Here is the question; What is the value of nothing?
My answer; observe your hand. What are you holding in it? Nothing. Nothing, that is, except possibility. The possibility to create, destroy, reform. The possibility to shape your very existence. So my answer to the question of What is the value of nothing is this; possibility. What do you think?
Nothingness in itself has no value, can have no value, for it isn’t there. You don’t hold nothing in your hand, unless you are being poetic. Nothing, as a concept, means a situation of lack. …and it always implies a lack of something in particular. Nothing is always short for “no X.” There are situations where “no X” is good and also situations where “no X” is not a good thing. The value of nothing is indeterminate.
As per your example, possibility, we are in this case talking about a lack of constraints. There are, however, some possibilities that we do not want to happen. I don’t think human beings are open to all possibilities. So this lack can be good or bad and the only way to determine the value of nothing is to define a context.
The value of nothing is…
Wait for it…
Nothing. It has no value.
*Refer to Parmenides.
I beg to differ. Questions of this ilk neglect that air itself is something. You are in fact holding something primarily composed of nitrogen, oxygen, argon and co2.
To say “I am” implies “I was not”, “I might not have been”, “I may not be”, “I will not be”.
The rest is just sheer conjecture.
There’s a lot of philosophy gone drunk on itself when it comes to nothing.
It’s a linguistic marker, in a context. Philosophers come alone and get their knickers in a twist because they need to know the essence of every word, the eternal form that corresponds to The Concept. It’s like having a problem with the word “I” because it refers to different people depending on who’s speaking.
Nothing is nothing-in-context. We live in a physical continuum (certainly to all intents and purposes in daily life); we break bits of it off and fit them into concepts and names. The bits left over that we aren’t talking about fall under “nothing” - I’ve nothing in my pockets. The bits that aren’t the concepts and names at hand are similarly nothing - I mean nothing by this. The value of it is that we don’t have to talk about everything, all of the time.
It’s a namebadge for the not-at-hand.
hey O_H,
I think what we’re saying is pretty close, if not exactly the same thing. Do you see any difficulties with what I said above?
i think possibility requires something
Well, it’s hard to gather from this whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Like Fuse pointed out, it could be the possibility for horrible awful things. This idea seems to depend on what you mean by “value”. It’s not clear that possibility counts as value as in “good” or “bad” - but there are other sense of the word “value” - for example, in algebra, we ask what is the value of some variable x, and the answer may be 5 or something like that. We ask what the value is of some piece of merchandice, and the answer is, say, $15.95.
There is also the question, again brought up by fuse, of whether there are any constraints on the possibilities at hand. If in your hand you hold nothing, you can certainly rule out the possibility of magically causing an object to suddenly appear there, but then there is the possibility of using that hand to reach out for an object and fill it into the empty space. Again, however, the issue gets complicated by the question of whether this possibility stems from the emptiness itself or from your hand, which was always there, engaging with an object, which also was always there. The object which it ends up hold doesn’t pop out from the emptiness ex nihilo. But it’s true that the emptiness does allow for the possibility of an object taking its place.
Oh, I thought he had infinity in his hand. 
True … and it’s value is also to appreciate and be grateful for the ‘somethings’ which we have.
It also teaches the value of ‘emptiness’ - creating that space within that needs to remain as ‘nothing’.
So, one may say that there is no such thing as ‘nothing’.