Let's ignore language or communicating with others. Do you think it's possible for an existent to perceive 'nothing?' internally? — universeness

Or if there was a book on the desk this morning. You saw it there lying on the desk. But when you saw the desk when you returned home from the town after few hours of errands, it has gone. There is nothing on the desk....................At that moment, in your mind, you have the feeling or perception of "absolute nothingness" about the existence of the book. — Corvus

A book at one moment in time can only exist in one location. For example, in the morning, it exists on the desk. But in order for it to exist on the desk, it cannot exist anywhere other than on the desk, for example, under the desk or ten metres to the right of the desk.

As I perceive the book existing on the desk, at the same time, I also perceive the book as not existing under the desk.

Generalising, to be able to perceive something somewhere, I must be able to perceive nothing somewhere else.

As I perceive the book existing on the desk, at the same time, I also perceive the book as not existing under the desk.

Generalising, to be able to perceive something somewhere, I must be able to perceive nothing somewhere else. — RussellA

No the difference here, is that the book could exist under the desk via change. I exist, when I die, I no longer exist, but all the sub-atomic quanta that was part of me, persists, but becomes separated.

Even at the point of the complete heat death of the universe, some unknown 'energy form' will persist, as will dimensional extent. But the universe will contain no objects, not even black holes. According to CCC and its 'hawking points,' as identified in this aeon cycle. Those conditions result in no further ticking of time, as no movement occurs and energy can no longer do work. That is the moment suggested as 'size/extent no longer having any meaning,' (the moment of singularity) and a new Big Bang cycle happens. At least that is my probably quite poor understanding of CCC, as posited by Roger Penrose and his team. At no point did a state of 'nothingness' exist.

Why is there something rather than nothing? — Ø implies everything

Mainly because you wouldn't be able to talk about nothing if there weren'r something.
I think that in a way this is what the title of your topic says too.

one must contemplate absolute nothingness — Ø implies everything

I don't remember having ever heard talking about "absolute" nothingness. When we say "nothingness" it's simply nothingness. As you say, nothingness is absence of everyting. That's all there is to it.

This "concept" is often deemed oxymoronic. For something to exist/be true, it must be a thing. If absolute nothingness is a thing, it would entail its own non-existence — Ø implies everything

Of course. But "absolute nothingness" is mainly a pleonasm, it is redundant, as I explained above.

I can't see what can one say more about this subject. And I think that it has been already said too much.
I'm afraid that you are just repeating yourself. Just the title of your topic --without word "absolute"-- says it all. :smile:

A book at one moment in time can only exist in one location. For example, in the morning, it exists on the desk. But in order for it to exist on the desk, it cannot exist anywhere other than on the desk, for example, under the desk or ten metres to the right of the desk.

As I perceive the book existing on the desk, at the same time, I also perceive the book as not existing under the desk.

Generalising, to be able to perceive something somewhere, I must be able to perceive nothing somewhere else. — RussellA

You can perceive the essence of the Absolute Nothingness via Husserl's phenomenological method called Bracketing, which is to bracket the distracting details of the perception such as the book, existence, the table ...etc, and just concentrating on the subjective experience of Absolute Nothingness - i.e. {the non-existence} of the book at that moment of your perception.

But the universe will contain no objects, — universeness

As a Nominalist, rather than a Platonic Realist, that's my present understanding of the universe today, in that there are no such things as objects in the world outside the mind. What we perceive as a book only exists in the mind. What exists in the world outside the mind are elementary particles and elementary forces existing in time and space.

The phrase "absolute nothingness" can't refer to anything (including constraints), right?
A contradiction could be ontologizing/reifying "absolute nothingness"?

If you would change it up so you're saying we wouldn't be able to conceive of the void without contrasting it to something, then I'd agree. Everything appears to the mind against a backdrop of its negation. But here we aren't doing ontology exactly. We're just talking about what we observe about how the mind works.

You can perceive the essence of the Absolute Nothingness via Husserl's phenomenological method called Bracketing, which is to bracket the distracting details of the perception such as the book, existence, the table ...etc, and just concentrating on the subjective experience of Absolute Nothingness - i.e. {the non-existence} of the book at that moment of your perception. — Corvus

There seems to be a family resemblance between Bracketing and Nominalism.

