Is nothing one or many? Can there be several nothings? — Gregory

I assume you are asking if there are multiple instances of nothing. Well, there are multiple instances of specific nothingness, like the nothingness of a book on my bed right now, or like the nothingness of a non-zero balance in my bank account, for example. These are absences in a larger environment of presence (like the presence of my crushing debt). Absolute nothingness is the absence of everything, “in an environment” of only absence.

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

This canvas of nothing sounds a little like something. I don’t think you can unify being and non-being, but I would like to hear more about this idea.

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.

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

I don't quite get your argument, but what you wrote in the quote is wrong. Absolute nothingness is oxymoronic because of the existence of something. Remove everything, and suddenly absolute nothingness is no longer oxymoronic, because absolute nothingness is nothing. There must be something to give absolute nothingness its oxyomoronic character. Furthermore, any proof of why absolute nothingness is impossible, must have content; thus, the proof is already presupposing the existence of the negation of what it is trying to prove could never be. It is just begging the question.

So, it is time I formalized all of this.
___________________________________________________________________________________

A thing is something that can be referred to, by whatever means, be they perceptual, emotive or conceptual. A conceptual reference is defining something. Therefore, the state that is absolute nothingness is a thing, by virtue of being referred to by its definition. Its definition is formalized further down.

$E$ is the set of all propositions true for some corresponding state; a complete description of that state. If a proposition $P$ is true in $E$, we have that $[P] \in E$.

$A$ is the set corresponding to the state of absolute nothingness. The definition of $A$ is as follows: $A = \varnothing$. That means for all propositions $P$, we have that $P \notin A$.

Contradiction:

$\biggr( A = \varnothing \biggr) \land \biggr( [A = \varnothing] \in A \biggr)$

So, done deal? We have proved why something must exist, right? Well, look above you; what do you see? Something. Let's denote that something as $C$; that is, $C$ denotes the proposition above.

Now, we know that $C$ is true, by virtue of simple logic. However, if $A$ truly was instantiated... Well:

$C \notin A$

Now, the irony of absolute nothingness is that what you see above is itself a proposition that would not be present in $A$, along with all other propositions. Reasoning with absolute nothingness will get you nothing! Which is why trying to prove there necessarily had to be something by virtue of the impossibility of absolute nothingness is wrongfully assuming that the impossibility of absolute nothingness would stop it from being the case. If $A$ was the case, it would not have an oxymoronic identity, because it would not have anything, do anything or be anything.

Okay, my vacation from this thread has lasted long enough. Time to dive in. Takes a slurp of nothing. (Just kidding, I'm drinking Pepsi Max, and will defend this choice of beverage over any other with passion)

I see, thanks.

That isn't to say applying stoicism in some areas of your life is bad, but Nietzsche always believed in maintaining the complimentary opposite of such a method, also, so that both drives could build a tension within a person to overcome and reconcile and bridge these differences. — Vaskane

Am I correct in describing this as an Hegelian thesis-antithesis synthesis happening within a single individual, and also happening partly in the emotional domain?

Yes, and also just a failure to execute a goal. I have issues with people lauding Nynorsk as something it never was, and even less is today (since the dialects it was based on have developed faster than Nynorsk can keep up with).

I find praise of Nynorsk to be naïve and ignorant.

In other words the exclusion only becomes significant in relation to an attitude of dialectical pride, and, the exclusion is significant to you — Metaphysician Undercover

I see your point, but it is not the mechanism behind my dislike for Nynorsk. The exclusion of the Northern dialects is significant because it is an instance of ethnolinguistic discrimination. It is significant because it is a message; "you people are not my people, you people do not belong here, you people are not worthy of representation, etc."

It's not about the dialects, it's about the people that speak them.

The main reason you gave for dislike of Nynorsk was the way that the author treated certain dialects. — Metaphysician Undercover

Are you referring to Fosse when you say author, or Ivar Aasen? If the former, then you need to re-read the conversation. If the latter, then your argument falls apart given the fact that I do not speak one of the dialects excluded by Ivar Aasen. In fact, the dialect is speak is one of the dialects best represented by Nynorsk, an epitomic example being ikkje, meaning not; which is written in Nynorsk exactly as how my dialect pronounces it.

Imagine if every individual insisted "I will only use my language" and each time two people met there was a lot of resistance toward compromise. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is indeed a factor in Norway; dialectical pride, that is. We are often told to hang onto our dialect when we move. Personally, I have not done too good of a job with that, especially when I have moved to places with an easier dialect (if the brain can reduce computational complexity, it often will).

