabbling too much in these topics, then it is only natural that it didn't ring any bells, so have no worries :)
Quoting jgill
That is self-contradictory. The space is not empty if there are fields in it. These kinds of retorts seem to rise from a confusion of exactly how absolute the absolute nothingness is. We are talking "about" the inexistence of anything definable and undefinable; the inexistence of absolutely everything.
To be clear, I am not arguing that its possible no thing exists. The argument only shows why the current impossibility of absolute nothingness does not single-handedly explain why there is something. The reason is that absolute nothingness is only impossible during the existence of something, so the question of why there is something to begin with remains.
That said, the impossibility of absolute nothingness is still helpful. You see, absolute nothingness does not hold candidacy for being reality. As said, it is either self-contradictory (whenever something exists to give it thinghood), or it is not self-contradictory (in the event there is no thing), but thus also actually inexistent (and thus not reality). However, the fact that absolute nothingness is not a candidate for reality does not mean there is A candidate for reality; for why must there be a reality at all? Why cannot there be an inexistent non-reality of nothingness?
So, what I have shown is that the impossibility of absolute nothingness does not entail there must be something, but it removes absolute nothingness from the competition. Thus, to explain why there is something, one must merely explain why something is a candidate. Since absolute nothingness is not a candidate, showing that something is a candidate means, by process of elimination, that something must be reality.
It may seem like I am splitting hairs or being a madman, but I believe this is the only way to logically approach the issue.
In Hume's view, "Absolute Nothingness" is an empty concept, which denotes nothing.
Hume wrote in his Treaties, If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Absolute nothing with something to give it meaning is, instead, an oxymoron. It is not an empty concept, but it is an illogical one.
Interesting to note that the criticism also applies to his book. Not for nothing is Hume sometimes called 'the godfather of positivism'.
All you've succeeded in doing is making the grammatical point that if there is something then there is not nothing.
Writing "absolute" in front of "nothing" only serves to obfuscate.
Quoting Ø implies everything
I was offering support for your position. I'm old but not that senile. :roll:
However, I think you make an empty mountain out of a philosophical molehill.
"Something" and "nothing" are words. As only words that are part of a pair (more or less) have any use in language - hot/cold, up/down, sense/nonsense, good/bad - the fact that a word exists in language assumes it has a counterpart - something/nothing. If a word had no counterpart, it wouldn't be part of language in the first place.
IE, the reason there is "something" is that it has the counterpart "nothing". In other words, as Derrida might have said "vive la différence".
Having said that, it exists as you wrote it down. It exists on its own as a concept without meaning or denotation.
If it didn't exist, you couldn't have thought of it, or typed it up. And if you will, the meaning of "Absolute Nothing" is an abstract concept which has no meaning, and no denotation. It could have other meanings, if a group of people agreed to give their own meanings to the concept.
Before the thread was made up, it didn't exist. When the thread was opened, and the word was typed, it exists on the screen in the thread - I can read it :) . According to Wittgenstein, meanings are dead before use. When they get used, they get born and are alive ... something like that in the Blue Book.
It doesn't exist in the external world, but it does exist in one's mind, and on the paper, and computer screen, as you write it down. Is it the "Absolute Nothingness" you meant? or did you have something else in mind?
Yes, interesting indeed. Do you have the quotes from Hume's works?
What are the counterpart words for "car", "book" and "Coca Cola"?
What I meant was that if you read the quoted passage If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask....", it actually applies to Hume's treatise itself! In other words, according to his own criterion, his book should also be 'committed to the flames'.
I studied a unit in David Hume as an undergraduate. The lecturer used to compare Hume's philosophy to the fabled uroboros, the snake that eats itself.
'The hardest part', he would say, 'is the last bite'.
For Derrida, the meaning of a word derives from how it contrasts with other related words.
In this instance "car" contrasts with bicycle, train and pedestrian. "Book" contrasts with film, ebook and radio. "Coca Cola" contrasts with orange juice, Pepsi Cola and water.
From the Britannica article on Jacques Derrida
Building on theories of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Derrida coined the term différance, meaning both a difference and an act of deferring, to characterize the way in which linguistic meaning is created rather than given. For Derrida as for Saussure, the meaning of a word is a function of the distinctive contrasts it displays with other, related meanings. Because each word depends for its meaning on the meanings of other words, it follows that the meaning of a word is never fully present to us, as it would be if meanings were the same as ideas or intentions; instead it is endlessly deferred in an infinitely long chain of meanings. Derrida expresses this idea by saying that meaning is created by the play of differences between wordsa play that is limitless, infinite, and indefinite.
There is a table in front of me. On the left there is not a unicorn and on the right there is not something.
As there is no logical necessity that a word such as "unicorn" refers to a thing that exists outside of language, there is also no logical necessity that a word such as "something" also refers to a thing that exists outside of language.
Regarding the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?", as we know that "something" and "nothing" exist in language, but cannot know whether something and nothing exist outside of language, our reply can only be in terms of language and not in terms of what may or may not exist outside language.
Thanks for your reply on the counterpart words for those words. This is a new way to view the words for me. I will mull them over.
I think the abstract words are definitely in the world of language, but they can also be in one's mind i.e. as psychological states or events.
For example "absolute nothingness" can be described as a psychological state prior to someone's birth, if he believed in the existence of soul separate from his body. The consciousness part of the soul of the person before birth would be "absolute nothingness".
Or if one believed in one's own consciousness in the soul after one's death, then would be "absolute nothingness".
Or if there was a book on the desk this morning. You saw it there lying on the desk. But when you saw the desk when you returned home from the town after few hours of errands, it has gone. There is nothing on the desk.
Someone might have moved it to the other room, but you don't know which room, or if it had been actually moved by someone, or was it dropped into a box underneath the desk, or actually you don't recall what has been happened or done to it. Only thing you recall is that you saw the book on the desk this morning.
At that moment, in your mind, you have the feeling or perception of "absolute nothingness" about the existence of the book.
Let's ignore language or communicating with others. Do you think it's possible for an existent to perceive 'nothing?' internally? If god was an existent that was eternal self-aware mind with intent, then how would it be able to perceive nothing or experience 'nothing' or personal non-existence?
I don't think it could, I think such IS impossible and thus such a god cannot be omniscient or omnipotent.
Hard solipsism is unfalsifiable, but so is the existence of nothing. For me, the concept of 'nothing' suggests that the process of 'universe' coming into existence, and then ending via something like heat death via entropy, suggests an eternal cycle, like suggested by Penrose's CCC. If I try to go anywhere else, my brain again just displays a big 'brain off' switch.
It's that "only" that makes all the trouble. It suggests that there is a perspective of absolute nothingness that we have overlooked all this time. It doesn't come right out and say so, but it would be uncontroversial if it were phrased, "Absolute nothingness is impossible from any perspective." We could all nod and move on.
I am not claiming absolute nothingness is possible from its own perspective; only that it is not impossible. It is not possible either. It isn't anything, nor is anything else. That's the problem. Our arguments for why there must be something presuppose there is something. Now, there happens to be something, so therefore there must be something. But that still leaves the question unanswered.
I don't see how. You seemed to offer a counter-example to my claim that absolute nothingness is impossible.
Quoting Corvus
A book at one moment in time can only exist in one location. For example, in the morning, it exists on the desk. But in order for it to exist on the desk, it cannot exist anywhere other than on the desk, for example, under the desk or ten metres to the right of the desk.
As I perceive the book existing on the desk, at the same time, I also perceive the book as not existing under the desk.
Generalising, to be able to perceive something somewhere, I must be able to perceive nothing somewhere else.
No the difference here, is that the book could exist under the desk via change. I exist, when I die, I no longer exist, but all the sub-atomic quanta that was part of me, persists, but becomes separated.
Even at the point of the complete heat death of the universe, some unknown 'energy form' will persist, as will dimensional extent. But the universe will contain no objects, not even black holes. According to CCC and its 'hawking points,' as identified in this aeon cycle. Those conditions result in no further ticking of time, as no movement occurs and energy can no longer do work. That is the moment suggested as 'size/extent no longer having any meaning,' (the moment of singularity) and a new Big Bang cycle happens. At least that is my probably quite poor understanding of CCC, as posited by Roger Penrose and his team. At no point did a state of 'nothingness' exist.
Mainly because you wouldn't be able to talk about nothing if there weren'r something.
I think that in a way this is what the title of your topic says too.
Quoting Ø implies everything
I don't remember having ever heard talking about "absolute" nothingness. When we say "nothingness" it's simply nothingness. As you say, nothingness is absence of everyting. That's all there is to it.
Quoting Ø implies everything
Of course. But "absolute nothingness" is mainly a pleonasm, it is redundant, as I explained above.
I can't see what can one say more about this subject. And I think that it has been already said too much.
I'm afraid that you are just repeating yourself. Just the title of your topic --without word "absolute"-- says it all. :smile:
You can perceive the essence of the Absolute Nothingness via Husserl's phenomenological method called Bracketing, which is to bracket the distracting details of the perception such as the book, existence, the table ...etc, and just concentrating on the subjective experience of Absolute Nothingness - i.e. {the non-existence} of the book at that moment of your perception.
As a Nominalist, rather than a Platonic Realist, that's my present understanding of the universe today, in that there are no such things as objects in the world outside the mind. What we perceive as a book only exists in the mind. What exists in the world outside the mind are elementary particles and elementary forces existing in time and space.
A contradiction could be ontologizing/reifying "absolute nothingness"?
If you would change it up so you're saying we wouldn't be able to conceive of the void without contrasting it to something, then I'd agree. Everything appears to the mind against a backdrop of its negation. But here we aren't doing ontology exactly. We're just talking about what we observe about how the mind works.
There seems to be a family resemblance between Bracketing and Nominalism.
Wikipedia - Bracketing (Phenomenolgy)
The preliminary step in the philosophical movement of phenomenology is describing an act of suspending judgment about the natural world to instead focus on analysis of experience.
Wikipedia - Nominalism
In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels.
You're almost right. All I've succeeded in doing is reducing this supposed answer to why is there something to the grammatical point you're mentioning. That is, your critique is highlighting the very same issue I am trying to highlight. If the impossibility of nothingness is entailed by the fact that there is something, then the argument "nothingness is impossible, thus something must exist" can be expanded into "something exists, thus nothingness is impossible, thus something must exist", and this of course leaves the first proposition unexplained. The first proposition is provably true, but it is nonetheless bereft of explanation.
The absolute is added in order to separate it from other, weaker conceptions of nothing, like the nothing of a vacuous void, for example.
Well, absolute nothingness is not just a mental negation of something, it is actually the negation of something. That's what it is defined as, and any would-be referent would correspond to that definition.
Negation is a logical operation. The void is no-thing, so we understand the void as the negative or opposite of things. When we say "things" here, we specifically mean existing things, such as objects that take up space and exist for a certain amount of time.
So when Einstein places moving objects in a void, we now have space and time in the void by virtue of having moving objects in it. The ancient Greeks would have been gravely troubled by this talk of voids and placing things in them. But we have the number zero, so we're accustomed to talking about absence or vacancy. We think of it as a cubby hole of some sort, where there's nothing in the cubby.
I think if you're interested in this topic, you'd probably love a history of the number zero. It's fascinating stuff if you haven't already read about it.
A void where you could place something into is not absolute nothingness, given that the action of placing something into it implies there was the potential for that action in the void. Thus, there was something, though not something physical (whatever physical means).
Absolute nothingness is not understood as the negation of something; it is the negation of something. Your claim is akin to saying "a square is understood as a shape of four connected and equally long sides", which is an understatement: that is what a square is! To say anything else would be to ascribe a referent to square that is not (fully) describable by the definition of a square, which would thus make the definition not a definition.
This kind of thinking comes from a confusion of descriptions and definitions. If one's perception is one's mode of referral, one would be referencing a referent with no definition. If one were to describe this referent, then one could be wrong; the referent is not referred to by one's description, but by one's perception; which one's description merely tries to symbolize through symbols that refer to other things. Thus, when describing percepts, one is comparing referents, and one could do this comparison incorrectly; one could misrepresent one's perception(s).
If however, conception is one's mode of referral, then there is no room for error. What would my conception be incorrect relative to? Itself? That would be nonsense. I could however subsequently describe the referent of the definition, and in this subsequent step, I could be wrong. If I decide to merge the incorrect descriptions with the definition, then I would have a new definition. The question is merely what I declare to be definition or not; the definition is me specifying the referent, not describing it, and thus I cannot go wrong.
So, the "referent" I am specifying is precisely the negation of something/everything. That is not my understanding/description of it; it IS it. Though it doesn't exist of course.
If someone were to say, "Well, empty space has nothing in it", I would say, "But it is inundated with various fields".
