Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

"This is a grammatically well formed sentence which seduces us into thinking that there has to be some wonderfully deep and tremendous answer."

Anthony A.C. Grayling - Why Not Nothing?


"It's very strange that we think of nothing as the sort of default, because we're not familiar with it. We've never lived in a world where there's nothing, so it's not as if we know we're familiar with it. Yet we think that it's the natural state, it's not a natural state at all. No human being has ever lived in the world in which there's nothing. So it's a puzzle about why we think of it as a default state."

Simon Blackburn - Why Not Nothing?


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(1) The question seems to stem from requiring existence (in general) to have a provenance. Or conflictingly giving primacy to cause or "generative force", which itself would invalidate so-called "nothing", via being a member of [general] existence. Existence is always more fundamental, because anything referenced thereby partakes in it or is subsumed by the category.

(2) Universal non-existence can never be the case, since by being the case it would be an existing condition or state, a something. The question is inherently nonsensical.

(3) It's said that an absence of be-ing thereby cannot produce be-ing; but by the same token an absence of be-ing has no restrictions, rules or logic to prevent be-ing from miraculously arising.

(4) There is an "absence of everything" that is attainable in strict physicalist beliefs, which includes lacking even a presentation of nothingness, silence, etc.

It's the non-consciousness of death (or, in the other direction, not being conceived/born yet). But it's not absolute as long as there are other experiences transpiring (of those still alive).

And the eradication of manifestations doesn't mean that an invisible, non-conscious manner of existence is kaput (with respect to physicalist beliefs). But the means to infer such a brand of being would be gone, since (even when alive) cognitive and intelligence related activity cannot validate itself as occurring without phenomenal presentations reciprocally corroborating each other (those manifested representations of applicable neural processes).

"The easiest way to show that there must be something rather than nothing is to try to define nothing. Nothing must have no properties: No size. No shape. No position. No mass-energy, forces, wave forms, or anything else you can think of. No time, no past, no present, no future. And finally, no existence. Therefore there must be something. And this is it."

Larry Curley, Sawtry, Huntingdon, UK

https://philosophynow.org/issues/125/Why...an_Nothing

Avoiding the fact that we deal with nothing everyday, and can thus extrapolate it more generally, only seems to be an attempt to avoid an originating cause.
When you make a box, it's default state is to be empty, containing nothing. Before making the box, the default state is no-box (only different in degree between no time, energy, space, etc.). Even the way we distinguish the box requires some conception of nothing between it and the surrounding environment...more no-box states existing as default.

Would thinking of nothing fall into the ultimate paradox category…

Quote: Kierkegaard and the Absolute Paradox
According to Kierkegaard in PF, a human thinker is passionately interested in the boundaries of his or her thinking faculty and is committed to, in Kierkegaard's own words, "the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think".

(Oct 20, 2022 03:15 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]Would thinking of nothing fall into the ultimate paradox category…

Quote:    Kierkegaard and the Absolute Paradox
According to Kierkegaard in PF, a human thinker is passionately interested in the boundaries of his or her thinking faculty and is committed to, in Kierkegaard's own words, "the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think".

Kierkegaard is essentially right imo. Thought's ultimate horizon is the ability to conceive the unthinkable. It assumes a kind of thinking that accepts paradoxical definitions of reality. The cat is both dead and alive. Light is both particle and wave. The electron is both here and there.

(Oct 20, 2022 06:31 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]

(Oct 20, 2022 03:15 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]Would thinking of nothing fall into the ultimate paradox category…

Quote:    Kierkegaard and the Absolute Paradox
According to Kierkegaard in PF, a human thinker is passionately interested in the boundaries of his or her thinking faculty and is committed to, in Kierkegaard's own words, "the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think".

Kierkegaard is essentially right imo. Thought's ultimate horizon is the ability to conceive the unthinkable. It assumes a kind of thinking that accepts paradoxical definitions of reality. The cat is both dead and alive. Light is both particle and wave. The electron is both here and there.

Good points MR. I was thinking way back to a time when I actually attended church, wasn't my choice but my accompanying mother's. Funny but I remember the preacher telling us to sit back and think of what it was like before God worked his Genesis magic. Probably the first time I ever thought of what nothing must be like. I struggled because I tried to envision a nothingness before God showed up. Preacher later said that what he asked of us was an impossible task but was a whole lot easier if you included God as always having been.
A mistake I still make and I'm glad about it.