So, I do not think your description fits me too well, nor most people of my generation. I do have some dialectical pride, as I think my dialect is beautiful, but I am not so proud that I'll actively resist myself going over to another dialect.

The attitudes towards Nynorsk and Bokmål are quite separate from this, however. Nynorsk/bokmål are not competing with the dialects; the Norwegian dialects have no standardizes written form, and Nynorsk and Bokmål have no standardized spoken form. Nynorsk is the language that fits my dialect the best, so if dialectical pride played a part, I would prefer Nynorsk. Yet, I prefer Bokmål, because at least its construction was not as stupid as that of Nynorsk.

Me too, and I usually felt alone because I never found a person of my age (I am of the millennial generation) thinking in a way like I do... And, people tended to isolate me obviously, because we are young and there is no time to think about this! Since I read Mishima, I have seen suicide as an idealised-beautiful ending. Furthermore, Fosse helps me to see it even clearer. — javi2541997

It's a shame you don't have people you can talk to about this IRL.

I think no activity is above scrutiny, including that of being alive. How can we scrutinize it without considering the alternative, to the degree we can? I find that thinking about death makes life better, it makes me live it more fully. I take healthy but scary risks most wouldn't simply because I don't take it for granted that life is inherently worth living. Maybe it is, but I am not so sure. So, I make sure to make life worth living, even if that means risking it. This is of course not promoting reckless actions, because we don't have a right to risk other's lives, nor are there that many things worth risking one's life for.

The more I hear about Fosse, the more interested I am in reading his stuff.

As for your question about how Norwegians look at suicide; I have some trouble answering, since it is a relative matter. I don't know how taboo it is in Norway compared to the rest of the world, but it definitely isn't so taboo that people won't casually mention that a person that happens to be discussed killed themselves. Coincidentally, this happened a few hours actually. The conversation happened to include a random person my grandparents knew, and they mentioned that he killed himself. Now, when I say casually, I don't mean that people talk about it flippantly in cases regarding actual suicides. When actual suicides are mentioned, they are mentioned in either a serious or neutral tone.

But suicide in general is topic often joked about with younger people in Norway (millenials & Gen Z), but I reckon this more flippant attitude to the topic is generally more prevalent with younger people around the world, not just in Norway.

As for romanticizing or legitimizing suicide, I would wager that Norway does it more than e.g. the U.S. First of all, Norway is quite secular, so that's a factor demonizing/stimgatizing suicide almost entirely removed. Beyond that however, I base this observation on my personal experience versus what I've seen in American media. I have for example mentioned to my family that if certain illnesses were to befall me, I would just kill myself or get euthanasia if possible (which is not legal in Norway currently I believe). My family and friends have never reacted with shock to this, and if anything seem to respect it, though perhaps not to think it a superior choice.

Lastly, I'd like to mention that there seems to be a general empathy/understanding of people who have comitted suicide among Norwegians. Maybe I am just projecting, but when the topic comes up, it seems like people have a face of "too bad they couldn't resist", or something like that. Personally, I have some suicidal ideations (though no suicidal thoughts), and as a result, I don't find cases of suicide (regardless of how well the person seemed to be) shocking. I know how fundamentally disappointing reality can be, regardless of how good things are on paper; this attitude is something I feel is shared amongst Norwegians to some degree, but I have no idea if I am just projecting or not.

Yes, but also perhaps due to a diversity in the ethno-lingustic origins of the UK people. Gaelic, Brittonic, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Latin and French influences makes for quite some dialectical diversity, I would think.

Both rejection and detachment, yes, which is not abnormal for Norwegians regarding Nynorsk, especially not those my age.

I reject Nynorsk because of its failure to do what it was supposed to do, and I am detached from the goal simply because I do not believe it achievable. Norwegian dialects are so diverse that any language that tries to capture it will just be pulled apart by opposing forces, winding up as a language of no-one.

I wonder if the dialects of Norway are more diverse than the dialects of the average country. Norway is a large country, and with a geography that tends to isolate communities. Therefore, I think there's a greater diversity of dialects in Norway than in most countries. In any case, the degree of dialectical diversity is why a programme like Nynorsk is doomed from the get-go.