An interesting point ! :up:
Mind can also perceive the process of changes and temporality of objects in the external world. When an object changes from existence to non-existence (the book on the table), the property of the object changes from extension to non-extension. The property of extension to non-extension of material objects can be perceived as Absolute nothingness.
All existence is either absolute existing or absolute non-existing. There is no in-between or half existence.
[quote=The Great, Forgotten Wolff; https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-should-recover-the-philosophy-of-christian-wolff] (The philosopher Christian) Wolff became known throughout Europe as a martyr of reason and the Enlightenment, thereby only increasing his fame. The Crown Prince of Prussia, Friedrich II (later Frederick the Great), commissioned a French translation of Wolffs so-called German Metaphysics in 1736, and rumour has it that he read it so often that his pet monkey Mimi threw it into the fire out of jealousy. [/quote]
Perhaps she was a kindred spirit of Humes :-)
On the desk is a book. One could say that the book exists because the atoms that make it up exist in different locations, for example, atom A and atom B. One could also say that the desk exists because the atoms that make it up exist in different locations, for example, atom C and atom D.
The mind connects atom A and atom B as being part of the object book, and also connects atom C and atom D as being part of the object desk. Therefore, these objects, the book and the desk, exist in the mind.
But outside the mind, what connects atom A to atom B but not to atom C?
If there is nothing outside the mind that preferentially connects atom A to any other particular atom, then objects as we know them don't exist outside the mind.
Outside our minds, atoms exist but not objects (treating the "atom" as a figure of speech for something that does physically exist)
Objects as a concept in the mind don't exist outside the mind, meaning that we can perceive something as existing in the world that in fact doesn't exist in the world.
IE, we perceive something where in fact there is nothing.
Maybe the monkey was a secret agent sent out to the Crown Prince by Hume?
Perhaps that would be the reason why it is so difficult to get hold of any of Wolff's books even today :( :)
What would be the "something" that you perceive?
My knowledge of him is extremely scanty, but I know Kant depicted him as a dogmatist, and I get the sense of what he means by that. That article I linked to said he started his career wanting to demonstrate theology with mathematical precision, which doesn't seem promising. My knowledge of Kant isn't that great either, but I think at least I get the point of his 'Copernican revolution in philosophy'. Anyway this isn't a Kant thread so let's not pursue that line of conversation.
This is related to the reasoning that led Parmenides to deny to reality of change (and for Russell to do something similar millennia later).
I think Hegel has an elegant solution here. We're here, so there is something. We have to start with that. So we try to strip that something down, to empty of it of all its contents and so arrive at a bare being in order to investigate what traits, if any, "something" must have. This is sheer immediacy, sheer being.
But what Hegel finds is that this sheer being is now totally contentless. It describes nothing, collapses into nothing. So, pure being turns out to be nothing. But nothing is itself unstable. We're thinking of it, so it's something, like you say. And so nothing turns out to collapse back into sheer being.
We have an oscillation, an unstable contradiction. But what if being subsumes/sublates nothing, incorporating parts of nothing into it? Then we reach the becoming of our world, where each moment of being is continually passing away into the nothing on non-being.
A better description of this can be found here: https://phil880.colinmclear.net/materials/readings/houlgate-being-commentary.pdf
And this makes sense to me from the perspective of what we can say about time. Why do we have a four dimensional manifold? Because we use the time dimension to mark when events have occurred. As Godel noted, eternalist responses to seeming "paradoxes" in relativity miss the mark. What can it mean to say "all times exist at all times?" Times exist at the point along the time dimension where they exist. Events occur when they occur. They do not occur at other times.
"Existence" is a complex word that leads to trouble here. When people say "all times exist" I think they generally want to say "all times are real." And this I agree with. But that doesn't mean that events don't occur (exist) at just the times that they exist. The time dimension becomes meaningless if it doesn't tell us when things occur. That becoming is local is confusing, and open to many interpretations, but also not all that relevant here.
Also I would quibble with this:
This seems to beg the question somewhat. It assumes that nothing exists necessarily. If there are necessary things, then they exist by necessity, and they are something. Which would seem to entail for you that "absolute nothingness is [not] most definitely possible," if anything exists of necessity. And then of course, there are many arguments for things which do exist of necessity, although not all senses of "of necessity" have bearing here. We really mean "cannot not exist," in this sense.
There is a strong tradition of seeing the world as "blown into being by contradiction," by "the principle of explosion." If we start with absolutely basic necessary entities, say just sheer being, then we might still end up kicking off a cascade from there as contradictions are forced into progressive resolution. And in this way the universe would exist, but not really as a "brute fact," but rather of a sort of "logical" necessity, even though the starting point for the analysis is quite similar to the one that forces us to conclude it is a brute fact. It sort of hinges on necessity.
Could we say that, because there is now something, it is clear that nothing, by necessity cannot exist? Maybe. It seems no matter how broad you want to define existence, our very presence precludes that a "nothing from which nothing comes" could ever have been. This is for the trivial reason that there is something, and if there was only a "nothing from which nothing comes" there couldn't be a something. And so, from the basics of Augustine or Descartes' versions of the "cognito" we might be able to preclude the "nothing from which nothing comes," by necessity.
But is proving that nothing necessarily doesn't exist the same thing as proving the necessity of existence? Tricky. Perhaps we only prove the necessity of a bare something, sheer being. But then, according to Hegel, this is all we need to kick off the rest.
I see the value in it. We can distinguish "absolute nothing," from the "nothing" we find when we look for something in a bag and there is "nothing there," or when there is "nothing in my bank account." Then we also have the physical idea of vacuum to distinguish a philosophical "absence of everything," from.
There is also the internal "nothing," of life's lack of meaning or purpose. Or the "nothing" that underlies all values supposed in some philosophies.
Aren't "elementary particles" objects? And wouldn't time and space be an object if it acts like a receptacle/container?
And if mind emerges from nature, from whence the objects of perception? The mind might "generate," perception to some degree, our "perceptual equipment," has a causal history, right? So what in the objectless world causes objects?
I agree with the denial of objects as fundemental, and the conception of Platonic forms as existing as some sort of super essential substance in their own realm, but it seems to me that forms have causal efficacy and that objects exist in the world, even if they are temporary, merely stabilities in a larger process. I don't even know if Plato really thought of his forms in the way they have come to be thought of. The way in which they are "higher," doesn't seem to track with our modern, substance dualism laced vision of Platonism. They are arguably merely higher by being more self-determining. They are "what they are because of what they are," in a way rocks and dogs are not.
Quoting jgill
I thought this was meant as a counter-example, but given what you're saying, I see now you were probably refuting it as an example.
I completely agree.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
No. Nothing is impossible because something happens to exist, regardless of if it had to or not.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Proving that nothing necessarily does not exist has to assume the existence of something, because this proof requires something to be valid. This is what I am getting at when I'm saying that all the problems of nothingness arise only because there is something; and this is obviously true; whatever produces the problems is a subset of everything, and thus do not exist if there is absolutely nothing.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I agree with Hegel here.
I was just tossing it out to get your opinion. Sorry for the confusion.
No worries; it takes two for confusion :)
Quoting RussellA
Mereological nihilism? I've been meaning to look into it if you could recommend any books or resources.
I feel part of the statement in the argument seems unclear.
"Absolute nothingness is impossible to x"?
x= exist, imagine, conceive, eat, see, smell, hear, manufacture, discard ... etc?
Can x in your simplified argument be specified and clarified?
Quoting Ø implies everything
What does "something" denote or indicate?
Perhaps, because we are not yet dead.
Anything that is not nothing.
Quoting Ø implies everything
I tried to analyse the statement further with logical reasoning, and the conclusion I got is, it is neither true nor false. Therefore it is not a valid proposition.
Quoting Ø implies everything
For the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?", I feel that we can get the answer for the reasons for the most existence by inductive and deductive reasoning. For example, the book exists in my room, because I bought it, it had been written by the author, printed by the publisher, and sold by Amazon ... etc etc.
But there are some existences with their properties, which are out of the boundaries of our reasoning capability in finding out their reasons for the existence with conclusive certainty such as the earth, mountains, seas, sky, space, the planets, galaxies and Gods so on.
These entities are just too old, far in distance, massive in size, or abstract for our reason to manage to work out the possible answers. The only answers we can get would be either from the scientific conjectures or religious myths, which don't convince our reasoning system with the conclusive assurance.
Therefore we are forced to go back to Kant's CPR written in the mid 1700s, and nod our heads to "Thing-in-Itself", and the limitation of human reasoning as declared by him.
The principal premise of your argument is: "For something to exist/be true, it must be
a thing." To consider the soundness of your conclusion we need to understand the soundness of this premise. Why do you believe that existence necessarily consists of "things"? If you take a look at "process philosophy" you will see that this class of philosophers deny the truth of this premise. They place activity as prior to and therefore not dependent on being. From this perspective it is possible to have existence without things.
However, in your conclusion, you move to qualify nothing with "absolute". This qualification is not supported by your argument, which restricts existence to things. Your argument premises that existence consists only of things, then it classes "absolute nothing" as a thing. So it fails to address all of reality which falls between things and true absolute nothingness, which is activity, process. Then you take an obviously false premise, that the nothingness you are talking about is "absolute", and proceed from that.
The premise is clearly false, because your principal premise has already restricted "existence" to things, therefore not an absolute nothingness. So "existence", by this definition is not absolute. In reality therefore, your argument proceeds from two contradictory premises, the first being that existence is restricted to things, and the second being that "absolute nothingness is a thing".
You may be interested in reading this then: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12098/a-first-cause-is-logically-necessary/p1
Also a follow up here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12847/if-a-first-cause-is-logically-necessary-what-does-that-entail-for-the-universes-origins/p1
But that's not right, since here's a thread about nothingness.
Something is going on here, to do with nothingness. The folk posting here have something in mind, when they talk about nothingness.
I saw nothing that wasn't there
It wasn't there again today
I wish that nothing would go away!
Were I to sit upon my chair
Would nothing again be there?
Or lack of nothing be gone away?
A curious thing, what can I say? :cool:
They do. But isn't that the problem? Can we talk about nothingness, other than to say there is a concept we imagine wherein there is a total absence of something? We talk about something with great ease and then posit that the opposite to something must exist.
Could you elaborate with a formal proof? If you want, I can try to formalize my proof as well.
If someone says to you - Why is there something rather than nothing? - what would be your usual response?
By thing, I mean anything that could exist, be it a process or a concept or whatever. So, if absolute nothingness is a thing, then it would mean it could exist, which would make it self-contradictory. It cannot exist, because its existence would imply its non-existence. Thus, absolute nothingness is impossible.
But its impossibility, is as I argued for, not important. If absolute nothingness was in fact the case, then it would not be a thing, and any paradoxes regarding that would also not be a thing.
Maybe, but I wouldn't want to. Too many empty calories.
Is nothing one or many? Can there be several nothings? The mind can see similarities between objects and make categories of them (such as species and genus). If Spinoza's principle that all determination is negation is true, then the further we abstract from things of the world, the more we reach a single concept of being. For Spinoza this ground is one and the concept should accord to one. Being and nothingness have aspects in common such that a painting paint brush has to the canvas; it takes what is potential and makes it something. The potential is limitless. And all nothing knows how to do is determine as time rolls on and the world operates according to it's basic laws
What you are saying, is that we ought to conceive of absolute nothingness as something other than a thing. No problem there, right? But then you define "thing" in such a way that if it is not a thing, it does not exist. Therefore you want us to conceive of absolute nothingness as other than existent. There's no problem there either, but it does not mean that such a concept would be impossible, self-contradictory, or in any way incoherent. We can and do conceive of many non-existent things.
Sure. I will make up my own analyses of the reasoning, and come back with it. Please forward your formal proof. Thanks.
[math] \mathit allocate : \lambda (A : Type) , \bot \to A [/math]
Likewise, for 'destroying' elements of a type, i.e to free their memory, we have
[math] \mathit deallocate : \lambda (A : Type), A \to \bot [/math]
"Deallocate" can therefore be regarded as the 'negation' of "Deallocate" and vice-versa.
In particular, [math]A[/math] can be taken to be [math]\bot[/math], which apparently denotes useless instances of the above functions that do nothing (since we officially have no values for [math]\bot[/math] to read or write with). This is because the meaning of [math]\bot[/math] in our programming language is to denote the mysterious origin and destination of the values in our programs, i.e. the external compiler/OS that our programs depend on for resources, but whose resources cannot be talked about or reasoned with within our programming language.
Yet suppose the following isomorphism is taken to be true and can be manipulated within our programming language.
