Hi y’all-
I know I’m cutting in on this debate kinda late, but it strikes me that the debatees appear to be using (outside of the mathematical references) at least two different meanings for “nothing”.
It’s commonplace usage as a linguistic symbol, where nothing = the lack of SOMEthing and functions as a generic “placeholder”, pointing to something else, i.e. “There were four apples in the basket and I took them out. Now there’s nothing in the basket”. That is, nothing = the lack of four apples (or garage contents or whatever).
2)Nothing as an abstract concept, i.e. nothing = the lack of EVERYthing.
It seems to me (feel free to pounce) that “nothing-as-abstract-concept” doesn’t exist, because if anything exists, nothing can’t.
RE: “then you can do this too, if anything exists everything can’t”…BjOrn, how do you figure?
Everything as abstract concept: “Everything” is the collective totality of all things. “Anything” is non-specific. It refers to something that just IS. In other words, “everything” consists of all of those “anythings”, so if “anything” (even just one “anything”) exists, so must everything.
then nothing must also exist, we have a word for it, we have a symbol for it, and therefore it must be included in everything.
back to square 1.
is nothing included in everything?
can we think of nothing as 0?
or is nothing the opposide of everything that is something?
like a negative side?
you can have 1, does that mean that nothing of 1 is -1?
does that lead to the conclusion that 0 is the absolute everything, and therefore nothing as well?
if you take all the numbers in the world, add, subract, multiply…whatever…them together on one side of a = mark. you get a 0 on the other side of the = mark.
Exactly my point. Certainly, the symbol (in this case, a word) exists, but symbols themselves and what the symbols represent are two different things. The word “chair” exists but I can’t sit in it. And just because a symbol exists doesn’t necessarily mean what the symbol represents exists.
In this discussion, the word “nothing” has been used (sometimes) to represent a concept. Do abstract concepts exist? Dawnbird raised that question and I didn’t have the guts or the free time to pick up THAT particular gauntlet. The main point I was trying to get across is that I think people tend to use
“nothing” (as a handy lingusitic signpost)
“nothing” (to represent a concept)
“nothing” (when, more precisely, they mean zero)
as if they were interchangeable, which gums up the whole inquiry.
By the way, I like your “or is nothing the opposite of everything that is something? like a negative side?”… it makes my brain slide around when I think about it.
yeah, thanks…
come to think of it, it made perfect sense when i wrote it…now i have a headache.
or perhaps it isnt a headache, maybe the it is just something replacing the nothing in my brain, and its just hasnt found a comfortable seat yet?
whatever…i am going to suggest that a shadow is nothing!
shadow is the negative side of yourself, therefore the nothing of you.
Nuttin’ from nuttin’ leaves nuttin’ - ya gotta have sumpin’ - if ya wanna be with me.
This is not difficult. Conceptual everything is the universal set, and the mental impression of nothing is the empty set. Therefore, conceptual nothing is a subset of theoretical everything (which is unfathomable), and the idea of everything could not be a subset of anything, unless conceptual everything just happens to truly be the abstract image of nothing. Dig?
well hello my good buddies, if it werent for you, i would be alone in this dog-forsaken universe (pardon my french oh…great labrador in heaven).
and because this isnt a religious thread im going to say something else.
what might be an interesting thing, is yes…we are talking in thingymagic. which is what everything and nothing is…but something isnt. so the thingymagic of to day would be something like: anything is every something possible, and nothing isnt!
OK, if nothing is the opposite of everything and I don’t have everything, does it necessarily follow that I have nothing?
AHunter…is it even possible to conceive of a totally empty universe? Don’t you have to be present in it mentally to visualize it? As an abstract idea, sure, but I see myself at a place looking out at nothing when I try to conceive it, and therefore don’t have a totally empty universe…I’m in it.
My conclusion is that matter and energy are necessary to have space and time. Without reference to the former, the latter have no meaning.
{{{tossing Cosmos over to AHunter3}}} ball’s in your court!
I agree. The second kind of nothing you mentioned, the “nothing-as-abstract-concept” kind, doesn’t exist, at least not * really*. Rather, it exists * as a concept*. That’s the only existence that abstract concepts have. Abstractions like “the lack of everything” exist abstractly, not literally.
Of course it’s fun and interesting and sometimes even useful to examine the line that divides the real from the conceptual, and like everything else, it’s a matter of interpretation. But I suspect that what divides the real from the abstract is not as distinct as we would like it to be. I think that some things just fall in between somewhere, or rather outside the entire dichotomy, which may, for all we know, be a false one.
Then again, if we use it carefully, language can keep the distinction pretty clear. Nothing*ness * exists, but nothing doesn’t.
One of my favorite professors, while walking with some students across the campus, stopped, grabbed a handful of leaves from overhead, looked at us over her reading glasses, and shook the leaves in our faces. * Stuff,* she said, is * real*, and * words are a damn poor substitute.*
Grad school was kinda fun, but I live in a much more real world now.
I have to admit I stopped reading the whole post, but working with Set Theory we can prove that both nothing is included in everything and nothing is something. In order to do this first we have to create some premises.
The null set is equal to nothing. An element is an entity within a set and is therefore something.
In order to prove that the null set, which is nothing, is included in everything one must utilize the a contradiction proof. If I create set B, and B has the elements within it {x,y,z}. The null set includes {}. As one can simply see the null set includes nothing that is not a part of B. Therefore we are able to place the null set within B. Therefore the null set is part of set B. This can be repeated for the universal set as well.
Since we defined B now as {x,y,z,null set} we now can define the null set as an element of set B. Going back to the original premise that an element is an entity then the null set is an entity and is therefore something.
For more information read the “Naive Set Theory” by Springer-Verlag.
yeah, thanks…