I wonder how the silent language is understood, used and commonly established in the truly Norwegian language or Danish-influenced Bokmål. We were discussing this because it is interesting how Fosse distinguishes silence and pauses. — javi2541997

I am indeed Norwegian, but I don't quite understand your question. I think I'm lacking the context surrounding the meaning behind the silent language. I haven't heard Fosse's speech, but I am contemplating watching it.

We should be clear on the context: Norwegians have mainly written in Bokmål, and Fosse is a pioneer in writing instead in Nynorsk, a largely spoken, and a minority-use, language. So what he has done is to make his version of a vernacular language into a literary language. — mcdoodle

Nynorsk is not a spoken language. It is purely a written language; and I don't mean that practically; there is no standard, official way to pronounce Nynorsk words (the same is true for Bokmål). I am not too familiar with Fosse's work, but I don't think he writes with a vernacular language, and if he does, then he does not write Nynorsk.

That said, the creation of Nynorsk was meant to capture different Norwegian dialects, so as to create a truly Norwegian language, as opposed to the Danish-influenced Bokmål. So in that sense, what you write is kind of true. However, Ivar Aasen, in his quest to create a quintessentially Norwegian language, ignored the northern dialects due to their Sami influence. Given that the Sami people have been in Norway just as long as their Germanic counterparts, the Sami people, and northern Norwegians, are most definitely Norwegian. Therefore, Nynorsk is not really the written form of a true amalgamation of Norwegian speech, instead, it is just the vision of some racist cunt that made every Norwegian kid's schooling doubly shitty. But, it sure does look pretty!

How do you define (dis)order? The capacity for intentional change? There aren't too many definitions of order and disorder that generally confer with negentropy and entropy.

It is both surprising and very disappointing to me to see how people, esp. in a place like this, can pass by these things without noticing them or commenting on them ... — Alkis Piskas

Some people have better things to do than to quibble about what phrases are the best when the meaning is clear. Also, if you have any experience with discourse on the topic of nothingness, you know that a lot of people do not realize what degree of nothingness is being discussed. Some talk about empty space, some talk about the absence of all physical things, yet the presence of immaterial things, like logical laws. All of these notions are examples of relative nothingness; that is, nothingness in relation to something specific; something is missing, but not everything. Absolute nothingness then refers to the absence of everything.

If you disagree that the qualification of absolute is helpful, then that's fine. But do you/we not have more important things to talk about? I'm sure there are others who felt the qualification was unhelpful but didn't care enough to comment, given they had more substantive things to comment on. This is not submitted under the Philosophy of Language category, after all.

My post deliberately avoids taking a stance on whether or not absolute nothingness is a thing.

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?

No. Proving absolute nothingness cannot exist does not entail something exists. Something and nothing can not exist at the same time, and any contradiction you may believe exists in that would not exist if everything did not exist.

A proof must have content; it must assume the existence of something. When considering the inexistence of everything, one cannot disprove it, because that would be assuming the existence of something, meaning one is assuming the falsity of what one is trying to disprove to begin with; that is, one is just begging the question.

So long as there is something, absolute nothingness as a concept is like a four-sided triangle. If there had been absolutely nothing however, absolute nothingness would be like

The real question is if it is possible to super-size your nothing burger. — GRWelsh

Maybe, but I wouldn't want to. Too many empty calories.

I was waiting for when my undefined use of thing would come bite me in the ass.

By thing, I mean anything that could exist, be it a process or a concept or whatever. So, if absolute nothingness is a thing, then it would mean it could exist, which would make it self-contradictory. It cannot exist, because its existence would imply its non-existence. Thus, absolute nothingness is impossible.

But its impossibility, is as I argued for, not important. If absolute nothingness was in fact the case, then it would not be a thing, and any paradoxes regarding that would also not be a thing.

I tried to analyse the statement further with logical reasoning, and the conclusion I got is, it is neither true nor false. Therefore it is not a valid proposition. — Corvus

Could you elaborate with a formal proof? If you want, I can try to formalize my proof as well.

What does "something" denote or indicate? — Corvus

Anything that is not nothing.

Sorry for the confusion. — jgill

No worries; it takes two for confusion :)

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

"Absolute nothingness is impossible from any perspective." We could all nod and move on. — unenlightened

I am not claiming absolute nothingness is possible from its own perspective; only that it is not impossible. It is not possible either. It isn't anything, nor is anything else. That's the problem. Our arguments for why there must be something presuppose there is something. Now, there happens to be something, so therefore there must be something. But that still leaves the question unanswered.

