OK, so we know a few things. We know that before our births, we did not exist for trillions of years. Then somewhere along, say 1983, (I am 25) we come into this world. We exist for awhile, although in the spectrum of time it is not even a drop in the bucket.
So say I live until 2083 and make it to 100. Then I die. After that, I cease to exist for another trillion years.
Is nothingness our “real” home as humans?
You just opened the flood gates for opinions here. It could very well be passing from one consciousness to another. I don’t mean ‘a past life’ thing. Rather from one state of being to another. Then some would argue DNA carries earlier memories like some animals pass on their instincts from generation to the next. Pure conjecture without a cohesive juncture to establish a rational reference. Simply put, you’re guess is as good as mine.
Good show.
Many philosophers have asked this question. When pondering the meaning of life it’s only rational to consider that life might mean nothing at all.
I’m currently reading “a hitch hikers guide to the galaxy”. The sophistry of douglas adams often yields interesting things…
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
The wording of your question i also find interesting. In one sense you ask if “nothingness” is our “true reality”, as if we are somehow whole or complete before and after death (give or take a mataphor or two). But on the other hand if you say to yourself, the true reality of humans is “nothing” (something potentially similar to nothingness), we can construe a completely different meaning.
Is not nothing the absence of truth? (the absence of everything?)
Consider this. You are standing on top of a very high cliff holding a roundish small boulder. You throw it down the cliff and it begins it’s incredibly long decent, rolling and banging against the cliff side…
Now suppose on the surface of this plumitting boulder there was randomly formed tiny repeating patterns made up of a complex reaction of rock fragments. Then suppose that these patterns reproduced, became more sophisticated, and eventually there came to be a race of sentient rock based life forms on the surface of this plumitting boulder.
When this boulder hits the ground, these unique lifeforms are all obliterated, and never seen or heard of again.
Now, what is the meaning of life for one of these rock creatures? what is their true reality?
In my opinion, the existence and workings of all physical beings is a direct result of the physical workings of the universe. What i mean is that we are an expression of something. The something which all humans impatrially and imperfectly percieve; the external world.
The universe as it is; unbridled, and just plain, reality.
Now whatever ramifications you want to deduce based on the circumstances and series of events that lead to our creation, consider the boulder you threw off the cliff, and the little rock beings, and our potential similarities. Consider the significance of these rock beings to the world around them. Consider their significance to their creator.
In my personal opinion, humans are not nothing, but we are probably as close to nothing as it is possible to get, so our true reality isn’t all that helpful or great.
A lot of people forget to ask the most important question: what significance does life have to you.
Our physical bodies are eternal, matter can neither be destroyed or created. I think our consciousness (which is what you are probably referring to) ((matter too?)) continues on as some form of electricity.
We don’t know about before nor after our present life, unless we have memory.
And even the memory can be wrong.
So, we don’t really know other than present, and even that can be questionable.
If you define “human” as something with perception, emotion, and (more or less functioning) reason, I’d say “nothing” can’t be a home because “nothing” is the total lack of any quality including that of “home”.
But I do consider my core nature to be “nothing”.
And “nothing” is gives me more impression of reality than other things.
“Nothing” is one of those fundamental abstractions which serves as a prerequisite for meaning. It exists primarily as a determinate negation of a thing, but as such it’s still ultimately a thing itself. I’m not sure what it means to say that our core nature is nothing because you’re grasping a specific idea or thing and then negating it so that it’s still an idea or thing, just one that’s less well understood and more open to interpretation. Then again, i suppose that’s probably the point of such statements, obfuscation of the self as a defensive gesture.
Nothingness is an ideal, and like all ideals, it haunts us with it’s impossibility - threads like this are one common symptom of that haunting.
In the logical understanding, “nothing” is often seen as a “thing”, just like any other object of focus. And it has to be so.
However, the nothingness I was talking about isn’t the one we employ in logical plane.
The only logical approach is by negation. The total lack of any attribute/property/possibility.
It is the base for any affirmation/assertion, but it’s in the back plane, normally invisible to us.
In my case, this description (the total lack of any quality) matches my inner experiences, somehow.
I can change my state of awareness and when I pull it back from outside focus, the perceptions in the awareness become less and it become quiet.
If I continue, it would be simple he awareness would be filled with light and then black out upon reaching the edge of the core.
This is roughly how I experience m inner core, where there is nothing.
As this is my personal experience and understanding, I don’t insist that it’s like this for everyone, but I do think it is so.
If you want to know more, you can read this thread.
viewtopic.php?f=25&t=166295
Actually, it makes my superficial self more visible (a least for myself).
It’s like seeing the self inside out, while most other people I know seems to be trying to see it from outside.
Impossibility doesn’t haunt me, since in the core, I care nothing. I mean, in the core, it’s nothing and there is nothing. It’s absolutely carefree. 
Outside of it, it’s in the relative/temporal/plastic world. Nothing really fixed.
Again, I do what I want, as I feel like doing, when I want, freely, most of the time.
So, it’s not hard to live, although I do feel pain as soon as I’m a little relaxed.
I do agree that it haunt you if you get sucked in.
Since I’m already in it (o I do perceive as such, if you prefer), somehow, it’s the world that get sucked in, and I’m standing by, observing as things get crunched and disappear.
I learn a lot by observing the last cry of many things, as they go by.