[math] \bot \simeq (\bot \to \bot) [/math]
This equivalence is regarded as true in models of classical linear logic. Then this implies that [math] \bot [/math] can be iteratively expanded as a potentially infinite list of ... values of some sort? - no, for that possibility was already forbidden - then of memory addresses for storing values!. In which case, if we allowed our programming language to manipulate memory addresses directly (e.g as in C/C++) then we can then interpret [math] \bot [/math] within our programming language, and consequently give meaning to and take control of allocate/deallocate in the intuitive and practical way, For example by defining
[math]\mathit allocate \ \Bbb{N} : \bot \to \Bbb{N}[/math]
[math]\mathit \ \bot = 0 [/math]
[math]\mathit \ \bot \to \bot = 1 [/math]
[math]\mathit \ \bot \to \bot \to \bot = 2 [/math]
[math] ...[/math]
And paired with a respective definition for 'deallocate' that destroys these values by freeing their corresponding memory addresses and then returning them.
So to summarise the above examples, "Nothing" initially referred to the mysterious effect of a destroyed value of a type and to the mysterious cause of an initialized value of a type within a programming language that could only talk about values. But by expanding the semantics of our language, we eliminated dead talk of "Nothingness" for talk about the interactive duality of "type values" and "memory addresses" .
I think the lesson is, "nothingness" denotes epistemic ignorance and/or semantic scoping and can be eliminated from empirical and rational discourse.
You are wrong.
"Explaining why anyone was wrong" is a requirement for every post you make on tpf. And the more political and divisive your reason for your interlocutor's failure to understand their own stupidity, the more points.
Okay, absolute nothingness is either a thing or not. If it is a thing, it is self-contradictory, and thus cannot exist. If it is not a thing, it cannot exist (by my earlier definition). Thus, absolute nothingness cannot exist no matter what. So, something exists, right?
No. Proving absolute nothingness cannot exist does not entail something exists. Something and nothing can not exist at the same time, and any contradiction you may believe exists in that would not exist if everything did not exist.
A proof must have content; it must assume the existence of something. When considering the inexistence of everything, one cannot disprove it, because that would be assuming the existence of something, meaning one is assuming the falsity of what one is trying to disprove to begin with; that is, one is just begging the question.
:up:
Well, at least someone else besides me noticed and commented on this redundant --and, as you say, obfuscating-- "absolute" thing. As if there is a "relative nothingness" or "partial nothingness". Which I never heard talking about, not in this thread or elsewhere. Of course, because it has no meaning. Therefore, "absolute nothingness" has no meaning either. And it was not used as a figure of speech or mentioned just en passent, but it is included in the title of the topic itself and appears to be an important element in the OP's description.
It is both surprising and very disappointing to me to see how people, esp. in a place like this, can pass by these things without noticing them or commenting on them ...
Some people have better things to do than to quibble about what phrases are the best when the meaning is clear. Also, if you have any experience with discourse on the topic of nothingness, you know that a lot of people do not realize what degree of nothingness is being discussed. Some talk about empty space, some talk about the absence of all physical things, yet the presence of immaterial things, like logical laws. All of these notions are examples of relative nothingness; that is, nothingness in relation to something specific; something is missing, but not everything. Absolute nothingness then refers to the absence of everything.
If you disagree that the qualification of absolute is helpful, then that's fine. But do you/we not have more important things to talk about? I'm sure there are others who felt the qualification was unhelpful but didn't care enough to comment, given they had more substantive things to comment on. This is not submitted under the Philosophy of Language category, after all.
Absolute is actually an absolutely important quantifier in this thread. Let us suppose that "Absolute nothingness" was defined as a concept for the state of the universe before it was born.
In this instance, "Nothingness" alone would be inadequate to describe the prior state of the existence of the universe, because it would be the only existence in the pre-universe.
It only makes sense then, "Absolute nothingness" would be the very right concept as the only and pure state of nothingness.
Quoting Banno
Perhaps we can deal with "nothign" in a similar way, by asking what it is that there is nothing of...
He has nothing in the bank; I've nothing in my pocket; there is nothing in a vacuum.
What there is nothing of is decided by what is absent.
Absolute nothing is a non-starter.
Zero came from the Babylonians. They used something like an abacus to do inventories and then would record the abacus layout on clay tablets. That's the origin of a mark that indicates zero. It revolutionized math, which received the stamp of abstraction from its association with money. I think a case could be made that money is ground zero for all abstractions.
If by "absolute nothing" we mean the void, it's obviously a useful idea. Einstein used it.
How?
Special relativity is from a thought experiment that starts with a void. Then we put two people in it. One is you. You see another person who is apparently moving, either
A. toward you
B. or you're moving toward him
In the void, there is no difference between A and B.
I think if there's nothing there, there's no time.
I agree.
I supose one might argue that the void disappeared when Newton introduced action at a distance. After that the void was never empty.
General relativity is about gravity and acceleration. Special relativity starts with a thought experiment that shows that in a void, with one object stationary and one object moving at a constant speed, there's no fact of the matter about which one is actually stationary and which one is moving.
Isn't that correct @SophistiCat ?
Quoting Banno
There's no void.
On The Electrodynamics Of Moving Bodies? He talks about empty space. No mention of void in this English translation.
I'm not saying you are mistaken, just that it seems an odd translation/interpretation.
Quoting frank
There was before Newton.
Ans.: It is the absolute non-existence between two things for all time. This absence is eternal. For example, hare's horn is the non-existent in the past, present, and will be in the future. This kind of absence has neither a beginning nor an end.
What is the state of absolute nothingness?
Is absolute nothingness possible?
Absolute Nothingness is a status with no details no space, no time, no dimension, no features. For Hegel, this status is identical to the status of Pure Being. Pure Being also has no details, no space, no time, no dimension, no features." - Google
I think you need to recognize distinct uses for "thing". This makes "thing" have a much wider range of usage than that outlined by your definition when you say "if it is not a thing, it cannot exist". So we might recognize that as well as things which exist, there is also things which do not exist. Consequently we talk about all sorts of fictional (non-existent) "things", as well as concepts as "things, and so on. Now as much as it may be true that "if it is not a thing, it cannot exist", there are also many "things" which do not exist.
Therefore we can say that "absolute nothingness" is such a thing. It is a "thing" in the sense of being a concept. And whether or not it is self-contradictory cannot be judged in the way you propose, because it would be required to determine what "nothingness" means in that context of the qualifying term "absolute". So far, I see nothing to indicate that the concept of "absolutely no thing" is self-contradictory, unless we stipulate that all concepts are necessarily things.
And if this is the case, I think we'd be better off to describe it as a type of hypocrisy rather than as self-contradiction. We'd have the proposition of "all concept are things" as a premise, and also we'd have a concept of "absolutely no thing". By that premise, the concept itself is a thing, and this would prove that the proposed concept does not state something true about reality, but it could still present us with a possible situation. However, we could truthfully state that under no circumstances could the description of "absolutely no thing" be true under this premise, because this would be a case of trying to do what the stipulated premise makes impossible. Notice though, that such stipulations don't render the described action as impossible, they only stipulate that it ought not be done. And doing what is contrary to what we state that we ought to do, is hypocrisy.
The further problem though, is that hypocrisy is very real, and actually occurs regularly. Therefore concluding that it would be hypocritical to hold as true, the concept of "absolutely no thing", does not prove that the concept is false. It may simply be the case that the premises which produce this conclusion are false. So we'd have to revisit the premises to see why the stipulated rule could be broken in a hypocritical way. Then we'd see that "all concepts are things" is not at all sound, and we'd discover that the hypocrisy is allowed for by this false premise. We can actually produce a concept which is not a thing.
That's why this type of argument does absolutely nothing for us.
Not necessarily, because it depends on how you would conceive of, or define, "something". It's possible that all that is does not fit the criteria of "something".
Ditto for the thread IMO. There has been a failure for something to have arisen out of nothing.
I didn't need to get into the symbolic formal proof for this elaboration. Just the plain English reasoning was enough.
The proposition has implied premises.
Everything exists, exists. (True)
Something exists. (True)
Therefore (OP's proposition) Absolute nothingness is impossible. (False), but it would not be impossible if it were not for the existence of something. (true) = inconsistent
Therefore I conclude that the OP's proposition is invalid and inconsistent, because it denies the possibility of absolute nothingness, then it accepts the possibility of nothingness at the same time. Remember something always exists. Everything exists, exists.
This was a very useful exercise. It isn't about whether Absolute nothingness exists or not in the real world. It is about how we could reason on some abstract concepts, and analyse them logically.
Do you conceive of, or define "you" and "we" as something?
Zero is the mathematical artifact that contains our concept of nothingness and it was a revolution when it was invented.
This is where we should start with when talking nothingness...
Not necessarily.
The basic question: Why is there something rather than nothing?
A relatively uncomplicated answer: Perhaps, because anyone who is able to ask and ponder this question is something. But who knows if, subsequent to anyone's death, there is nothing rather than something? Kind of like Schopenhauer trying to explain the Nothingness that results subsequent to a person's successful Denial of the Will to Live.
When you say you dont consider yourself to BE something "necessarily", are you speaking of anatman?
Do you know of Nishida Kitaro?
I suppose that would be one possibility.
I recently started reading more about John Scottus Eriugena. For someone so well regarded among neoplatonist scholars, it is surprising how little "cred" he seems to have today. I've now seen a few different people describe him as the "apex" or "climax" or neoplatonism.
Anyhow, he makes a distinction between the "nothingness" of God and the nothingness of things without being (which, it turns out, is also God).
The "nothingness" of God is "nothingness through excellence (nihil per excellentiam) or nihil per infinitatem (nothingness on account of infinity"). This is "nothing" because nothing can be said of It; God transcends everything. Any positive statement is limiting and thus inappropriate. God is a true infinite, beyond all limitations, and thus the true "nothing" beyond any positive definiteness.
But then we also have the nothing of non-existence, nothing through privation (nihil per privationem). At first glance, it seems to me like you are dealing with the latter (privational nothingness) in the OP, but upon further consideration, it becomes hard to say.
Anyhow, Eriugena would say that this second nothing (through privation) is only defined by, and thus only has existence relative to things that do have existence. Thus, such nothing cannot exist "of itself." Rather, this "nothing through privation" emerges dialectically. It is, in fact, part of the larger infinite nothing, created being itself being a dialectical process of being and non-being.
Eriugena divides nature into four species:"
1. That which creates and is not created (i.e., God - nothing);
2. That which creates and is created (i.e., Primary Causes or Ideas/Forms);
3. That which is created and does not create (i.e., Temporal Effects, created things);
4. That which is neither created nor creates (i.e., non-being, nothingness).
"The four divisions are not strictly a hierarchy in the usual Neoplatonic sense where there are higher and lower orders, rather, as Eriugena will explain, the first and fourth divisions both refer to God as the Beginning and End of all things, and the second and third divisions may also be thought to express the unity of the cause-effect relation. Finally, the division is an attempt to show that nature is a dialectical coming together of being and non-being. Creation is normally understood as coming into being from non-being. God as creator is then a kind of transcendent non-being above the being of creation. These themes are rigorously discussed and disentangled throughout the dialogue."
Fascinating stuff. Don't get how this guy flew below my radar so well, seems sort of like Hegel way ahead of his time. OFC, the opus is an 800-page dialogue, so who knows if I will ever get to it. It always shocks me though how dismissive my education was of medieval philosophy, but then how much of "groundbreaking" modern philosophy turns out just to be stuff that was already done, just with the overtly Christian content removed.
I don't quite get your argument, but what you wrote in the quote is wrong. Absolute nothingness is oxymoronic because of the existence of something. Remove everything, and suddenly absolute nothingness is no longer oxymoronic, because absolute nothingness is nothing. There must be something to give absolute nothingness its oxyomoronic character. Furthermore, any proof of why absolute nothingness is impossible, must have content; thus, the proof is already presupposing the existence of the negation of what it is trying to prove could never be. It is just begging the question.
So, it is time I formalized all of this.
___________________________________________________________________________________
A thing is something that can be referred to, by whatever means, be they perceptual, emotive or conceptual. A conceptual reference is defining something. Therefore, the state that is absolute nothingness is a thing, by virtue of being referred to by its definition. Its definition is formalized further down.
[math] E [/math] is the set of all propositions true for some corresponding state; a complete description of that state. If a proposition [math] P[/math] is true in [math] E [/math], we have that [math] [P] \in E [/math].
[math] A [/math] is the set corresponding to the state of absolute nothingness. The definition of [math] A [/math] is as follows: [math] A = \varnothing [/math]. That means for all propositions [math] P[/math], we have that [math]P \notin A [/math].
Contradiction:
[math] \biggr( A = \varnothing \biggr) \land \biggr( [A = \varnothing] \in A \biggr) [/math]
So, done deal? We have proved why something must exist, right? Well, look above you; what do you see? Something. Let's denote that something as [math]C [/math]; that is, [math]C [/math] denotes the proposition above.
