(Dec 7, 2025 10:01 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMeVBEgeymg&t=492s
(added) VIDEO EXCERPT: But if you don't have anything at all, then you don't have time. So it doesn't make sense to think of an antecedent state of affairs of nothing being followed by something.
Whether absolute or mitigated, "nothing" treated as "something" (an existing entity, state or condition, placeholder, abstract concept, provenance, etc) perversely gets it categorized as just that: something. An instantiation of or item partaking in being.
Really? The nothing in an empty box is something? That emptiness has being?
I guess, in the Hegelian sense of self-negating being.
(Dec 8, 2025 05:31 AM)Syne Wrote: [ -> ]Really? The nothing in an empty box is something? That emptiness has being?
Ordinary language use of "nothing" isn't dealing with absolute lack of being (both concrete and abstract things), but only the observation of no visible objects being perceived in space (along with granting the sensory presence of the latter itself).
If expanding beyond that everyday meaning or usage (toward science -- but still not absolute), then that perceptual limitation or condition of "nothing" which the interior of an ordinary box exemplifies would be undermined by the air inside it, the cosmic rays passing through it, various EM waves from both natural sources and broadcast transmitters, etc.
Whereas the quote seemed to be either addressing or submitting the standard of absolute nothing. Again, where abstract entities are also excluded or don't apply (time, causation, principles, laws, etc).
Talking about technicalities, like air, EM fields, etc., only seeks to avoid nothing. If we want to talk about science, we can talk about how nature abhors a vacuum or how virtual particles arise from essentially empty space. But again, we run the risk of only talking about somethings.
When we talk about nothing, we are, first, talking about our experience. How we recognize it and what it is we gave the name to. We identified it, but it's not a thing, it's a relationship between things. Are relationships something in the same sense as objects, air, etc.?
Absolute nothing is the only thing I can think of that by its very definition doesn't exist. Which is paradoxical, being a sort of positive attribute of "something".. How can nothing have an attribute?
When it comes to relative or relational nothingness, we have lots of examples of that, as specific absences or negations of certain specific positive somethings. Zero. The vacuum. Space. Darkness. Silence. Unconsciousness. But even emptiness presupposes the possibility of becoming filled. So relative nothingness, which as Sartre stresses is what defines the human condition as "lack of" being, is actually part of the creative dialect of Being itself, the positive and the negative always playing off each other and defining each other and making the other possible.
Absolute nothing just has the same relationship to everything that relative nothing has with something. Yes, while something/everything exists, absolute nothing does not. But that only obtains if something always existed... with the aforementioned fatal flaw of infinite regress.
If not an infinite regress, one must define what sort of something can always exist without any cause of its own... and lead to everything we know.
(Dec 9, 2025 12:39 AM)Syne Wrote: [ -> ]Absolute nothing just has the same relationship to everything that relative nothing has with something. Yes, while something/everything exists, absolute nothing does not. But that only obtains if something always existed... with the aforementioned fatal flaw of infinite regress.
If not an infinite regress, one must define what sort of something can always exist without any cause of its own... and lead to everything we know.
That suggests a something like a first mover or God. But if we are positing something with no cause and has existed forever, a far better candidate would be Being or Somethingness. The only Absolute and Necessary Being that we see. God as but one more something would only be another form of Absolute Being, which by its very definition is and can never be nothing. And since spacetime is but another form of the Absolute Being, Being would by definition be uncaused and omnipresent.
"Somethingness" is far too vague to pin down.
Personally, I think being is nothing. It's what everything plays against to form consciousness and experience. Otherwise, you're stuck with two somethings that magically produce something neither can.
"Now since Being and Nothing are identical the one passes into the other. Being passes into Nothing. And conversely, Nothing passes back into Being; for the thought of nothing is the thought of emptiness, and this emptiness is pure Being. In consequence of this disappearance of each category into the other we have a third thought involved, namely, the idea of the passage of Being and Nothing into each other. This is the category of Becoming.20 “Nothing, if it be thus immediate and equal to itself, is also conversely the same as Being is. The truth of Being and of Nothing is accordingly the unity of the two: and this unity is Becoming.”---Hegel
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-...g-becoming
There's a reason I mentioned Hegel:
(Dec 8, 2025 05:31 AM)Syne Wrote: [ -> ]Really? The nothing in an empty box is something? That emptiness has being?
I guess, in the Hegelian sense of self-negating being.
But if being is nothing, it can't also be something. Becoming is a precursor to something, not something itself.