I think that the way we characterize nothingness will have a great influence on what we make of existence.
Can you imagine nothingness ? No, you can’t…
You can’t imagine nothingness because nothingness implies that not even empy space (void) should be, “exist”.
Can you comprehend that ? No… not really.
Some astro-physicists say that the univers is not infinite but has not boundaries.
I will try and accept that because it makes sense… but the problem is I cannot imagine nothingness (lack of space/void) and also cannot imagine infinite space/void.
I cannot comprehend infinity… you can prove its existence mathematicaly very simply… the biggest number you can think of +1. Its that simple to express infinity.
Am i wrong ? Can anyone here teach me how to imagine nothingness and infinity ?
That brings me to the question asked by Denys Turner… which i brought here.
“Why is there anything at all rather than nothing?”
I can’t really ask Mr. Turner if he sees void or empty space as something but i do.
Thus i’m trying to put together a philosophical theory to show that the nothingness about which so many philosophers talk as if it were something… cannot “exist”.
And the fact that nothingness cannot “be”… something, anything must exist, must be.
As i say in my native language: Neantul cere existenta. ( The nothingness asks/begs for existence ).
Does this make any sense to anyone ?
I know i rarely express such deep philosophical problems here… but thats because i don’t share them with you people. I got many such issues on my mind and i restrain from posting them because they’re not completly coherent in my own mind and i’m not sure how much sense they make.
The first thing to bear in mind is that your (and everyone’s) subjective world is a representation. You can’t “think away” yourself as subject precisely because you are the supporter of this representation. And you can’t think-away time and space because they’re the two “a priori intuitions” that the representation is built on.
You can of course think away for all time all other lifeforms besides yourself, which is a bleak thought…
I,d have to disagree , since nothingness is something I imagine all the time
Ok , I admit , my nothingness is a black , formless nothing , however different it would be to actual nothingness Im not sure , maybe nothingess is actually blue , and cant be described , but who,s to say the nothingness I see is,nt the real void
Try meditating ?
Steady !
Do you work as a philosopher ?
Your thinking is good , I enjoyed reading your stuff
Hey, I’ve thought about this a lot. And Carpathian, your first post did make sense to me and inspired my response to someone else, who saw nothing as a “frequency of vibration we cannot experience”.
To me, nothingness is the lack of existence. So, by definition, it is impossible for nothingness to exist. How can something non-existent exist?
Hey, I’ve thought about this a lot. And Carpathian, your first post did make sense to me and inspired my response to someone else, who saw nothing as a “frequency of vibration we cannot experience”.
To me, nothingness is the lack of existence. So, by definition, it is impossible for nothingness to exist. How can something non-existent exist?
Well my view of nothingness is utter lack of anything… including void and empty space.
Finnaly someone sees exatcly my logic behind this argument.
The fact that i used the verb “to exist” when referring to nothingness is precisely what i wanted someone to see; It is in fact a shortcoming of language.
If you take nothingness as empty space or void… it can “exist”; There can be a great deal of space. But if you take nothingness as utter lack of anything that means nothingness is not a black kind of empty space.
I guess this begs the question, Can empty space not exist ?
You obviously make a hobby out of trying to refute everything i say… but you missed my point. I only talked about nothingness that “could be” “could exist” to show that nothingness cannot “be”.
It is impossible to conceive lack of everything, including space or void… and my question is: Does that mean that existance is a product of the fact that nothingness cannot be ? That something MUST be… ?
My idea being that if we can reach that conclusion then we can answer why something is; why anything is.
The answer i’m looking to give is this.
Why is there anything rather than nothing ?
Because nothingness cannot be. Something, anything must be.
I really hope you understand because this is very important to me.
why is there something rather than nothing? simple
if it was nothing it would all have the same name
differenciation presumes existence
the fact that we can name it different things merely shows humans’ need to measure and label -it doesn’t reveal any metaphysical truth about objects, it only says something about the human animal
Yeah, yeah yeah. Nothingness cannot exist, by the definition of the words used. It’s the syntax of such a statement that gives us the illusion that it is a meaningful statement at all. There is a difference between syntax and logic. In philosophy, anyway.
As Imp says, however, none of this should be taken as an epistemic statement. It’s not a philosophical problem at all. You need a linguistic theory (not liguistics as a philosophical subject).
I cannot see how you have shown that it is necessary that anything exists. What I mean is that we can know that it is the case that something exists, but not that this is necessarily so, but only the actual fact. That it happens to be the fact, and not that it could not be otherwise.
Further, it does not speak to the necessity of the particular things that do exist. They could as easily be entirely other things than what they in fact are.
But if you have a conclusion here, why not just let it fly?
How is it it that something must be? I think it is necessary to believe that something is, but must be?
Firstly, one must ask himself why is the concept of nothingness an issue. Is it merely because the term nothingness implies an antithesis to existence? That death, a matter closely related to existentialism, is so fascinating, so romanticized in the Man’s psyche that by the spark of its presence constitutes an obsessive fixation, that more so often males rather than females find it intriguing? Or perhaps the contradiction of the term itself, that one can imagine the existence of something that doesn’t exist, hence torturing us by its mere shadow of thought, rendering our common sense useless in the strive for the answer to the question of why we can’t see, hear, smell, taste or touch it yet we can still be affected by it?. Where does one draw the line between existing and not existing? Is it only the sound, the taste or the matter of an object? Doesn’t the term nothingness exist by our mere thought of it? Shouldn’t we consider the existence of something a prerequisite for thinking of it? A thought is matter, a memory exists because we make it exist - hence nothingness, even though consisting of absolutely nothing, is something by the fact that we are giving it space in our minds and time out of our lives. We can all agree that a thought does exist while it’s in the process of being thought about and that time is actually something. Well, if the term ‘nothingness’, however insignificant is might be from an objective point of view, can exist within these finite mediums, we can say that it drifts in and out of existence randomly from one consciousness to another, grows and diminishes depending on how many minds that are considering it and how much time is spent on it. So long as we are aware of it, it does exist - however contradicting the language of it is.
Perhaps I am wrong, but the Senator has forwarded his motion upon you.
Actually, a philosopher named Max Stirner came to a conclusion much like the original post.
Any effort to understand nothing is paradoxical, as you ultimately instantiate something in an effort to represent it (The word, nothing, is that very something that opposes it.)
Personally, I have built upon this to derive a sort of logical affirmativism, as well as support a psychologistic understanding of logical value theory, as well as contemplating the harmful consequences entailed in believing in inherently negative values, which include infinity, nonexistence, unreality, indescribability, unthinkable, inconceivable, and so on that all fall under the same paradox as the one which Stirner and the original poster have mentioned.