Now, we know that [math]C [/math] is true, by virtue of simple logic. However, if [math]A [/math] truly was instantiated... Well:
[math] C \notin A [/math]
Now, the irony of absolute nothingness is that what you see above is itself a proposition that would not be present in [math] A [/math], along with all other propositions. Reasoning with absolute nothingness will get you nothing! Which is why trying to prove there necessarily had to be something by virtue of the impossibility of absolute nothingness is wrongfully assuming that the impossibility of absolute nothingness would stop it from being the case. If [math]A [/math] was the case, it would not have an oxymoronic identity, because it would not have anything, do anything or be anything.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
My very undeveloped reading of Hegel would disagree slightly. Pure being is indeterminate, that is, logically indistinguishable from anything else. Thats what indeterminate, and its negation, determinate, means in Hegels terminology. Now, pure being is obviously distinguishable from other things. We can define pure being in various ways, you already hinted at one. This definition is distinct from e.g. the definition of a square. However, pure being does not exist right now. Something specific exists. So, when talking about an instance of pure being, it is indeterminate, by virtue of the inexistence of any specific things to which it can be distinguished. And by inexistence, I mean complete inexistence; these things are not even conceivable in this state of pure being.
So, pure being is, when existent, indeterminate. Now, pure nothing (or absolute nothingness as referred to in this thread) is also indeterminate. It also does not have any definition, by virtue of having no details, no components. We now have two distinct states that are both indeterminate, and thus logically (definitionally) indistinguishable from each other. That is, by virtue of both states having no definition, one cannot define their difference. Yet, nonetheless, they are different, since pure nothing is currently, by definition, the negation of pure being. I say currently, because pure being and pure nothing only have definitions in a determinate reality. I refer to these temporary definitions by convenience; you see, these definitions reveal that pure being and pure nothing are indeed different. However, despite that, their definitions (and thus the definition of their difference) disappears if pure being was ever instantiated.
This does not mean pure being is pure nothing whenever pure being is instantiated. Instead, the difference between them is itself indeterminate during this instantiation. The difference is indeterminate, but it is still existent. In fact, it is absolutely crucial that they are different, for if not, the becoming does not happen. You see, all of this has been leading up to one fact; pure being would be related to pure nothing. This quirk, this relationship, gives them both an essence; a relational essence. Thus, determinacy arises from indeterminacy.
I think? I have no fucking clue what I am talking about. Pass the bong, would you? I would like your thoughts on this, as I am now really intrigued by Hegels philosophy, and you blessed me with the introduction.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is the intuition (minus the temporal-extendedness implied by oscilattion) that I have gained from reading Hegel. The relationship is somewhat asymmetric in favor of being, which makes sense; it is the positive that fills the negative. I like how you tie it into the passage of time and change; though Id like an elaboration on the exact mechanics of it all.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I completely agree. Eternalism does miss the mark. You point to the nonsensical breed of eternalism above. Then theres the spotlight eternalists who forget theyre reintroducing change by having the spotlight move (duh ). A third breed would be the frozen omphalists, and I would like to ask them some questions, but I fear they would have no time to answer.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I dont quite understand how your comment relates to the sentence you quoted me from. All Im saying is that any proof of the impossibility of absolute nothingness presupposes there is something, and would thus be of no consequence to a state of nothingness. Therefore, if there ever was a state of absolute nothingness, something would not arise by virtue of these proofs (since those proofs would be invalid and more damningly, inexistent). So, these attempted proofs do not prove something like thats why absolute nothingness necessarily could not have been. This fact is something you ask about later in your comment, actually, so I will touch on it there.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I dont believe in ex falso because if there ever was a contradiction, the disjunctive syllogism would not be valid.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
No. Such a proof is itself something. So, you are just saying, because of [something], nothing is impossible. If nothing truly were, the proof would not be; the logical/metaphysical problems of absolutely nothing would be non-existent. See my reply to Corvus.
I assume you are asking if there are multiple instances of nothing. Well, there are multiple instances of specific nothingness, like the nothingness of a book on my bed right now, or like the nothingness of a non-zero balance in my bank account, for example. These are absences in a larger environment of presence (like the presence of my crushing debt). Absolute nothingness is the absence of everything, in an environment of only absence.
Quoting Gregory
This canvas of nothing sounds a little like something. I dont think you can unify being and non-being, but I would like to hear more about this idea.
I am not familiar with that notation, though I think I know what it means, except for the lambda expression. What does it denote?
I find your comment highly interesting, but I want to reserve my reply until I understand your notation and thus exactly what you are saying.
Are you saying that one cannot have an absence of everything, for that would also be an absence of the absence of everything? If so, I tend to agree, but as Ive argued for in this thread, any contradictions regarding absolute nothingness are irrelevant to the question of cosmogony.
As has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I am not arguing that we lack proof for the existence of something. I am simply saying the lack proof for the necessity of the existence of something; that is, we lack proof that reality is not a brute fact.
Interesting perspective, but how did everything start? In the beginning, if we perhaps had a state of pure being, then anything would have been logically consistent. But then everything would have popped into existence simultaneously, and contradictions would have arisen. How did the universe remove these contradictions? How did it choose one thing over the other? The purely logical donkey, when faced with two equally voluptuous hay stacks, starves to death. In that case, there must be a paralogical (but not illogical) prime will, a lá God? Someone who chooses when logic cannot (or will not, by virtue of being a stubborn donkey, of course).
I do not know of Nishida, but I read a little up on him. According to this SEP article, he is perhaps where you got your idea of nothingness as creative. I wonder how absolute nothingness can be anything and do anything.
I'm heading to Hegel. The whole 'nothing requires something' seems totally incoherent. This thread may be illuminating.
If anyone wants to give me footnotes/cliff notes, i'll take 'em :)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
So, a claim like God is red must be false, because it would assert that God is not not-red, which would be a limitation of his infinite content, right?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is indeed what I thought I was talking about, and I still think it is, but I think I might have to reflect on that.
This third category you mention; it refers to objects that although may be the immediate cause of new states, are not defined as the creators thereof, because in this terminology, creation is being the first or second cause of something? So, theres one first cause (God), and then a few second causes, and everything else, although partaking as immediate causes, are not defined as creators. Am I getting this right?
I read your OP from 2 years ago. I think you would do well by either distinguishing logical necessitation from temporally-extended causation, or by proving them one and the same. If not, it becomes hard to judge what you count as the first cause; is it the collection of logical laws requiring the first state, or the first state itself?
See here.
:up: :up:
If you would like to discuss there, I gladly will. I make a rule not to derail other people's threads. However, I did take this as an invitation to read your OP, which I did!
Quoting Ø implies everything
I like this approach. However, isn't logic the best assessment of reality that we have? Absolute nothingness itself is not impossible. Logic is a tool we use to grasp reality. If there were absolute nothingness, there would be no logic, thus no contradictions to reality.
Fortunately, as long as there are thinking things like us, there is logic, and we can definitely assert that there is something, because if there wasn't, we wouldn't be here to claim it. As to whether its possible that one day there might be absolutely nothing, who knows? No one will be around to find out what its like.
Quoting Ø implies everything
We can say that right now, absolute nothingness is not the state of reality. But it says nothing about whether it could or could not be in the future. Nice post.
Perhaps it will lead to an unusual strategy for the courtroom for you. If so, let me know and I will fly to NZ for the occasion.
I understand, I might write a few pieces. As you rightly pointed out a while ago, I think our threads are very much connected. If a self-sufficient, ultimate cause was determined, then that would negate the worries my argument produces of reality being a brute fact (to some, this is not a worry but rather something worthy of celebration; I like to direct those people to the nearest boulder-and-hill setup).
Quoting Philosophim
I don't see why you mention that with an however. Did my post seem to argue against that?
I totally forgot about this thread. Nice to hear back from you.
Quoting Ø implies everything
I feel your arguments seem to be still unsound. It starts from the wrong premises. When you say "absolute nothingness", you cannot even make up a proposition and assign it to an empty set. For example, I have a cookie tin here. It used to have some cookies in it. I can make a proposition A= "The tin has 3 different type of cookies." A = {C,M,T}
When all the cookies are eaten up, the tin is empty. Now A = { }
But when you say "absolute nothingness", you don't even have the tin. You don't have anything to make up a proposition. Absolute nothingness means brutely there is not even you, or the world.Hence the proposition is unthinkable. Is it possible to think about such state or a concept?
If you say, that it is possible, then it was not "absolute nothingness" you were talking about by definition, but something totally different from what I have been thinking about for "absolute nothingness". If you say, no it is not possible to even think about it, then it is a self-contradiction. Microphone over to you.
This is a fine and important point, and I am still developing my intuition and logic in regards to this. But in short, absolute nothingness is a thing which has a mutative essence; that is, its essence is dependent on things beyond it; things that may change. This mutation has two versions; the current, oxymoronic version (a version which can be referred to, as evidenced by this thread), and the hypothetically instantiated version, which cannot be referred to. You might think that the hypothetical instantiated version is precisely the reference, but no, it is not. You see, a prerequisite to referring to something instantiated is for it to be instantiated; if it is not instantiated, I am merely referring to a hypotehtical.
The difference is the same as the difference of the following scenarios: I have in mind an actual, instantiated cow (1), versus, I am looking at an actual, instantiated cow (2). Both of these are separate from merely the thing that is a cow (3), which as a thing is a category. (1) is a hypothetical item (not a category), and (2) is an instantiated item (not a category). Notice that (1) is asserting the cow to be instantiated, but this assertion is merely that; hypotheticality combined with instantiation equals hypotheticality; just like a negative number times a positive numbers equals a negative number.
Now, the essence of a specific cow does not change whether it is hypothetical or not (although one's apprehension of it does change). But some things undergo an essential difference when referred to as a hypothetical, and when referred to as an instantiation; they are mutative, as I call them. This is because their essences have variables in them, and these variables happen to change as a result of the thing's instantiation.
So, an example? Well, here's an abstract example that very straight-forwardly exemplifies the nature of having an essence vary according to its instantiation:
The instantiation counter is an object that counts the number of instantiations in reality. A part of its essence is thus that it displays some number n. Whenever that object is hypothetical (like right now), that number is n, but if it ever were instantiated, that very event would change the number n. Now of course, this object, if instantiated, would undergo a change of its essence; the number n, whatever it was, would turn to n + 1. Its essence is therefore dependent on its own (and other things') instantiation. It is therefore mutative.
Absolute nothingness is one of these things. Its essence, that is, its definition and the list of all attributes it holds (like oxymoronity) is something that would change in the event of its instantiation. More specifically, its essence would go from being what it is right now, to being absolutely nothing. So yes, you are correct that the instantiated version of absolutely nothing cannot be referred to; not even with this sentence am I referring to it, because although I am specifying it as instantiated, it is nonetheless evidently hypothetical. And as already established, hypotheticality times actuality equals hypotheticality.
We are taking advantage of this mutative nature of absolute nothingness by referring to its hypothetical version and using the symbol thereof to argue about the consequences (more precisely, the lack thereof) of the instantiated version.
I hope this cleared a few things up. I am looking to formalize my framework of actuality and hypotheticality being used here, so maybe this will be clearer in the future.
In mathematics all logically consistent objects exist simultaneously and there is no contradiction.
Quoting Ø implies everything
So what? There is nothing logically inconsistent about starving to death.
The implication has missed me, I'm sorry :P
Absolute nothingness is impossible for us to comprehend. This marks a limit to human understanding. That there always was and always will be something is not something that we can know.
Can something come from nothing? We cannot understand how that could be, but what can happen is not dependent on our understanding or lack of understanding.
And, of course, this tells us nothing about nothing.
It's more like "democratic chalk", a mere concatenation of words, with the folk hereabouts puzzling over what it might mean; as if meaning were something that was discovered rather than decided.
That, in a courtroom case, you might construct a convincing argument arising out of nothing. :smile:
Are these rules of the mind that we are examining or rule of the universe? The SEP articles on Hegel speak of those who interpret the philosopher normatively and those who are ontologist interpreters. Just like with the debates that Jordan Peterson has ignited, there are those for whom the world is simply and soley scientific but who believe philosophy to straighten out their souls. It's not so much whether being or nothing is "out there" in a Platonic sense. It's that these discussions can quell the insistent desire to know. Then you can find being or nothing or anything you like. Hegel's "pure being" is neither actual nor potential but instead completely conceptual because we can't hold it in our minds without losing it to pure (absolute) nothingness. They dialect themselves back and forth further and further into the horizon until they are sublated back *to your* moment of contemplation abd you see what is empirically before as true reality
If you could define the concept "absolute" and "nothingness" separately, then it would help for getting more concrete perspectives on "absolute nothingness" i.e. as a combined idea.
After the process, the first thing we could ask or clarify is whether absolute nothingness is an entity or concept which stands on its own. If it is, then does it have any attributes or properties associated with it?
If not, then is it something that emerged from some other entities, concept or existence? .. so on.