Wikipedia - Bracketing (Phenomenolgy)
The preliminary step in the philosophical movement of phenomenology is describing an act of suspending judgment about the natural world to instead focus on analysis of experience.

Wikipedia - Nominalism
In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels.

All you've succeeded in doing is making the grammatical point that if there is something then there is not nothing. — Banno

You're almost right. All I've succeeded in doing is reducing this supposed answer to why is there something to the grammatical point you're mentioning. That is, your critique is highlighting the very same issue I am trying to highlight. If the impossibility of nothingness is entailed by the fact that there is something, then the argument "nothingness is impossible, thus something must exist" can be expanded into "something exists, thus nothingness is impossible, thus something must exist", and this of course leaves the first proposition unexplained. The first proposition is provably true, but it is nonetheless bereft of explanation.

The absolute is added in order to separate it from other, weaker conceptions of nothing, like the nothing of a vacuous void, for example.

It is contradictory to reify absolute nothingness, but it is of no consequence. All issues of absolute nothingness exist only because there is something; if there was nothing, there'd be no issues (literally).

But here we aren't doing ontology exactly. We're just talking about what we observe about how the mind works. — frank

Well, absolute nothingness is not just a mental negation of something, it is actually the negation of something. That's what it is defined as, and any would-be referent would correspond to that definition.

Well, absolute nothingness is not just a mental negation of something, it is actually the negation of something. That's what it is defined as, and any would-be referent would correspond to that definition. — Ø implies everything

Negation is a logical operation. The void is no-thing, so we understand the void as the negative or opposite of things. When we say "things" here, we specifically mean existing things, such as objects that take up space and exist for a certain amount of time.

So when Einstein places moving objects in a void, we now have space and time in the void by virtue of having moving objects in it. The ancient Greeks would have been gravely troubled by this talk of voids and placing things in them. But we have the number zero, so we're accustomed to talking about absence or vacancy. We think of it as a cubby hole of some sort, where there's nothing in the cubby.

I think if you're interested in this topic, you'd probably love a history of the number zero. It's fascinating stuff if you haven't already read about it.

The void is no-thing, so we understand the void as the negative or opposite of things. — frank

A void where you could place something into is not absolute nothingness, given that the action of placing something into it implies there was the potential for that action in the void. Thus, there was something, though not something physical (whatever physical means).

Absolute nothingness is not understood as the negation of something; it is the negation of something. Your claim is akin to saying "a square is understood as a shape of four connected and equally long sides", which is an understatement: that is what a square is! To say anything else would be to ascribe a referent to square that is not (fully) describable by the definition of a square, which would thus make the definition not a definition.

This kind of thinking comes from a confusion of descriptions and definitions. If one's perception is one's mode of referral, one would be referencing a referent with no definition. If one were to describe this referent, then one could be wrong; the referent is not referred to by one's description, but by one's perception; which one's description merely tries to symbolize through symbols that refer to other things. Thus, when describing percepts, one is comparing referents, and one could do this comparison incorrectly; one could misrepresent one's perception(s).

If however, conception is one's mode of referral, then there is no room for error. What would my conception be incorrect relative to? Itself? That would be nonsense. I could however subsequently describe the referent of the definition, and in this subsequent step, I could be wrong. If I decide to merge the incorrect descriptions with the definition, then I would have a new definition. The question is merely what I declare to be definition or not; the definition is me specifying the referent, not describing it, and thus I cannot go wrong.

So, the "referent" I am specifying is precisely the negation of something/everything. That is not my understanding/description of it; it IS it. Though it doesn't exist of course.

I was offering support for your position. — jgill

I don't see how. You seemed to offer a counter-example to my claim that absolute nothingness is impossible. — Ø implies everything

If someone were to say, "Well, empty space has nothing in it", I would say, "But it is inundated with various fields".

There seems to be a family resemblance between Bracketing and Nominalism. — RussellA

An interesting point ! :up:

Mind can also perceive the process of changes and temporality of objects in the external world.  When an object changes from existence to non-existence (the book on the table),  the property of the object changes from extension to non-extension.  The property of extension to non-extension of material objects can be perceived as Absolute nothingness.

All existence is either absolute existing or absolute non-existing. There is no in-between or half existence.