I might agree. True absolute nothingness, that is, absolute nothingness without anything to give it meaning, "is" an empty concept. That is, true absolute nothingness denotes nothing, for there is nothing to denote, nor is there any denotation either.

Absolute nothing with something to give it meaning is, instead, an oxymoron. It is not an empty concept, but it is an illogical one.

How so?

To be clear, I am not arguing that its possible no thing exists. The argument only shows why the current impossibility of absolute nothingness does not single-handedly explain why there is something. The reason is that absolute nothingness is only impossible during the existence of something, so the question of why there is something to begin with remains.

That said, the impossibility of absolute nothingness is still helpful. You see, absolute nothingness does not hold candidacy for being reality. As said, it is either self-contradictory (whenever something exists to give it thinghood), or it is not self-contradictory (in the event there is no thing), but thus also actually inexistent (and thus not reality). However, the fact that absolute nothingness is not a candidate for reality does not mean there is A candidate for reality; for why must there be a reality at all? Why cannot there be an inexistent non-reality of nothingness?

So, what I have shown is that the impossibility of absolute nothingness does not entail there must be something, but it removes absolute nothingness from the competition. Thus, to explain why there is something, one must merely explain why something is a candidate. Since absolute nothingness is not a candidate, showing that something is a candidate means, by process of elimination, that something must be reality.

It may seem like I am splitting hairs or being a madman, but I believe this is the only way to logically approach the issue.

The empty set (and thus its interior) is a thing, for it has a definition. It is not absolute nothingness.

But physically, there are fields everywhere inundating empty space. — jgill

That is self-contradictory. The space is not empty if there are fields in it. These kinds of retorts seem to rise from a confusion of exactly how absolute the absolute nothingness is. We are talking "about" the inexistence of anything definable and undefinable; the inexistence of absolutely everything.

No one is arguing for absolute skepticism. — Tom Storm

Is anyone arguing this? — Tom Storm

My response was not argumentative, it was a monologue. I was simply explaining my motivation, I was not explaining why anyone was wrong.

I have no idea what any of this means. Sorry. This may well be on me. — Tom Storm

The passage was so non-specific that there is not much meaning to be had, so it is more on me. I believe the passage is meaningful to people who are thinking about the same kinds of things I am currently, as there's a context in which the non-specificity collapses into something quite concrete. If you are not dabbling too much in these topics, then it is only natural that it didn't ring any bells, so have no worries :)

I struggle with these sports of sentences. What does it mean? — Tom Storm

There's a meta-reason for reality. Okay, as for non-meta-reasons for reality; what options are there? There's reason 1, reason 2, etc., and then there is the option of there being no reason.

Now, this last option is true, and if we left it at that, reality would be a brute fact in every sense (and also paradoxical I believe). However, there's more to it. You see, there is a reason for why this last option is true. A reason for a reason, or the lack thereof, is a meta-reason; so, we now have meta-reason for reality. But what is the reason for this? Well, that would be some self-referential reason. I think one could formulate this ultimate self-referential reason in such a way so as to include the meta-reason, though in order to make the full explanation as clear as possible, I think it is prudent to separate them.

Now, that's all very non-specific and might thus be of very little value to you. However, my more concrete ideas are at this point too undeveloped for it to be productive for me to elaborate.

In general, I don't think humans have the capacity to understand reality beyond certain parameters. — Tom Storm

It could be I agree, depending on the exact meaning of your statement. There are parts of reality that must be understandable in order to allow for any certitude, and I believe (because I am optimistic) that certitude regarding non-trivial matters is attainable. Without this certitude, everything of value is lost to the absurdity of absolute skepticism. How can I know something is good for me if I don't even know I exist? Of course, one could make the conscious choice to not give a damn about the technicalities and roll the boulder anyways, and this might be what I have to resort to if my project fails.

People find this aesthetically unattractive and insist on more pleasing stories. I came to this view as a small child and all that I've seen and read has not led me to an alternative narrative. — Tom Storm

I am of the view that there is no "normal" reason for reality, but there is a reason for why there must be no reason. Thus, with this belief, there is a meta-reason for why reality exists. I do not want to spoil anything more, but this gives you the general picture. Is this contrary to your beliefs, or specification of them?

This is entailed by "nothingness is impossible" (i.e. there cannot be not-something), no? — 180 Proof

This inference is only valid if one assumes there is something to begin with, which makes it a circular argument.