Sure, but in the real world, a banana and an apple cannot exist with their centers overlapping. So, if the first moment in time is perhaps reality reduced to its most fundamental, undetermined and universal substance, then I would think that every possible object (including its implementation) would be logically consistent, and thus everything would happen in the next moment. But everything happening simultaneously everywhere is not logically consistent.
Quoting litewave
The donkey's starvation is a metaphor for the universe's inability to choose, even though it has to, just like the donkey has to eat.
This is a very typical view, and a respectable one. We are just monkeys that are not designed to see the truth, right?
I think our perception is definitely geared towards survival and just that, allowing truth to peer through mostly when it is evolutionarily beneficial.
But cognition is a different beast. Our minds require a kind of isomorphism to reality in order to allow for logic, which is necessary for survival. This logic is of course overriden by emotions and heuristics, but whenever we can sustain our logical thinking for long enough, we can use it to build ever more complicated mirrors of reality, extending their domain of validity. I believe it is possible, otherwise I would not try. This logic-thingamabob has gotten us to the moon, after all.
Definitions are indeed decided, but the implications therefrom are discovered.
And absolute nothingness is one of those funny things that, like a square circle, are self-contradictory, yet that self-contradiction is not of relevance to the discussion. And we can talk of a square circle. We might not tie it to any percept, nor believe in its existence in any shape or form beyond mere reference and definition, but it is nonetheless something we can talk of. It just so happens that it is pretty irrelevant to most things, beyond being an epitome of self-contradiction. Absolute nothingness is not irrelevant, however, because it happens to refer to the very thing that would delete its own self-contradiction.
I am not so sure if it is only conceptual. I believe it is also perceptual, though not in a way that allows for anything beyond immediate experience. The second you've experienced it, it is gone. But you still experienced. How can you experience something specific, without first experiencing it as just something? Before I see a car, I see something. Only after determination does it become more and more semblant of a car; before that determination, it is pure being.
If I try to approach pure being directly, it is as you say, replaced with pure nothing, which goes back to pure being, etc... until I suddenly think of something specific, replacing both of them.
Well, nothingness is absence.
And by absolute, I mean, without non-universal reference.
So, absolute nothingness is the absence of everything, as opposed to relative nothingness, or specific nothingness, which is the absence of something specified, like the nothingness of the book of my bed.
Absolute nothingness does have attributes, among which is oxymoronity. These attributes, as I have said, would disappear if absolute nothingness was ever instantiated.
Because such a world would be logically inconsistent, with respect to the laws that characterize its structure. So I state again: all logically consistent objects exist because there is no difference between logical consistency and existence.
Okay, let me take this step-by-step:
1. First moment in time, there is just being (I don't claim you believe this, but you have to deny it).
2. For this moment in time, due to the lack of any laws or anything specific, it would be logically consistent that a banana spawns at coordinates x,y,z.
3. By the same logic, it would also be logically consistent that an apple spawns at coordinates x,y,z.
So, in the next moment in time, what happens? Do both spawn? Well, each spawning is separately consistent, but together, they are inconsistent. So, there's two possibilities:
Possibility A:
In the second moment of time, everything happens, and contradictions are everywhere. Reality then removes all contradictions by removing one half of each contradictory pair.
Possibility B:
In the second moment of time, only one half of these contradictory pairs spawns to begin with.
Both possibilities require paralogical/alogical arbitration. How can one logically choose whether the banana or the apple gets to spawn/remain at coordinates x,y,z?
All I am saying is, your view IF combined with the idea that reality starts of with pure being, would entail a paralogical arbiter. That's all I'm saying; I am not saying that is wrong or implausible, I am simply trying to elaborate your view.
If logic is necessary for survival then other animals require it as well.
Isomorphism to reality is not necessary for survival either. We respond to what we see and hear, but this need not be what we think it is in order to pursue or avoid it. By the time we determine that it is not a snake and not a stick it may be too late.
Then there are two logically consistent worlds - one in which an apple spawns and one in which a banana spawns. Both worlds exist because they are logically consistent.
And other animals have it as well, but they are not able to develop due to their limited computational capacity. Their working memory, symbol enconding, symbol recollection and pattern recognition are too limited to go from simple tautologies (and perhaps simple syllogisms) to something more advanced.
But animals do show logical capacity. There are no instincts that tell ravens that cars crush nuts. Instead, they observe the world around them and eventually observe that when cars pass over objects, those objects are sometimes crushed.
So, through induction, they realize that there's a good chance nuts will be crushed as well. Then, simple logic dictates they must place the nuts at certain locations. Why? Well, that's a simple AND condition for the crushing of nuts.
If the nut is at place x AND a car passes over x --> the nut is crushed
The second conjunct is not in their control, but the first conjunct is! So they do it. It is not automatic, because no humans are teaching and no instincts are at play, because they are evolutionarily adapted to behave like that around cars. No, some raven at some point learnt it, because their mind works through logic, and their mind is powerful to perform sufficiently complicated reasoning to allow for the above trick.
If cognizant organisms did not operate with some basic logic, then a predator could be attacking them AND not attacking them at the same time. Given that those conditions have different response procedures (be they automatic or not), their mind has to, one some level, treat the condition binarily. It's logic, however basic.
Okay, now we are getting somewhere. This splitting of worlds; has it happened after sentience entered the picture?
I don't know what sentience has to do with this. This is about logical consistency: each world is identical to itself. Each world is what it is and is not what it is not. That's all.
Edit: By the way, the principle of logical consistency or identity does not pertain only to "worlds" but to any object. For example, one object cannot be both an apple and a banana because that would be a logically inconsistent object. But there can be two logically consistent objects - an apple and a banana.
So, these sentiences are different then? That would mean the original sentience was not put through any arbitrary choice, since all choices were made. But each resultant sentience, however, owe their existence to an arbitrary choice; since there is no logical reason for why exactly they turned into the sentience they now are, instead of any of the other sentiences they could have turned into. Each resultant sentience had the same starting point, yet wound up at different places; indicating a paralogical choice was made anyways.
Now, maybe the above is not a problem; I am still undecided. If the resultant sentiences are not counted as parts of the original sentience, then their starting point is not the same; their starting points are the distinct worlds they were born into.
However, this question does not even enter the stage if this splitting of worlds had to necessarily stop before sentiences formed. Then, the question is answered by; "this did not, and could not have, happened."
There can be two sentiences - one experiencing the world with an apple and one experiencing the world with a banana. After all, a sentience is just an object, like anything that exists. There can be many objects.
I don't see any mystery in why one sentience experiences this world and another sentience experiences another world. Location and experience are part of the identity of each sentience. Each sentience (each object) is what it is, and cannot be what it is not because that would constitute logical inconsistency.
The difference is that when a non-sentient object splits, you can say that two split objects are both the original object, just in different situations. With sentience, you cannot say the same thing, so a question arises.
If one simply answers that the original sentience is no longer present, and two new sentiences were born (both having access to the original sentience's memories, and experiencing their birth as continuous extension of the original sentience's experience), then you have answered the question.
The alternatives however, demand that some paralogical choice took place, which defeats your purpose of postulating parallell worlds to begin with.
I think you can put it that way. Another possibility might be that there were two worlds with two sentiences where everything was the same up to a moment when an apple appeared in one world and a banana in the other world.
I don't think that works, because it introduces the choice again. Since both worlds already existed separately, then they were two separate objects (despite their identicality). Thus, a paralogical choice is made between which of the two worlds gets a banana and which gets an apple.
By the way, are you a fan of Stephen Wolfram's theory of everything? I haven't properly looked into it, but last I heard of it, it uses your idea of all possible worlds being generated. What's very interesting is that the first generations of worlds are being differentiated at the level of what rules govern them; meaning these worlds represent different positions in what he calls ruliad space. Very interesting, though I would love to ask what his explanation is for the rule that governs the larger superverse; that is, why does this superverse generate every possible universe? Why is that rule true?
Ravens are intelligent birds but they do not need nuts to survive. They do not need logic to eat. A newborn baby latches. It does not reason that by doing this it is likely that whatever it is that they are sucking on will have milk in it.
They don't need nuts, no. But the way they crack them is a demonstration of their logical capacity, which I mentioned as an example that animals do indeed have logic.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes they do. Let's look at even the simplest scenario; there is food right in front them, and there are no dangers.
First, their brain needs to answer the question; "is this food or not?" Advanced food recognition systems determine that "yes, this is food." These systems need to have a single output. Either it is certainly food, it is not (and this category of not, it could further classified as potential food). If it is certainly food, the action of eating is initiated. The stimuli is either classified as S, or as not-S, and the action is either A, or not-A. Reality does not allow for anything else; the binarity of reality extends to brain states too, even those brain states may encode complicated ideas, those ideas are themselves, and not not-themselves.
This is the kernel of logic in agents; conditionals between stimuli and actions who both take on values of true or false. The greater the mind of the agent, the more complex the conditionals can grow. If the agent becomes self-aware, then they will be able to reflect over this binarity of their internal states, and this binarity of external states. Are they sufficiently intelligent, they can start symbolizing all of this logic, thus extending their working memory into a document.
Our minds are to some degree isomorphic to the external reality, because our mind is a part of the same reality to which the external reality belongs. Logic is the structure of both the objective and subjective; it is truly universal and basic. That is why I trust it, despite the fact that I have a stupid, monkey brain.
Our minds are not fully isomorphic to external reality, of course. Some researches claim that if the mind was fully isomorphic to external reality, it would be too entropic for proper information transmission. Apparently, the perfect place for information transmission lies at some phase-transitional point between no entropy and max entropy.
You have gotten way off topic.
Not really. You mentioned that absolute nothingness is beyond our comprehension:
Quoting Fooloso4
I responded to this by claiming that logic allows us to comprehend the implications (and really, lack thereof) of absolute nothingness. You replied by suggesting maybe our cognition doesn't actually sufficiently match reality for this:
Quoting Fooloso4
I am arguing that what we call logic, that is the structure of our cognition, does in fact match reality. I argue for this with my last reply. This argument is important, because either you deny it with some argument, or concede it, but then argue that our logical capacity is not complex enough to describe implications of absolute nothingness. Or, you could argue the incomprehensibility of it is beyond the issue of logical capacity.
So, unless you think you were off-topic when you first said absolute nothingness is incomprehensible to us, then this is all very much on-topic. It is a natural progression of the discussion about whether or not absolute nothingness is comprehensible, now geared towards the necessity of the existence of our logical capacity. I agree it has gone far away from the motif of the OP, but that is irrelevant. We are still ultimately arguing for and about the topic of absolute nothingness.
The problem is that if logic is about something then it cannot be about nothing. There are no implications of absolute nothingness. Logical implications are about something. Nothing follows logically or in reality as we know it from nothing.
:up:
Especifically, if we take existence to be synonymous with instantiated, like a black dog is instantiated but a blue one does not, it is obvious by definition that nothing cannot ever be instantiated.
Quoting Corvus
I like the fragment, but I don't see how it connects with absolute nothingness being an empty concept (something I agree with too).
But such a choice is never made because the apple and the banana are part of the identity of each world and the identity of an object can never be different than it is, because that would constitute a logical inconsistency. So, the world that has the apple has the apple necessarily; it is logically impossible for the world to be different.
You seem to be thinking of objects as changing in the passage of time but time is structurally (mathematically) a special kind of space, and space doesn't pass; it just exists. What appears in our experience as the future already exists, just like the past, and it exists the way it is and cannot be different, because that would constitute a logical inconsistency.
Precisely, which is what I'm arguing for in this post. I am arguing for the LACK of proof that reality is not a brute, because I am saying that proving the oxymoronity of absolute nothingness is irrelevant to the matter; it is not valid as a proof that there was a logical necessity for something to be the case. Please read my formal proof of this, and you'll see that I agree with you. You'll also be reminded of what the point of this post is.
TLDR; the implications of absolute nothing are not positive, but rather negative. That is; I am point to the lack of implications of a certain kind of reasoning that involves absolute nothingness, namely saying "absolute nothingness is impossible, therefore something existing is a metaphysical/logical necessity."
Aha, this is very helpful. We do indeed have a disagreement on the nature of time, and it appears you are a kind of eternalist. I completely agree that there are no problems in regards to arbitrary choices if one is an eternalist; as you say, the choice is not made; the two worlds already existed as the off-shoots they are from the get-go.
However, eternalism is itself very problematic, philosophically. How do you explain our changing experience? If you explain it as completely illusory, then you are a frozen omphalist; that is, you think this specific moment is all you have ever experienced (frozen in time), and any experience indicating the contrary is just your simultaneous, frozen experience of many false memories leading up to this moment. This view is quite absurd and few hold it, so the only other view is admitting some kind of change; that is, your awareness is moving through the time dimension. This itself is a change, requiring its own time. Maybe causality is already laid out the way it is, unchanging; but your passage through the temporal dimension of it is evidently changing (unless you are a frozen omphalist, of course).