I agree that people tend to construe nothingness as a thing. But can they not be refering to nothing at all?
Nothing in my mind is the absence of “thing-ess”
no-thing-ness, a quality of having no qualities.
It’s easy to confuse arguments when talking about this subject, and metaphors usually end up being the cause of confusion.
It’s possible to understand, know and think what nothing is.
Here’s a demonstration. In your mind, say “up”, and quickly shift your sight up to a random point somewhere high in the room, and then again in your mind, say “down” and lower your gase to your lap or somewhere lower.
repeat the process one or twice quickly.
It’s my speculation that after you think the word up, and before you think the word down, you think nothing.
It is possible to return. The universe has expanded and contracted for bazillion years. In implodes and it explodes. It is possible that everthing mixes into the same proportions once again. And again earth will exit and you will too. The dinosaurs, rome, the world wars,could happen at the exact precise sameness; in all the cycles of universes created and collapsed. If any tweak goes different you will never come back.
But even then “you” are only an experience that this animal is having. You are not even a living thing.
Our “real” home is this planet, in this galaxy, in this universe. You are not human before you are born, and once you are dead you are no more. Nothingness is nothing. It is not a state of being for a human. Before we exist, we cease to be, after we die, we cease to be, but for most people this is insanely difficult to deal with. I find myself, at least once a day, just sitting, staring in awe at the fac that; I didn’t exist, RIGHT NOW I DO, and some day I won’t. Other animals don’t get to experience this mind trip like we do. We have realized that WE DIE!
Sounds like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. Even so, how you lived this one life is what matters. The infinite time and space before it and after it cannot possibly matter to you.
no
I was thinking about this on the bus yesterday. it really does put the fleeting nature of life into perspective. Blink and you miss it. I’m not sure about this ‘nothingness’ as a ‘home’ as it’d require us to be something which has a home, maybe we merely cease to be, in the very least we just cease to be what we are now. Matter just gets recycled. Maybe one day part of me will become a star 
.
When I came to grips with the fact that I did not exist before I was born and will not exist after I die, I thought that life had no meaning, or that I was an impossibly tiny “blip” on the screen of an eternity without me.
The fact is that this life, as short as it was, took on an INFINITE SIGNIFICANCE. Your one brief life means infinitely everything to you. My life means infinitely EVERYTHING to me. It IS EVERYTHING. Ayn Rand quoted an anonymous philosopher and said, “I will not die, it’s the world that will end.” Meaning that this life is everything, and if the entire universe was sucked into oblivion once I died, it was all the same difference, as far as the individual is concerned. Oblivion is oblivion.
No longer do delusions of an afterlife render THIS life meaningless or insignificant. This life means EVERYTHING.
I just thought I’d share my world view. This world view, I believe, has made me a healthier, happier, more-thankful, more-alive person than I ever was. In the face of eternity, my life could be 1 year, 100 years, or 1 million years; it’s all the same and means as much to me no matter how long, as this is MY ONLY ONE! (Even if I’m infinitely living the same exact life over and over, with no memory of it, as in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, the way I live this ONE life INFINITELY MATTERS.)
WONDERER:
I don’t know - how can you refer to nothing? - reference requires at least two parts . . .
I understand what you are talking about, but at the same time, to have no qualities is still to have the quality of having no qualities - and a quality (even a quality of having no qualities) is always something had by a thing - the fact is that there is something instead of nothing - nothing is quite literally impossible.
contextually, yes - but contextuality presupposes various somethingnesses which require negative counterparts in order to be determinate as things - this is what i mean when i say nothing’s a prerequisite for meaning.
i’m not sure i understand what you mean here - can you explain what you are getting at in saying “you think nothing”?
you’re asking me to describe “feeling nothing”
changes take place in our brains which give us thought. this is how we are able to move around and experience things. a combination of time and changing sequences of matter.
if you remove the change or remove the matter, you stop thinking, and experience nothing.
the eye thing is a good way to conceptualize nothing…
or you could rip out your brain…
If you could get to the most smallest minutest size. And near the surface of the body that you are in, you will not be able to tell where the organism starts and where empty space ends. You could move up down left right forward backward and still find your self in empty space.
The mind is in there somewhere. The mind is also an immaterial.
So I guess nothing is our nature.
I’m not asking you to describe feeling nothing - i’m more asking how you concieve that such a thing is even possible in the first place - we can argue over what does or doesn’t qualify as nothing, but we’re still arguing over things and conceptions, right? even in degenerating into semantics, nothingness seems an impossibility.
The eye thing doesn’t cause me to think nothing, it causes me to reinforce for myself the very fundamental conceptual dichotomy of up vs. down - in between the two is not nothing, but rather a whole spectrum of relative degrees of meaning - for me anyway - i’m curious how that enables you to conceptualize nothingness … maybe it’s just different strokes - like trying to diagram the infinite - we each do it our own way - i wonder if it isn’t a fool’s errand to a certain degree, though.
if you want me to be more littoral, before i existed, i don’t reckon i percieved anything. i percieved nothing.
nothing is what we were before life, and after death.
our percieving thinkig selves cease to exist; are destroyed; become nothing.
i can concieve that. i cannot prove or demonstrate it, but there it is… does it satisfy you?
A quest for the infintesimal is probably a fools errand… again i don’t know, and i don’t know how to describe the feeling of feeling nothing.
I honestly do not know waht you are having problems with here…