Okay, your message was long and I am afraid my reply will be longer. When I replied the first time, I could not reply to a lot of what you said, for I had to read up on Hegel. I want to thank you for pointing me in that direction, it has been very fruitful (though I have much to learn and will be looking for the right resources to get into Hegel going forward).
But what Hegel finds is that this sheer being is now totally contentless. It describes nothing, collapses into nothing. So, pure being turns out to be nothing. But nothing is itself unstable. We're thinking of it, so it's something, like you say. And so nothing turns out to collapse back into sheer being. — Count Timothy von Icarus
My very undeveloped reading of Hegel would disagree slightly. Pure being is indeterminate, that is, logically indistinguishable from anything else. That’s what indeterminate, and its negation, determinate, means in Hegel’s terminology. Now, pure being is obviously distinguishable from other things. We can define pure being in various ways, you already hinted at one. This definition is distinct from e.g. the definition of a square. However, pure being does not exist right now. Something specific exists. So, when talking about an instance of pure being, it is indeterminate, by virtue of the inexistence of any specific things to which it can be distinguished. And by inexistence, I mean complete inexistence; these things are not even conceivable in this state of pure being.
So, pure being is, when existent, indeterminate. Now, pure nothing (or absolute nothingness as referred to in this thread) is also indeterminate. It also does not have any definition, by virtue of having no details, no components. We now have two distinct states that are both indeterminate, and thus logically (definitionally) indistinguishable from each other. That is, by virtue of both states having no definition, one cannot define their difference. Yet, nonetheless, they are different, since pure nothing is currently, by definition, the negation of pure being. I say
currently, because pure being and pure nothing only have definitions in a determinate reality. I refer to these temporary definitions by convenience; you see, these definitions reveal that pure being and pure nothing are indeed different. However, despite that, their definitions (and thus the definition of their difference) disappears if pure being was ever instantiated.
This does not mean pure being
is pure nothing whenever pure being is instantiated. Instead, the difference between them is itself indeterminate “during” this instantiation. The difference is indeterminate, but it is still existent. In fact, it is absolutely crucial that they are different, for if not, the becoming does not happen. You see, all of this has been leading up to one fact; pure being would be related to pure nothing. This quirk, this relationship, gives them both an essence; a relational essence. Thus, determinacy arises from indeterminacy.
…I think? I have no fucking clue what I am talking about. Pass the bong, would you? I would like your thoughts on this, as I am now really intrigued by Hegel’s philosophy, and you blessed me with the introduction.
We have an oscillation, an unstable contradiction. But what if being subsumes/sublates nothing, incorporating parts of nothing into it? Then we reach the becoming of our world, where each moment of being is continually passing away into the nothing on non-being. — Count Timothy von Icarus
This is the intuition (minus the temporal-extendedness implied by
oscilattion) that I have gained from reading Hegel. The relationship is somewhat asymmetric in favor of being, which makes sense; it is the positive that fills the negative. I like how you tie it into the passage of time and change; though I’d like an elaboration on the exact mechanics of it all.
And this makes sense to me from the perspective of what we can say about time. Why do we have a four dimensional manifold? Because we use the time dimension to mark when events have occurred. As Godel noted, eternalist responses to seeming "paradoxes" in relativity miss the mark. What can it mean to say "all times exist at all times?" Times exist at the point along the time dimension where they exist. Events occur when they occur. They do not occur at other times.
"Existence" is a complex word that leads to trouble here. When people say "all times exist" I think they generally want to say "all times are real." And this I agree with. But that doesn't mean that events don't occur (exist) at just the times that they exist. The time dimension becomes meaningless if it doesn't tell us when things occur. That becoming is local is confusing, and open to many interpretations, but also not all that relevant here. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I completely agree. Eternalism does miss the mark. You point to the nonsensical breed of eternalism above. Then there’s the spotlight eternalists who forget they’re reintroducing change by having the spotlight move (duh…). A third breed would be the frozen omphalists, and I would like to ask them some questions, but I fear they would have no time to answer.
This seems to beg the question somewhat. It assumes that nothing exists necessarily. If there are necessary things, then they exist by necessity, and they are something. Which would seem to entail for you that "absolute nothingness is [not] most definitely possible," if anything exists of necessity. And then of course, there are many arguments for things which do exist of necessity, although not all senses of "of necessity" have bearing here. We really mean "cannot not exist," in this sense. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I don’t quite understand how your comment relates to the sentence you quoted me from. All I’m saying is that any proof of the impossibility of absolute nothingness presupposes there is something, and would thus be of no consequence to a state of nothingness. Therefore, if there ever was a state of absolute nothingness, something would not arise by virtue of these proofs (since those proofs would be invalid and more damningly, inexistent). So, these attempted proofs do not prove something like “that’s why absolute nothingness necessarily could not have been”. This fact is something you ask about later in your comment, actually, so I will touch on it there.
There is a strong tradition of seeing the world as "blown into being by contradiction," by "the principle of explosion." — Count Timothy von Icarus
I don’t believe in
ex falso because if there ever was a contradiction, the disjunctive syllogism would not be valid.
But is proving that nothing necessarily doesn't exist the same thing as proving the necessity of existence? — Count Timothy von Icarus
No. Such a proof is itself something. So, you are just saying, “because of [something], nothing is impossible”. If nothing truly were, the proof would not be; the logical/metaphysical problems of absolutely nothing would be non-existent. See my reply to Corvus.