Saying absolute nothingness is impossible is saying something. It does not follow from saying something that something is a metaphysical necessity. In saying "nothing" you are saying something. This is a logical but not a metaphysical necessity.
Not sure I get what you mean. As in, sloppy language on a holiday?
Quoting Phil Jones
We can throw out all the holiday baggage by simply and rigidly defining our terms and applying logic to that, and disregarding any alternatives senses of the words not of interest at that time. I have defined absolute nothingness multiple times in this thread (with equivalent definitions, I believe), though the definition used in my formal proof to Corvus is good.
I don't have our experience of passing time figured out, honestly it seems like a major mindfuck. I imagine myself as being extended not only in space but also in time, as having many temporal parts in different moments of time, in continuous sequence. Each temporal part od myself experiences only its moment but my whole temporal self somehow (subconsciously?) experiences itself as a whole too, which perhaps provides the impression that the different experiences at different moments belong to me as to a single object. The arrow of time according to physics seems to be provided by the rising entropy along the time dimension (2nd law of thermodynamics), which perhaps creates the impression of irreversible progression of moments from the past to the future, along with impressions of memories and anticipations.
That still necessitates change; the change from experiencing a moment subconsciously to experiencing it consciously.
Quoting litewave
Completely agree, it's a wicked thing. But I think I've ruled out eternalism as self-contradictory, which means there must be real change. That doesn't mean an Einsteinian space-time is impossible however; all of change may be manifested as the expansion (or conspansion) of the boundary of the four-dimensional manifold of reality.
That ends any further conversation, then.
Cheers.
It has been a few months since that post has been written, so I was wondering about it myself, but it was for this point, I think.
Quoting Corvus
What, so the point is the symbols, not what they refer to? That's absurd.
But while awake and alive, it is somewhat more difficult to do so, assuming dreamless sleep is in now way similar to nothingness, which sounds wrong to me.
But then I could be wrong in this latter intuition, don't think I'm wrong about my former one. But, we cannot be certain.
I thought about it again, and Nothingness must be always about something. Nothingness also implies that it has its past and past existence. But some change took place, which replaced something to nothing.
For example, I had the biscuits in the tin. When the biscuits were all eaten, there was nothing in the tin.
The thing = biscuits were replaced by the nothingness.
So nothingness exists. It has its properties too, which is emptiness and nothingness.
Now absolute nothingness is a strange concept. Absolute nothingness implies there is nothing in real absolute sense. There is no tin, no biscuits, no me, and no world. Hence it is an oxymoron, or the state of the universe before its birth. If it is Absolute Nothingness of oxymoron, then Hume would want to throw it away to the flames in his wood burning stove. But because it is absolute nothing, he might not quite be able to do that, or he doesn't need to.
If it is the state of the universe before its birth, then it is unknowable, hence it is Thing-in-Itself of Kantian terms.
Maybe not. The conscious and subconscious experiences may be simultaneous, the subconscious in the background. Transition from moment to moment may be just an impression, a feeling.
Quoting Ø implies everything
I am not sure it is self-contradictory.
How could that be? I am definitely not conscious of my experience 10 minutes ago. Either I am, or I am not; there is no in between. And the fact is, at some point I was, but I no longer am. That's change.
Or if we make a very unusual inference that there is such a thing as Absolute Nothingness, I think it has to be the space. Space is nothing, and it is absolutely nothing. That nothingness is what makes all the the other things exist.
So space has to exist as absolute nothingness for anything else to exist in it such as all the particles, molecules and atoms (if they did exist), and all the livings and physical objects and the planets and stars, air, sea and lights and waves. So it is a precondition of the whole universe. In reality and actuality, the universe exists, therefore Absolute Nothingness must exists too!!
what are concepts, apart from the words you use? If I string words together, do I thereby make a new concept? Ostracised nothingness? Absolute parricide?
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
This is quite ironic. What are words, without the concepts to which they refer? Do you suggest that the space of concepts (or words, as you conflate them to) exemplify ??nyat?? Words just referring to other words referring to other words ad infinitum (and/or in circles), never gaining the import of reality? Strange how we seem to use communication in reliably navigating reality. Strange how we actually experience concepts as they are. How do you even start a closed, meaningless network of words/concepts without some kernel of reality to set it off to begin with?
A square is a square, and a square is a string of letters. They are not the same.
You can have different experiences simultaneously, like hearing a sound, seeing something, experiencing a memory and an anticipation, and having the feeling of passage of time. Some of these experiences may feel more salient while others may feel vague or subconscious.
In the case of ravens using cars to crush nuts, why think it is a matter of logic rather than pattern recognition? (Which is a more basic aspect of neural network behavior than is logic) How do you know you aren't projecting?
In the case of your quoted statement, I'm thinking fight or flight responses aren't something I'd see as a particularly good example of logical reasoning, but more as evidence of the machine inside the ghost. Again, the question of projecting logic, on something more complex than simple logic, comes to mind for me.
Think about that. So the concept seven, the concept money, the concept chalk, the concept galaxy - these are all and each, experiences?
And the concept experience - that's also an experience?
Maybe take a look at the alternatives to such an obtuse notion - see the Stanford entry. There's quite a bit to the notion of "concept" - certainly more than just "mental representations".
Doing philosophy might be a bit harder than you supose.
"If therefore we begin with the contingent, we must not set out from it as something that remains fixed in such a way that in the progression it continues to have being. This is only one side of its determinateness; rather it is to be posited in its full determinate character, which means that non-being may just as well be attributed to it and that consequently it enters into the result as a passing away. Not because the contingent is, but rather because it is non-being, only appearance, because its being is not genuine actuality- it is because of this that absolute necessity is. The latter is its being and truth." Hegel, Lectures on the proofs of the existencebof God, Oxford University Press, pg. 114
Does the opposite of this world exist?
The problem with this is that 'nothing' is NOT a thing, it is the LACK of a thing. However, lack of something can be true. For example, black is the lack/or absence of light, but it is still true that it is black and lacking light. Nothing is the lack of a thing, but it is still true that it is nothing and lacking a thing.
Bearing this in mind, if we alter your statement to take this into account, we get:
"For nothing to be true there must not be a thing."
This seems to make sense to me. (unless I am missing something?) Obviously, when I say 'nothing' I mean the concept of lack of a thing, not 'nothing being true'. Using 'nothing' in sentences can appear to have many meanings, which confuses things somewhat!
Quoting Ø implies everything
If absolute nothingness was a truth, then there would be no definition because there would be no humans to give it a definition. However, it would not make it any less true or lacking in something.
Quoting Ø implies everything
I have been trying to figure out what you were getting at here. Breaking this down, in this sentence, if we take out only, and to begin with then we get, absolute nothingness is impossible if there is something. Of course. This is clearly correct; you just defined nothingness.
Now, if we take into account the word only, this suggests that there are circumstances when absolute nothingness IS possible, such as if you swap your sentence around to say, absolute nothingness IS possible if there is NOT something. This is also very true, but also very obvious. I am guessing you must be getting at more than just this.
So, now if we consider to begin with, if there was nothing to begin with, then there would be nothing, which is what absolute nothingness requires. The only thing I can think of that you might mean is that, if nothingness is lack of something then you must have something to take away, to make it lacking??? But, hmmm. Why can it not be so that there was nothing, or lack of even one thing, to start with? ? I cannot see any reason why absolute nothingness would be hypothetically impossible, and therefore, there does not appear to be a circular reasoning...as far as I can tell, but I could be wrong???
As far as I can see, the options we have regarding this are these I think, but there may be more that I just havent thought of
Absolute nothingness
Absolute something AND nothingness
Absolute somethingness (Okay, I should probably take the ness off this, but I just like the way it sounds and fits in with all the above.)
Strangely, I think that maybe the last one, absolute somethingness, would be the only impossible one. This is why: I believe that we are currently, in the absolute something and nothingness stage. This is because,
Quoting jgill
Okay, I think we understand the concept of absolute nothingness, but strangely enough, it is the 'fields' of empty space, or areas of nothing, in our universe that appear to be preventing absolute nothingness. If one day, for some reason, those fields of nothingness disappeared, then there would be absolute nothingness. (An idea that seems so ironic) This is because the fields of nothing, such as the vacuums we find in outer space and in the very fabric of the atoms that everything is made from, are the reason why things are held apart. If things were not held apart, then everything would cancel itself out and we would have absolute nothingness... in our universe at leastI cannot say about other universes, if there are such things. (NOTE I have covered why everything would cancel itself out in another post. I have included it here at the end of this post, but it can be skipped if you already know why.)
To sum up, it would seem as if absolute nothingness could hypothetically exist, and may have previously existed. We know that absolute something AND nothingness can exist because we are living it now, but it seems as if absolute somethingness might be impossible because, once you put EVERYTHING together without any spaces between things, then everything cancels itself out. (Either that or it would become unimaginably crowded, and I think I would have to move to a different universe to get some peace and quiet!)... and yes, I know that if there was another universe to move to with empty spaces in it then absolute nothingness and absolute somethingness would not exist, but I was joking, and there may well not be a thing as another universe.
Why everything could cancel itself out:
E=MC^2 tells us that mass and energy are the same physical entity.
Admittedly, we are all to some extent relying on theories in these discussions, but these theories are pretty well known and widely accepted, and E=MC^2 has been tested and proven to be accurate.
Basically, energy and mass are equivalent because energy can change into mass, and mass can change into energy. But in a closed system, such as the universe, there is a set amount of energy, (The Law of Conservation of Energy = energy cannot be created or destroyed) and hence, a set amount of mass tooor I suppose, to put it more accurately, whatever state the mass/energy is in, there is only a set amount of it.
The reason that there is C^2, or the speed of light squared, also in the equation is because energy travels at the speed of light, and the reason that this is squaredwhich makes it into an incredibly huge number is because a tiny amount of mass/matter can be transformed into huge amounts of energy. We see this when we split atoms, as huge amounts of energy are generated out of only a tiny amount of mass. But, as stated before, it doesnt matter how much mass, energy and speed combo we have, or at what stage the mass or energy is, because if we take the universe as a whole, there is always a set amount of mass/energy. Mass and energy are basically the same thing, just at different states.
We can understand how the amount of mass, or matter, in the universe is very small compared to the amount of energy when we consider that there are vast areas of space which are virtual vacuums, hence, why we call it 'space', whereas in just one star, enormous amounts of energy are converted. Stars are one example of where mass/matter is converted into energy btw (through the process of nuclear fusion.)
If two objects are apart, then there is a store of gravitational potential energy in them, which wants to pull them together. (This is what keeps the planets in our solar system) If those two objects are then moved closer together, then the gravitational potential energy decreases negatively as the positive kinetic energy increases. The two are opposites, one positive energy, and one negative energy. Due to balancing of forces and chargesand other equilibriums we see in the structure of the universe it is believed that the total positive energy must equal the total negative energy. This would mean, if we take the universe in its totality, then the positive energy cancels out the negative energy, leaving overall zero energy .and mass.
Are you sure "speed of energy" is definable in theoretical physics?
You know, this thread is similar to the thread on "A First Cause is Logically Necessary". Both attempt to take participants into areas of knowledge that are extreme in the sense of being beyond any sort of verification except questionable applications of logic, an investigative tool arising from what we see and understand of nature. All is speculation in these discussions. To assume logic applies to "absolute nothing" or "first causes" beyond origins, or "infinities" that are not simply axiomatic structures of mathematics is - and only my opinion - mistaken.
Unfortunately, this doesn't leave much available as an exploratory strategy. But these topics constitute a frontier of philosophical thought, no doubt.
You seem to be saying that mathematics is a greater source of truth than philosophy's pursuit of the ineffable. The later can't be put into words but it can be pointed at and knowledge of this wordless truth can grow
So if nothing, either thought or matter, ever existed, how can we cognize that state of affairs? Absolute nothing is that. We do have thoughts and bodies now and there are now necessarily only limited nothings. Only the whole has it all. There is limited nothingness especially in consciousness. Why this interest in absolute nothing unless it is connected to the human concern over death? What relevance does it have for students of philosophy?
I can't argue with that. :smile:
You are exactly right
You seem to be making philosophy so powerless, as if we cannot talk about certain things. To me, that is the whole point of philosophy. To me, it is the pursuit of truth and knowledge however we come about it. Mathematics and sciencesand other subjects tooare also in the pursuit of truth and knowledge, only they are in their specific fields; philosophy isnt limited to a specific field. I can't imagine 'philosophy ' saying, "hold on, you got, or are attempting to get, to that truth through maths or science, therefore that truth is of less value." Besides, I don't see them as being separate things. But that is just my view. I have no doubt some other people would disagree.
Because we cognize it now because now we exist. But we did not, or could not, cognize it then obviously.