Speaking of ‘committing texts to the flames’:

(The philosopher Christian) Wolff became known throughout Europe as a martyr of reason and the Enlightenment, thereby only increasing his fame. The Crown Prince of Prussia, Friedrich II (later Frederick the Great), commissioned a French translation of Wolff’s so-called ‘German Metaphysics’ in 1736, and rumour has it that he read it so often that his pet monkey Mimi threw it into the fire out of jealousy. — The Great, Forgotten Wolff

Perhaps she was a kindred spirit of Hume’s :-)

When an object changes from existence to non-existence (the book on the table),  the property of the object changes from extension to non-extension. — Corvus

On the desk is a book. One could say that the book exists because the atoms that make it up exist in different locations, for example, atom A and atom B. One could also say that the desk exists because the atoms that make it up exist in different locations, for example, atom C and atom D.

The mind connects atom A and atom B as being part of the object book, and also connects atom C and atom D as being part of the object desk. Therefore, these objects, the book and the desk, exist in the mind.

But outside the mind, what connects atom A to atom B but not to atom C?

If there is nothing outside the mind that preferentially connects atom A to any other particular atom, then objects as we know them don't exist outside the mind.

Outside our minds, atoms exist but not objects (treating the "atom" as a figure of speech for something that does physically exist)

Objects as a concept in the mind don't exist outside the mind, meaning that we can perceive something as existing in the world that in fact doesn't exist in the world.

IE, we perceive something where in fact there is nothing.

Perhaps she was a kindred spirit of Hume’s — Wayfarer

Maybe the monkey was a secret agent sent out to the Crown Prince by Hume?
Perhaps that would be the reason why it is so difficult to get hold of any of Wolff's books even today :( :)

IE, we perceive something where in fact there is nothing. — RussellA

What would be the "something" that you perceive?

He was torpedoed by Kant, although that article doesn’t really seem to capture that.

I have a book called Metaphysics by Baumgarten, which Kant had studied. But I could not find any books by Wolf in English. There are some Wolf books available in German, but no one really seemed have translated Wolf's original works into English. Supposedly Wolf was a giant in Metaphysics at the time too. Wolf must have affected greatly the Kant's system, but probably in opposition way?

Wolf must have affected greatly the Kant's system, but probably in opposition way? — Corvus

My knowledge of him is extremely scanty, but I know Kant depicted him as a dogmatist, and I get the sense of what he means by that. That article I linked to said he started his career wanting to demonstrate theology with mathematical precision, which doesn't seem promising. My knowledge of Kant isn't that great either, but I think at least I get the point of his 'Copernican revolution in philosophy'. Anyway this isn't a Kant thread so let's not pursue that line of conversation.

:cool: :ok:

This is related to the reasoning that led Parmenides to deny to reality of change (and for Russell to do something similar millennia later).

Parmenides argued against Heraclitus that, far from everything being flux, change is not possible at all: in order for A to change into B, A would have to disappear into nothingness and B emerge out of nothingness. Nothingness does not exist, so change does not exist. The nothingness that Parmenides was denying perhaps has a contemporary parallel in the notion of the nothingness outside of the universe (vacuum is not nothingness in this sense). It is not clear that such a notion makes any sense, and this was roughly the Parmenidean point. Furthermore, for the ancient Greeks, to think about something or to refer to something was akin to pointing to it, and it is not possible to point at nothing. For a modern parallel to this, consider the difficulties that Russell or Fodor (and many others) have had accounting for representing nothing or something that is false

I think Hegel has an elegant solution here. We're here, so there is something. We have to start with that. So we try to strip that something down, to empty of it of all its contents and so arrive at a bare being in order to investigate what traits, if any, "something" must have. This is sheer immediacy, sheer being.

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.

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.

A better description of this can be found here: https://phil880.colinmclear.net/materials/readings/houlgate-being-commentary.pdf

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.

Also I would quibble with this:

Absolute nothingness is most definitely impossible, but that is of no consequence. You see, absolute nothingness is only impossible if there is something to begin with.

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.

There is a strong tradition of seeing the world as "blown into being by contradiction," by "the principle of explosion." If we start with absolutely basic necessary entities, say just sheer being, then we might still end up kicking off a cascade from there as contradictions are forced into progressive resolution. And in this way the universe would exist, but not really as a "brute fact," but rather of a sort of "logical" necessity, even though the starting point for the analysis is quite similar to the one that forces us to conclude it is a brute fact. It sort of hinges on necessity.