Strange to think that the information needed to piece things together is unthinkable. We can't think of something unthinkable, but we try. Do you feel out-of-the-box thinking or thought experiments are some of the best ways to at least get close to the unthinkable?

Quote:We can't think of something unthinkable, but we try. Do you feel out-of-the-box thinking or thought experiments are some of the best ways to at least get close to the unthinkable?

Yes..thought experiments, as well as analogies, are good ways for us to at least partially think the unthinkable.
I would also venture to say meditation is too, for if done right, it gives us a glimpse into our own nothingness or nonselfness, which is closer to us than our own breath.

Ever had a character in any of your dreams think? What happens if one does, will it dream of characters and ask that same question? Don’t know who said it but all this, our entire experience, may be what nothing looks like?

Can nothingness be an illusion without substance?

Nothingness may be an illusion. When I think of nothingness, all I can conceive is dark empty space--a blankness empty of all that is. But that's the thing. By its very nature it excludes consciousness. It is unconsciousness, which is not something we can actually experience. The fact that being and consciousness everywhere entail each other means nothingness is an illusion, or at least a relative state of absence or "missingness" amid the ocean of all existence.

(Oct 22, 2022 06:22 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]Nothingness may be an illusion. When I think of nothingness, all I can conceive is dark empty space--a blankness empty of all that is. But that's the thing. By its very nature it excludes consciousness. It is unconsciousness, which is not something we can actually experience. The fact that being and consciousness everywhere entail each other means nothingness is an illusion, or at least a relative state of absence or "missingness" amid the ocean of all existence.

Achievement of "absence of everything" via either a deep mental state or the brain ceasing to function (death) is potentially a deception. If matter truly subsists on its own independently of all representations, which one would expect believers in a strict physical world to hold.

So-called meditative "nothingness", for instance, is still being apprehended (and thereby corrupted) by a cognitive system that stores the "empty experience" in memory, which allows it to be acknowledged and considered afterwards.

Whereas following death, there is no longer a memory-based cognitive system for understanding and identifying that "something is there" (even blankness). The result may be a specious "absence of everything", if matter is intrinsically present to itself as proto-phenomenal properties. There are just no reciprocal processes organized to validate those primitive manifestations as fact -- only oblivion. Which is vaguely akin to people who claim that they can't remember their dreams, or perhaps mistakenly believe they do not dream as a result of that. The cause of the "not even nothingness" during that sleep period is lack of the dream experience being retained in memory (or at least recoverable memory). 

Unpackaged:

Matter as abstract description (physics) is an artificial, culture-produced representation; and matter as the outer appearances of perception is a biological-produced representation.

So if one literally believes that matter exists independent of such representations, then it has to subsist in some non-extrinsic manner of its own.

To explain the manifestations of consciousness, one can kill two birds with one stone by positing that non-living matter likewise is present to itself as primitive proto-phenomenal properties that the brain recruits at its higher level, to constitute its complex experiences that represent "things of matter" extrinsically. (That is, as fraudulently or deceptively existing "outside themselves", external appearances dependent on an observer or as technical symbols dependent upon a describer).

In the context of strict physicalism, we shouldn't call that "panpsychism" as is popularly the case. The "psyche" root implies all the abilities that a mind has, including memory/intellect.

"Proto-phenomenalism", as a different term, must instead reference raw ontological properties, not the subjective or mental ones at the neural stratum. Just as artificial intelligence is constituted of precursor affairs like the ubiquitous capacity of matter to form interactive structures, but we do not ascribe those elemental, dynamic relational building blocks to "proto-intelligence" or "pan-sapience".

Just as methodological naturalism has no option but abiogenesis, in terms of the origins of life, so there is no other route for strict physicalism (with respect to explaining the manifestations of consciousness) but something descended from Russellian monism. Because the unrelenting, dogmatic version of physicalism is hostile to the alternative of dualism. (Whether that's dualism as an undetectable, immaterial field brutely conjured into being by a neural dance performance or an undetectable, immaterial presence summoned by a neural dance performance). And it certainly doesn't cotton to monistic idealism, as another putative alternative.