Quoting Gregory
I'm not sure how one could say why someone has an interest in something. Or why we should need to. In my opinion, it is a valid topic and brings up debate and discussion, which to my mind is an important part of philosophy. Who knows if discussion about nothingness might give us the answers to everything. (Although I doubt it because I don't believe there is an answer to everything, but I don't know for sure.) I don't see philosophy as limited to only certain subjects and discussions.
I objected to jgill's apparent claim that mathematics is superior to philosophy. Both give truth but different kinds of truths. They are two peas in a pod. Science on the other hand was refuted by Hume and Plato long before this forum started. It has lots of practical truths but it's still in the Cave as far as philosophy is concerned. So I agree with you that philosophy has something to say about pretty much everything
Oh, really? Where?
Sorry, I think I got confused about who was referring to who. My mistake.
Quoting Gregory
I'm not sure I see science as being in the cave for philosophy at all. I suppose it depends on how someone views and uses the information/theories etc from science. If you just accepted it all without question, then that could be problematic. However, I don't think truth in science nowadays is often thought of as being final. It is constantly being questioned, which I think is a good thing. In the past, on the other hand, people were severely punished for questioning too much, such as Socrates, or in scientific fields, Galileo springs to mind. If people were not free to search for truth, and science was dictated to by the people in power then, yes, in that sense, science could be seen to be in the cave. I would like to think that these days there is less 'cave dwelling' than in the past, but I guess realistically, there still are a fair few dastardly caves... if they are plural, or is there just one, big, overcrowded cave?
Hume on causation obviously, and in Plato's system the world is the realm of opinion, while the Ideas alone have true actuality. Some turn modern science into a religion by calling Dark Matter "God" or speculating of something coming from nothing, which is fine but science can't avoid philosophy while at the same time its methods don't lead to the Ideas
To be upfront, I am a Hegelian perennialist non-dualist, so clearly I may see these matters differently than many in Western modern society. The German idealists contrasted "understanding" from speculative thinking. Practical truth is clearly differentiated from philosophical truth. The latter is without time.
And {the claim that Plato refuted science, which is a method and not a philosophy, centuries before the scientific method was even put in philosophical terms} is a weird one, to say the least.
Well if Plato is right then science is opinion. His system stands as a certain way of looking at reality and should be addressed. Too few people are even interested in philosophy, not knowing what it's really about. Hume showed that science can't make definite statements the way mathematics can, and as philosophy can after much mulling. Science works sometimes but it fails all the time as well. It can't say what reality is and it's results are open to investigation.
Let me state that no one here is denying that he has parents and drives a car, ect. That is practical truth. Philosophy addresses something more subtle. Scientists must think philosophers are crazy for speaking of the "real Reality" but we think they are crazy for talking about a theory of everything. Such a theory can't address philosophy even though much of its thinking gets mired in philosophy. If it's not the true reality, how can you have a full theory of it? Hume already shows with the induction problem that the world is radically contingent and we can't truly know what is causing what. Science is fine but it doesn't go anywhere
You don't think the methods of quantum mechanics have led to impressive ideas? All the mathematics and mechanical expertise involved don't lead to ideas? Scientists have to wait patiently for philosophers to ruminate about their work?
Quoting Gregory
:roll:
Science and math are not about philosophy except when one (Hume for example) make philosophical comments on it. Scientists usually miss the point about that stuff and this is why there is division of disciplines. But this is after all a philosophy forum right?
So if it were up to you people would be banned for promoting Platonism, neo-Platonism, or continental philosophy because it is not philosophy? We are on opposite ends because i don't consider logical positivism to be philosophy but my philosophy is what has traditionally been called philosophy for thousands of years. For me modern positivism attempts to numb the parts of the soul that want to do philosophy and they try to examine what is left as this doubt reveals the truth as reduced to perfection. But basically they are just become materialists. I heard recently Richard Dawking saying "we dont know how consciousness arises but we are working on it". Isn't the brain enough? *What kind of answer is he looking for?* Is a part of the brain or QM any more explanitory? What material explanation will ever satisfy him. Science is like "we found the meaning of life: it's helium!" Or whatever. Obviously its just about matter yet they think if they focus on matter long enough the answers to life will emerge. And that's nonsense. Science is good at making life comfortable if it's done by good people. Yet science is simply pointless because it can't say what "good" is.
How is my position objectionable?
I guess one could say that centuries of philosophy have yet to demonstrate that Platonism and transcendence are true. But I'll concede as faith based positions they have a perennial appeal (no pun intended).
@Banno is not a logical positivist and I recall him criticizing scientism on numerous occasions. Seems to me he is simply arguing for a more careful approach to philosophy, to be more scrupulous with one's assumptions and the use of language.
Quoting Gregory
It's Richard Dawkins. And I don't recall anyone here bringing him up as a philosopher, despite what the media in their confusions might do for clicks and confected outrage. He may be correct on this. I doubt many on this site are qualified to know.
I think the debate between those who would hold to transcendental entities and those who do not is one that seems vital and worth pursuing. I don't believe that humans have access to any other realm and not being a theoretical physicist or significant intellectual with documented work behind me in neuroscience or philosophy (like most here), I will simply sit back and watch the endless debate between the self-educated and untheorized play out.
I don't think it objectionable so much as incoherent.
Quoting Banno
Platonism is the error of reifying grammar. I have nothing in my pocket - you can have it for a reasonable remittance.
Cheers.
Yes, but what I am wondering is why do you feel the need? Ah, I know, it must be to help us poor people out, to let us know that we are not philosophers because, after all, if you say we are not, it must be true. How lucky we all are to have you to set us straight. If there is so much rubbish on this thread, I only wonder why you have wasted so much time reading all of it, and then going even further by actually taking the time to comment on it.
Me, I may not agree with everything other people say, but I have the decency to respect their views and not attempt to demean them. I dont see any good reason for doing that at all.
Grammar is the one thing that Platonism has nothing to do with. There is science, philosophy as applied to science (which can never be finally solved), and pure philosophy. Plato dealt with ideas which have no relation to words except when they are communicated by grunts
had expressed some disillusionment with Philosophy as compared to Maths. it was simply to remind him that what is happening here is atypical of philosophy generally. It's no more exemplary than say supposing that mathematicians spend their time multiplying very big numbers.
Yes, the tone was grumpy, but most of the posts on this thread are rubbish.
Quoting Gregory
But
Quoting SEP
The problem wan't clear in my joke, it seems, so I'll add a bit of explanation. So "I have sand in my pocket" implies that there is a thing - the sand - in my pocket. "I have nothing in my pocket" has the same grammar. Does it imply that I have a thing - the nothing - in my pocket?
No, because the deeper grammatical structure of each is very different. "I have sand in my pocket" sets out a first-order relation between being in a pocket and sand - "There is a something such that it is sand and it is in my pocket". But "I have nothing in my pocket" has the structure "it is not the case that there is something and it is in my pocket" or "for all things, none are in my pocket". In logical terms, the former is a first order predication, the latter a negative existential quantification.
This is the sort of grammatical frippery to which I was alluding.
I understand and appreciate your point although i have not read enough Wittgenstein to make a judgment about what he thought. Hume talks about impressions as opposed to ideas. For me grammer is the bridge between impressions and thought. But we can still have thoughts that language cannot capture because thought, in Hegel's language, has form and also content. Form is how thinking relates to language and perception. But philosophy tries to give rise in the individual student to ideas eternal, beyond words and world. Yet you seem to think that philosophy is just a game (but one that needs to be played properly), as when you said Hegel arguments are is reality just rhetoric
The bold part seems equivalent to:
Absolute nothingness is impossible because something exists.
and
Something exists: therefore absolute nothingness is impossible
So you seem to be saying: absolute nothingness would be possible if there were absolute nothingness. This seems vacuous: you seem to be basing your claim on a tautology: If X than possibly(X).
But I prefer admitting our limits to such pretence.
What remains is that something, negation and nothing are the results from the application of grammar rather than things in the world. Not sure what the Hegel comment you refer to was.
What are the connections / relations between something and absolute nothingness?
I don't see how there could be any. Nothingness is a concept that is mentally constructed by subtraction, but it has no real-world analogue.
But isn't the subtraction external to your mind? Surely you must have subtracted something from something else from the objects external to youself. You couldn't possibly subtract a concept from the concept, or did you?
Or is it also an internal mental event?
No. Concepts are mental "objects", and the subtraction process is entirely a mental activity.
But you still need data to subtract from outside of you? You must know what you are to subtract from what. That what must come from outside of you? If you say, no, then how do you know what to subtract from what?
Anyhow "Absolute Nothingness" itself must be from external to you, because without the object called "abstract nothingness", how could you have formed the concept inside your mind? Where did it come from? What gave a birth to the concept "Absolute Nothingness"?
You must have known something about it too. If you didn't know anything about it, then how could you deny its existence?
And for something X to be impossible, it must first exist. If it doesn't exist at all, then how could be judged as impossible?
I'm agreeing with you. It's my first comment on this because I don't think absolute nothingness can exists in the universe as we know it. In the coldest, sparsest regions of the universe there would be stars twinkling in the far distance.
Mental objects do exist and it's were the abstract concepts of absolute nothingness shows up.
As far as external data....what is that? It's physical matter that the brain must interpret through our senses.
Nothingness is an abstraction mentally constructed from other abstractions: in particular, set theory. It is similar to the concept of an empty set. Empty sets don't exist in the real world: they are defined as sets with no members, while sets are purely conceptual groupings.
Quoting Corvus
That's self-contradictory.
That cannot be always the case. You can make up an empty set from a biscuit tin, which contain no biscuits. Empty set can be made up from empirical world objects.
Quoting Relativist
How could something be impossible in the actual world, if it didn't exist?
You haven't made an empty set, you have conceptualized one. Sure, you can conceptualize nothingness by starting with an empty biscuit tin, then conceptually disregard the air it contains, the quantum fields that exist everywhere, and then ignore the biscuit tin itself. What's left: nothing is left.
Quoting Corvus
If something is impossible, it cannot exist. It is impossible to be simultaneously married and unmarried, so it is impossible for someone to be a married bachelor.
Yes, that is where nothingness comes from. Therefore the origin of nothingness is external to human mind, not internal to human mind.
Quoting Relativist
But married and unmarried is not existence. They are analytic concepts. But think of this case. For you to make a meaningful statement that it is impossible for you to be married or unmarried, you must first exist. If you didn't exist, it is impossible to say that it is impossible for you to be married or unmarried.
You're blurring the distinction between the objects of the world (the ontic) and concepts we formulate in our minds. Nothingness is a concept (not ontic). We formulate it based on other concepts (eg the concept of an empty biscuit tin). Biscuit tins are ontic, but there are no biscuit tins that are truly devoid of contents. That's pure conceptualization without any real world referrent: nothingness is not ontic.
Quoting Corvus
My point was that a phrase that entails a contradiction cannot have an ontic referrent (i.e. there can exist no object that is described by a contradiction; it is logically impossible). You had said, "And for something X to be impossible, it must first exist". It makes no sense to claim an impossibility has to exist. I think this may get back to your blurring of the conceptual with the ontic.
Nothingness is a concept, but it is also ontic. Nothingness is the only concept which can be applied to space. Because they share common qualities such as emptiness and invisibility. Nothingness / space is the prior condition for the biscuits to exist in the tin. If the tin had no space (nothingness) in it, and it was filled with full of candies, then you cannot put your cookies in it.
When you say Absolute Nothingness, it would be the space with absolutely nothing in it, not even a particle of air. The total vacuum state of the space can be called Absolute Nothingness.
Quoting Relativist
This is wrong assumption. For something to create a contradiction, it must be existence either in the actual world as physical objects or in the propositions. You cannot make a meaningful statement about something, if something was not existent. Because to know something was contradictory, you must have known or perceived the object or concept you are stating about.
I take it that by "absolute nothingness" one means absolute non-being rather than being which is devoid of things and hence thingness. Nirvana, as one example, is reputed to be devoid of any thingness while yet being, hence not being nothingness.
If so, in which sense can space occur, i.e. be, in the absence of any and all distances?:
Distance is always relative to things - even if they're construed to not be material (e.g., the distance between two psyches: two psyches might be very far apart, this being a distance, strictly due to their differing views ... if, that is, one were to not take this example as being purely metaphorical). At any rate, here is my contention:
If there are no things between which there is distance, then there is no occurring distance period. And if there is no occurring distance, I so far fail to see how there can occur any sensible understanding of space. Again, what does distance-less space signify?
(The quantum vacuum state yet has distances between particles that appear out of it and disappear into it, for instance.)
That is an interesting view on Absolute Nothingness. As long as you have arguments with possibly some evidence, we are interested in looking into the ideas.
There are a few possible cases that Absolute Nothingness can be attributed to, from metaphysical, logical, epistemological, physical and even linguistic perspectives. If we look at it from linguistic and logical perspectives, we call the planet venus as morning star or evening star. Then why couldn't you call an isolated empty space as absolute nothingness? Because they share the common qualities for the concepts and existence. Absolute space is also a physical entity demonstrated by Newton in his bucket experiment.
