Okay, agreed.
Could we say that these two statements are the same?
"Nothing is the absence of anything."
"Nothing is the absence of everything."

And if not, what is the distinction? — Lif3r

Anything states one thing, therefore the statement implies that there are or might be others.

With everything there is no room to doubt.

Nice!

Nothingness is the dual concept of everything (or would it be "everythingness"?) "Everything" would be the mereological sum of all objects. So nothingness is the mereological sum of no objects.

I suspect if you get down to it nothingness I probably a contradictory concept.

"Universal nothingness" is pretty uninteresting as it is a pertinent lie. And consequently, its complement of "incidental somethingness" (there is something somewhere, some time) is true. Descartes "cogito, ergo sum" covers about the same point by stating that the something "I" exists.

Therefore it is more realistic to look at "nothing(-ness)" in terms of the specific context and attribute it is used for. For instance:

Mum: "The porselain is broken. What did you do, Jacob?" Jacob: "I did nothing, Mum!"

Clearly, this neeeds a little editing before feeding it to the household robot to decide upon proper punishment for Jacob. like: Mum: "During the time I was shopping this afternoon, the porselain in the kitchen was broken. Did you do do anything which caused that porselain to be broken, Jacob?" Jacob: "I did zero things to cause the broken state of the kitchen porselain this afternoon, Mum!".

This example shows that "nothing" is often convertible to "zero" when using a different phrasing. One might try to debate the usefulness of the concept of "nothingness" but no one will deny the perks of having the "zero". Lacking it kept Roman calculus backward for centuries.

Math makes perfect use of nothingness by means of the "empty set" - a set which contains nothing - for the construction of number-objects in ZFC Set-Theory, probably the most important theory in all of mathematics. All sets based on natural numbers are derived from the empty set. It tells us that "nothing" in itself may not be much but "nothing in a container" can be a great tool. Another example is the assocation of "nothing" with "non-separation" in number theory. What's between 5 and 10? Well, 6 and 7 and ... But what is between 5 and 6? Pecisely, nothing! Tells you these natural numbers are contiguous, a non-existent property for most other number types.

This is mistaken. For one, "nothingness" has to do with mereology, not set theory. Set theory and mereology are not the same, and use entirely different formal systems. So for example, all the parts of a thing, when taken together (fusion or sum), gives you the thing itself. But that's not true in set theory. So if we have a set whose only member is "x" we get the singleton of the set as {x}, we do not get "x" itself.

Similarly, zero is not the same thing as nothingness. As a first issue, zero has properties while nothingness is standardly thought of as falling outside of the possibility of having properties. What you are describing sounds like emptiness, not nothingness. Also, you initially confused "nothing" as in the quantifier with "nothing" as in the noun phrase "nothingness". "Every" and "no" words can be nouns, they're not just quantifiers.

You may very well be right here as my knowledge of mereology is minimal. From the title of the thread and its opening post I had not deduced we were dealing with a specialized subject and treated it with the looseness commonly associated with human language.

Note that I was aware that zero is not the same as nothing or nothingness. I tried to show that many sentences with the word "nothing" can be easily converted to similar sentences with the word "zero" with the same meaning. That the sentence as a whole has the same meaning does not imply that "zero" and "nothing" have the same meaning but it could imply that the understanding of one can be derived - via a detour - from the understanding of the other.

My view on the emptyness is that - because it refers to an entity which must be empty - it is equivalent to a container with a nothingness (property). For its lack of property the nothingness itself cannot be tied to the container, but there exists no reason why the container would have no information on its emptyness.

I see your points about nouns and quantifiers.

Nothingness is the dual concept of everything (or would it be "everythingness"?) "Everything" would be the mereological sum of all objects. So nothingness is the mereological sum of no objects.

I suspect if you get down to it nothingness I probably a contradictory concept.



This is true if nothingness and everythingness always apply to unrestricted object and property categories/domains. However, in practical cases a property filter is applied before nothingness is declared, e.g.:

A physical object commonly has a color but occasionally not because it is transparent. Its color then is described as "no-color" or "nothing". Its color attribute becomes a nothingness, another way of stating that this particular object has no color attribute. The color-domain restriction assures that the other mereological attributes - especially the objectness of the object - need not be erased.

Is this a valid mereological argument?

it's of course true that "Everything" and "nothing" are in the majority of cases bounded when they're used as quantifiers, and sometimes as zero for the latter. So if I say "I put everything in the fridge" I'm obviously not saying I put the Sun in the fridge, but contextually some relevant set of things.

But notice we don't always use them this way. So take this:

"When you die, every experience ceases."

This quantifier is unbounded, I'm clearly not limiting it's scope to only a subset of experiences. So we do not always use the quantifier "every" and "no" words within a bound. However, you may be making a potential mistake. "Nothing" and "everything" are not always quantifiers, they can be nouns such as with:

"I was in the middle of everything."

I'm certainly not saying that "For all x, I was in the middle of x" because, obviously, I can't be in the middle of every individual thing in that hypothetical scenario. Rather, I'm taking all the objects there as a whole and saying I was in the middle of that. This can be done with "no" words too:

"God created the world out of nothing."

This definitely wouldn't be translated as "For no x, God created it out of x" because that would be true if God didn't create anything at all. People who believe that intend it to mean something like "There was nothing at all and then *bam* God created it without prior stuff." I wouldn't say that transparent things have a color of "nothingness", they just have no color (nothingness is the absence of anything at all).

Great sentences! No discussion can flourish without good examples and metaphores though they make easier targets for criticism than dull theory. Or may be precisely because of that!

So far it seems to me that defining the "nothing" and "everything" quantifiers in a meaningful manner is considerable easier than performing that feat for "nothingness". Of course, we can generate the standard expansion for "-nesses" and define nothingness as "the quality of being nothing" but that is where trouble begins. One needs something to have that quality and a something which is nothing appears a trivial contradiction (as MindForged suggested). Unless of course, the something is a nothing itself - as a thing (noun). A nothing possesses the quality of being nothing and therefore possesses nothingness. That's not a genuine property but a description of the fixed relationship.of these concepts.

The point I try to make here is that, in order to access nothingness without contradiction one needs a nothing, not as a quantifier but as an object. I am not sure meaningful examples of a nothing object exist but if they do, and they are not unbounded, they also provide a peek at bounded mental manifestations of nothingness. Wonder what that looks like.

Not that any of this promises individual significance for the nothingnesses. They are only addressable through nothing objects and that is probably where the buck stops wih regard to any functional uses.