Could we say that, because there is now something, it is clear that nothing, by necessity cannot exist? Maybe. It seems no matter how broad you want to define existence, our very presence precludes that a "nothing from which nothing comes" could ever have been. This is for the trivial reason that there is something, and if there was only a "nothing from which nothing comes" there couldn't be a something. And so, from the basics of Augustine or Descartes' versions of the "cognito" we might be able to preclude the "nothing from which nothing comes," by necessity.

But is proving that nothing necessarily doesn't exist the same thing as proving the necessity of existence? Tricky. Perhaps we only prove the necessity of a bare something, sheer being. But then, according to Hegel, this is all we need to kick off the rest.

Of course. But "absolute nothingness" is mainly a pleonasm, it is redundant, as I explained above.

I see the value in it. We can distinguish "absolute nothing," from the "nothing" we find when we look for something in a bag and there is "nothing there," or when there is "nothing in my bank account." Then we also have the physical idea of vacuum to distinguish a philosophical "absence of everything," from.

There is also the internal "nothing," of life's lack of meaning or purpose. Or the "nothing" that underlies all values supposed in some philosophies.

As a Nominalist, rather than a Platonic Realist, that's my present understanding of the universe today, in that there are no such things as objects in the world outside the mind. What we perceive as a book only exists in the mind. What exists in the world outside the mind are elementary particles and elementary forces existing in time and space.

Aren't "elementary particles" objects? And wouldn't time and space be an object if it acts like a receptacle/container?

And if mind emerges from nature, from whence the objects of perception? The mind might "generate," perception to some degree, our "perceptual equipment," has a causal history, right? So what in the objectless world causes objects?

I agree with the denial of objects as fundemental, and the conception of Platonic forms as existing as some sort of super essential substance in their own realm, but it seems to me that forms have causal efficacy and that objects exist in the world, even if they are temporary, merely stabilities in a larger process. I don't even know if Plato really thought of his forms in the way they have come to be thought of. The way in which they are "higher," doesn't seem to track with our modern, substance dualism laced vision of Platonism. They are arguably merely higher by being more self-determining. They are "what they are because of what they are," in a way rocks and dogs are not.

I was referring to this:

What about the interior of the empty set? — jgill

I thought this was meant as a counter-example, but given what you're saying, I see now you were probably refuting it as an example.

"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. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I completely agree.

Which would seem to entail for you that "absolute nothingness is [not] most definitely possible," if anything exists of necessity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No. Nothing is impossible because something happens to exist, regardless of if it had to or not.

But is proving that nothing necessarily doesn't exist the same thing as proving the necessity of existence? Tricky. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Proving that nothing necessarily does not exist has to assume the existence of something, because this proof requires something to be valid. This is what I am getting at when I'm saying that all the problems of nothingness arise only because there is something; and this is obviously true; whatever produces the problems is a subset of everything, and thus do not exist if there is absolutely nothing.

Perhaps we only prove the necessity of a bare something, sheer being. But then, according to Hegel, this is all we need to kick off the rest. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree with Hegel here.

What about the interior of the empty set? — jgill

I thought this was meant as a counter-example — Ø implies everything

I was just tossing it out to get your opinion. Sorry for the confusion.

Sorry for the confusion. — jgill

No worries; it takes two for confusion :)

But outside the mind, what connects atom A to atom B but not to atom C?

If there is nothing outside the mind that preferentially connects atom A to any other particular atom, then objects as we know them don't exist outside the mind.

Outside our minds, atoms exist but not objects (treating the "atom" as a figure of speech for something that does physically exist) — RussellA

Mereological nihilism? I've been meaning to look into it if you could recommend any books or resources.

I think my argument can be simplified to this:

Absolute nothingness is impossible, but it would not be impossible if it were not for the existence of something. — Ø implies everything

I feel part of the statement in the argument seems unclear.

"Absolute nothingness is impossible to x"?
x= exist, imagine, conceive, eat, see, smell, hear, manufacture, discard ... etc?

Can x in your simplified argument be specified and clarified?

if it were not for the existence of something. — Ø implies everything

What does "something" denote or indicate?