Two nothings; the absence of anything and the abscense of something that was supposed/expected to be there.
#1 is everything we never imagined, saw, heard, wrote etc.
#2 is the bottle of wine that was supposed to be in the basement on christmas eve but wasn’t and ruined the whole night.
(just to sum it up)
One of the problems in discussing this question is determining whether others are agreeing with you–or not.
I am saying that:
in contrast to those philosophers who see only a verbal-level confusion in this question (and who regard “that which ‘nothing’ names” as being just as legitimate as “that which ‘zero’ names”);
I think the matter is very profound indeed.
I have indicated some senses in which the word “nothing” does name a kind of entity–roughly, the entity that represents for you a “representable absence” (as when the absence of something on a table is represented by a visible “blank spot”).
But is TOTAL absence, utter nonentity, something that the mind can represent? Of course, “to represent” is also an ambiguous term: I WAS able to represent “TOTAL absence, utter nonentity” in the preceding sentence by my use of accepted symbols. Yet (I claim) these symbols, meaningful in themselves, fail to coalesce into one concept, the concept that they PURPORT to represent. They are, as it were, failed attempts at allusion. They are not literally without meaning. But they do not mean what the unanalytical reader might, at first, suppose them to mean.
To hint at one sort of paradox: utter nothingness, if indeed it is UTTER, must have no properties whatever. No truths can adhere to it. It follows that to assert anything about it–including “that it exists”–is to assert falsely. (Even the denial of “its” existence is false, as there is no subject for the ascription to apply to.)
So ultimate nothingness “does not exist” only in the sense that one can say, eg, “sjkjfkerptx is not a truth”. Because sjkjfkerptx is only a random string of letters, not a posited concept of which truth can be asserted.
ERISLOVER, my friend–and people are starting to talk–it depends on what you mean by “mind” (and, of course, “transcendent”).
Under my ideosyncratic terminology, “the mind” is to be identified with “the thinker engaged in thinking,” where “to be engaged” always entails occupying this present moment. (One never “is engaged” in actions assigned to other times.) This is equivalent to The Self. It is, thus, NOT transcendent.
But The Self, the I-Myself, is evidently joined to other Selves that have a special relationship to one another, and that I collectively place under the heading Person. This Self of mine is one of a series of time-slice selves belonging to a certain Person. And just as an indeterminately large number of Selves participate in a certain Person, so some complex of Persons participate in some higher entity, up to “something like” the Deity. Short answer: what is “higher” than the Self IS transcendent of time and space.
I’m honored by your interest.
Which is not to say that I believe in Something, either!
gee isnt no-thing just some-thing that isnt?
Black is the absence of color, doesnt that make it non existant too?
zero is nothing … so is zero also non-existant…
wait … non-existant …that means thats not real either!!
I am totally nonplussed …wait… DOH!!!
the use of a term to denote something that isnt there is no mystery. It just makes it easier to convey they idea. I’m sure it started out as a drunken philosopher joke…
Whasha got der??!
I’s got no thing … sheee?! nada…
snicker yooo gots NOTHING??!! hAHAHAHA!!
Must it be representable in the mind, really? To take a Humean perspective, we can have no conception of infinite divisibility (or a dimensionless point). But, this is not to say we cannot operate with it… that, for example, though we cannot list off all the digits of pi, operating with an infinite series that we call pi is of no consequence.
It would seem to me that, from a process-ontology perspective, or from a universals perspective, nothing is simply the intersection of each process with all others (or each universal with all others), which of course yields… nothing. A fine description, as you note
But this loads the question, for the natural inclination when an allusion is noted is to say, “alludes to what?” and of course “nothing” cannot be the answer… or can it?
Now, as I tried to say, “nothing” is meaningful in a phenomenal context, the absence of an expected set of qualia (for instance). And this should hold true for all contexts we have access to. Now, do we have access to the mutha’ context, the context of all contexts? I would say not (if such a thing even has a sense). However, does this still allow us to state that there is no nothing as we can describe it? As you note, Scott,
Why must this be? I must admit a sort of sheepish disinterest in ontology leads me to be behind in this sort of conversation, but if we ask any question with a “no” answer—or make any statement that evaluates as false—have we not stumbled upon nothing? What if I said that nothing was an analytically false statement, or a contradiction?
Well, the question of the existence of “nothing” is pretty closely tied to whether existence is a predicate property. Does it, in fact, make sense to assign “existence” as a property to objects which exist? Obviously, ones answer to this question is likely to relate to one’s answer to whether “green” and “symmetrical” are predicate properties, and whether that implies something about teh object being perceived, about teh agent doing the perceiving, or neither.
My own answer? I dunno.
Intuitively is is attractive to argue for an existence predicate as a natural outgrowth of my immanent realism. But I think that approach either obscures or contradicts some “qualities” which I would intuitively assign to “existence”:[ul]
[li]Independent of the qualities of any, or all, observing agents (yes, the tree makes a sound)[/li][li]Native/naive (non-contigency. Existence just is)[/li][li]Irreducible (Dissecting an “existent” never results in a “non-existent”)[/li][/ul]
So, where does that leave me? I still feel that existence is a viable predicate, but I do not think that position can be supported as a necessary extension of immanent realism (though I do not find the two contradictory).
So how do I answer the OP? “Nothing” does not exist. The word is meaningful, but the abstraction which it represents does not possess the property “existence”.
it seems as though there can be no thing which is “nothing”. for example, suppose:
there exists something, which is nothing.
then, there is some thing, which eliminates the possibility of it being nothing.
is it just me, or does this seem to have a lot of bearing on russell’s paradox and its relation to set theory?
i think something that we are mistaking for nothing is the empty set. so, nothing exists in the set of all living unicorns. but that set exists in a context, which is not nothing. there is in fact a set, and it lacks unicorns.
“Shit, man, what’s buggin’ you?!”
“Nothing, man. Nothing.”
Funny story I heard about Russell’s paradox. Seems this German paranoid bachelor philosopher was just going to print on a philosophical treatise based on mathematical precepts like sets and classes. Big honking book, years of work. Then the poor bugger gets a letter from snot-nosed punk Bertie Russell saying, “Excuse me, sir, but you’re quite full of it because…” and straight on to QED.
Poor guy had to include an errata with his book saying he just got a letter proving his book is pointless.
That’s gotta hurt.
Which is more likely to suffer an existential crisis? The half-empty glass, or the half-full? And if absence is, by definition, emptiness…why does it make the fart go “Honda!”?
If, however, Shroedingers Cat is…half-empty…and the Dalai Llama is half-full?
(And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as glossed as Shclegel)
Ramanujan, I don’t find “nothing” alluding to an empty set as a problem, however. “What satisfies this choice function?” Answer: “Nothing.”