Quoting javra
I will think about this point, and get back here for update, if I can come up with any idea either for agreeing or disagreeing. But here is a good article on the topic in SEP.
Ontic= existing. Nothingness is an absence of existence. Nothingness existing is self-contradictory, like married bachelor.
Quoting Corvus
No, it can't. Quantum fields exist at every point in space.
Things can be existent, not existent or half existent too. An absence of existence is also an existence.
Every existence has its history of existence. Prior to the existence, it was non existence i.e. an absence of existence. Then there were conditions for the birth of existence, and that is how all existence came to being existence.
A married bachelor is possible logically and in the real world. A bachelor just signed for the marriage certificate in the registry office, but not having gone through the religious ceremony yet is a married bachelor under the eyes of the religious community he belongs.
To be a thing is to exist. If you don't understand that, then there's no point discussing further.
This "we" which you here reference, they'd be "interested in looking into the ideas were arguments with possibly some evidence" to be provided by me for the way that the term nothingness gets interpreted by you in your arguments? I don't get it.
I made it clear what my background presumption in this respect was. To be clearer: Do you or do you not interpret nothingness as equivalent to non-being in you're arguments, this as I've explicitly stated I so far assume you do (with emphasis on this being an assumption)? Else do you take non-existence to be something other than non-being? If so, how are the two concepts different to you?
There is no one correct answer here. But the answer you provide will have significant baring on how the issue of nothingness is commonly addressed.
Quoting Corvus
Because an isolated empty space occurs relative to givens, such as its surroundings, and is thereby not absolute nothingness. (absolute does mean complete without exceptions).
As to the video you've linked to, it seems to me to pose a trick question from the get-go. By the very concept initially specified in the video, an "absolute empty space" (whose very cogency my addressed contention questions) cannot contain a bucket of water, never mind distant galaxies and starts, for the occurrence of any of these things would make it other than an absolute, i.e. a literally complete, empty space. Besides, Newtonian conceptions of absolute space have been debunked some time ago by the theory of relativity, no?
Quoting Corvus
That's perfectly fine, but I want to point out that my post, or else contention, was in the form of a question, and not in the form of an argument one then can agree with or disagree with: Again, in what sense can space occur, and thereby be, in the complete absence of distance(s) between givens?
Oh, Banno. That's very cute. :flower:
We know you care a lot and some noobs (myself included) learn reading your threads and comments... our discussion on sense and sensibilia was awesome.
Cheers, and protect yourself when dingoes are closer!
Please back your statement up by clarifying and defining what "to exist" means.
Philosophy is about being able to see beyond the things existent, widening and deepening your perceptual capabilities. If you limit yourself your perception to the visible physical objects only, then you will not improve your perceptual abilities from the ones of the philosophyless folks just discharging their remaining lifetime in the mundane world. If that is what you opt to do, then it is pity, but I can't help that.
First time when I came across the concept "Absolute Nothingness", I was like so many other folks here, it is an illogical concept, doesn't make sense, blah blah and tried to disregard it. But when I thought it more, I found it actually quite an interesting concept. It can be used to cover, or explain many things beyond we take as existence.
As I said in the previous post, that one of the philosophical aims is about widening, deepening and enriching one's perceptual capabilities. The concept like this will help us to achieve that, and it is worthwhile in keep thinking over trying to come up with some logical proof that it can make sense.
I have not thought about the case where Absolute Nothingness can be linked to Absolute Non-being. But I think it is an interesting concept too. More later~
I think Absolute Nothingness can be interpreted as a property of Non-being too. Every being is not just a being, but it also encompasses its origin (which is the past of the being), and the future in it. All beings were non-being at one time, but one day and moment, it manifested into a being by some causal conditions either physical or mental.
Every being which is a human does think about the existence prior to their birth, and also the possible existence after their life in the actual world.
Also non-being, absolute non-being can be used for different levels of beliefs in one's own existence.
The current existence as a living being in the actual world would be a being. This is a belief and also a fact.
But when one believes in the existence of past life, and afterlife, then the existence could be named as non-being. One has lived in the past or existed as some other being in the past before birth, but there were changes of the being via change of time, or some event, the being in the past has gone through transformation to non-being. Then the current being has come to existence.
When the current being dies the physical death after the course of life, then the current existence will cease to exist. In that case, what does the being become? A non-being. A non-being is a being that has no physical body, but the soul still intact as a Cartesian substance, being invisible and unable to communicate with the livings due to lack of the bodily existence, but still able to be present in the actual world having all the mental states intact perceiving, knowing and feeling just as a non-being, if one believed in afterlife and has faith in the existence of souls. Concepts of non-being could be useful to attribute the possible existence to it.
If one had absolute no belief in the existence of possible non-beings, then for them their prior existence and afterlife existence would be Absolute Nothingness. It would be something one never experiences in real life, but presumed, or inferred existence. Or non-existence, if one wants to call it. But there is no reason why one cannot call it an existence too.
Quoting javra
Absolute Nothingness is a useful concept to use in explaining the existence of Absolute space, or relative space which is absolute. A relative space can be made into space which is totally empty with no particles of air, and in total vacuum state could be called an absolute relative space.
It could sound contradictory, but then if we think about the case where we call the planet of venus morning star or evening star depending on when you see it, why not? It is just a matter of widening one's understanding of the concept in conjunction with the object, be it physical or mental nature.
And the distance-less space you mentioned is also quite an interesting concept I feel. Distance is only possible when there are objects in space, or some markers for the measurements to take place between them. In absolute space with no objects in it, distance would not exist or be meaningless.
Quoting javra
I am not very knowledgeable on QM, and QM is not my first interest in my readings, but I feel that for the whole universe to exist, there must have been absolute space first. Without absolute space as absolute nothingness, no physical objects, motions or changes are possible. Time itself is from changes of the objects, hence without space there are no motions, no changes hence no time would be possible either.
Kant was quite right in establishing Space and Time as dual entities in human perception of the world as the precondition for the possibility of experience. Space is definitely physical. It exists outside of the human mind, but it also exists in the mind as a priori condition for visual perception and experience.
Absolute nothingness can be a priori concept which denotes the prior state of the universe before it was born, or the aftermath of existence of the universe, if it ends in some future time as a deduced entity or state, which has been existence and will keep existing through eternity.
A handy concept in your pocket to explain the possible state of the universe before and after its existence.
Introducing a dualist form will resolve this:
Physical brain; (Absolute Nothingness)
So physically and conceptually we have two categories. The physical is what we observe as something and Absolute Nothingness (as mental content) is a concept.
If you don't like dualism don't worry. In this form the dualism is just an expansion of physicalism.
Absolute Nothingness is only possible from the perspective of something'.
The something being the perspective of our brains.
Thank you for the relatively in-depth reply.
Quoting Corvus
The semantics the two of us use for being and non-being are significantly different. Because of this, I think we would be talking past each other in using these terms, and, by extension, the notion of nothingness. For one example, to me, iff ghosts were to be real and not merely constructs of some humans imaginations, then I would label ghosts as spirits or souls that hold actual being in the cosmos. This rather than labeling ghosts as non-beings (noun) or else expressing that they do not hold actual being (in verb form) in the cosmos. Id hold the same for past lives and afterlives. So, in my use of words, neither ghosts, nor past lives, nor afterlives would pertain to nothingness or else nonbeing. And I would instead affirm that all these are different forms of being.
But again, this is more an issue of how we express ourselves rather than the content which we intend to express. Its just that without uniformity in the former, it is difficult toward impossible to find agreement on the latter.
Quoting Corvus
As a technical detail of the theory of relativity via which any linear model of the universe can be established (a linear model here being one in which the universe had an absolute beginning that progresses toward an absolute end), neither time nor space occurred prior to the Big Bang. The here assumed gravitational singularity from which the Big Bang is stated to have occurred is affirmed to be spacelessthis because space, just as much as time, becomes meaningless in a gravitational singularity. In the linear model just described, then, both space and time are stated to have started only upon this cosmically singular, initial gravitational singularitys explosion, this being the Big Bang. As reference:
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity
But again, I myself would label this initial singularity as something rather than as nothing(ness).
So that its known, rather than a linear model of the cosmos, I instead favor what could in summation be termed a cyclical model of the cosmos, a Big Bounce rather than a Big Bang as the labels go, which can also be established via the theory of relativity.
Quoting Corvus
I can very much see this application for any linear model of the universe (as previously described). But again, I'm one to favor a more cyclical model of the universe and, because of this, I personally don't find use for this notion of before and after the universe's being.
Again I am not too familiar with Buddhism, but Absolute Nothingness can be a useful resource or concept for the Buddhists for their aim of of meditation in endeavour to achieve the state of Nirvana.
Wiki has some synoptic info on Nirvana "Nirvana is the goal of many Buddhist paths, and marks the soteriological release from worldly suffering and rebirths in sa?s?ra.[2][3] Nirvana is part of the Third Truth on "cessation of dukkha" in the Four Noble Truths,[2] and the "summum bonum of Buddhism and goal of the Eightfold Path."[3]"
Nirvana has also been claimed by some scholars to be identical with anatta (non-self) and sunyata (emptiness) states though this is hotly contested by other scholars and practicing monks.[web 1][7][8][9][10] In time, with the development of the Buddhist doctrine, other interpretations were given, such as the absence of the weaving (vana) of activity of the mind,[11] the elimination of desire, and escape from the woods, cq. the five skandhas or aggregates." - Wiki on Nirvana
This makes sense, because Buddhists believe the human sufferings come from the bodily nature and desires of the beings. The only way to achieve the freedom is after the time of the being's death. However, the beings don't want to die just to achieve the freedom from suffering. Instead, they can try to separate their bodies from minds via meditation aiming to achieve the absolute emptiness, viz Absolute Nothingness, which could be construed as the state of body-less with only the mind existing in the actual world.
Not saying, Absolute Nothingness is an officially proved concept for representing all these cases, but certainly it seems a useful concept to keep in one's pocket when thinking or explaining about the abstract objects and concepts in metaphysics, logic, physics or even religious topics.
Well, to affirm that, "nothingness once was" is a contradiction in terms when nothingness is equated to nonbeing.
The term "was" is the past tense of "to be". Hence, the affirmation then claims that there in the past was a time when "lack-of-any-type-of-being held a type of being". Which can be logically contradictory contingent on semantics: At the same time and in the same respect, both a) nothing is/was (entailed by lack of any type of being) and b) something is/was (entailed by their being or once being a state of nothingness).
The only contention here would be if this is strictly due to our linguistic constraints of speech which do not accurately capture metaphysical possibilities or, else, whether our linguistics accurately conveys a logical contradiction in any such metaphysics.
Again, our semantics are too different for me to engage in meaningful discussions with you on this particular topic. But I will point out that there is a distinction in Buddhism between annihilation (which I would again myself term nonbeing) and Nirvana as absolute bliss (which I would myself term being and, hence, not nothingness).
In annihilation, there is no bliss to be had; in Nirvana, however, this absolute bliss does occur.
OK, that's fair enough. I tried to explain what I think and understand of the concept. As I said, initially it was not a logical concept to me to accept. But after thinking about it second time, it seems actually a very useful concept to further work on. I am glad that I have the concept, and will be further studying the cases, which it could be applied to.
I care about people. I also realize that you are expressing your views, not facts. But I further know that you may see things differently to me, and I can respect that. I personally would be a lot more mindful of being understanding towards others, but everyone is different.
For reasons given.
'Rubbish' in your opinion. You're getting confused between opinion and fact.
I'd leave him to it.
There was a bit more than mere expression of an opinion involved. I brought both Wittgenstein and Austin in to play - mostly unrecognised; pointed out that 'nothing" is not inconceivable; corrected some misunderstandings to do with Newton and Einstein; critiqued some misconceived Platonism; explained a lost joke and apparently pissed off a Kiwi.
Not a bad result.
Is there something of substance we could discuss here? Or is it to remain puerile?
I'll go over the key point again: the OP and the bulk of responses reify a piece of grammar. Prefixing "absolute" compounds the error.
Edit: I'll add a bit of nice: behind the OP is a bit of wisdom - "nothing" only makes sense against a background of "something".
Of course you should express your own opinion. I am a big believer in everyone having a right to their own opinions :) But, I was just pointing out that it was just that: an opinion, not a fact.
Hm...
How do you go about telling these two apart? What is fact, what is opinion?
Maybe there is some hope for this thread.
I think you might be right there.
Oops, silly me, I missed off the most important thing... in my view: there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of expressing one's own opinion though.
I'm Irish - but you should be so lucky. Hehe. However, that does explain your comportment :sweat: Aiming to piss people off sits well with it.