Oh. I wonder if you had general relativity in mind. — Banno
I supose one might argue that the void disappeared when Newton introduced action at a distance. After that the void was never empty. — Banno
On The Electrodynamics Of Moving Bodies? He talks about empty space. No mention of void in this English translation.General relativity is about gravity and acceleration. Special relativity starts with a thought experiment that shows that in a void, with one object stationary and one object moving at a constant speed, there's no fact of the matter about which one is actually stationary and which one is moving. — frank
There was before Newton.There's no void. — frank
Okay, absolute nothingness is either a thing or not. If it is a thing, it is self-contradictory, and thus cannot exist. If it is not a thing, it cannot exist (by my earlier definition). Thus, absolute nothingness cannot exist no matter what. So, something exists, right? — Ø implies everything
That there is something is a necessary condition for speculating about nothingness. — Fooloso4
Could you elaborate with a formal proof? If you want, I can try to formalize my proof as well. — Ø implies everything
Not necessarily, because it depends on how you would conceive of, or define, "something". — Metaphysician Undercover
Do you conceive of, or define "you" and "we" as something? — Fooloso4
When you say you dont consider yourself to BE something "necessarily", are you speaking of anatman? — Gregory
…the Creative nature permits nothing outside itself because outside it nothing can be, yet everything which it has created and creates it contains within itself, but in such a way that it itself is other, because it is superessential, than what it creates within itself..
It follows that we ought not to understand God and the creature as two things distinct from one another, but as one and the same. For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God; and God, by manifesting himself, in a marvelous and ineffable manner creates himself in the creature….
Therefore I conclude that the OP's proposition is invalid and inconsistent, because it denies the possibility of absolute nothingness, then it accepts the possibility of nothingness at the same time. — Corvus
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
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
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
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
There is a strong tradition of seeing the world as "blown into being by contradiction," by "the principle of explosion." — Count Timothy von Icarus
But is proving that nothing necessarily doesn't exist the same thing as proving the necessity of existence? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Is nothing one or many? Can there be several nothings? — Gregory
For Spinoza this ground is one and the concept should accord to one. Being and nothingness have aspects in common such that a painting paint brush has to the canvas; it takes what is potential and makes it something. — Gregory
What there is nothing of is decided by what is absent.
Absolute nothing is a non-starter. — Banno
The basic question: Why is there something rather than nothing?
A relatively uncomplicated answer: Perhaps, because anyone who is able to ask and ponder this question is something. — charles ferraro
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