Fairydust

Hmmm matter of opinion

MJC

from starting off as a mistake, this thread's growing!!

Fairydust

So which one is it that you want?

MJC

all of them

Truth Speak

Not a bad thread for no subect matter.


MJ .you\re gonna have to pad this out a bit more. This is not like the Me we know so well......

Rumble Tumble

What on earth is this thread about?????????

novita77

Dunno ... u tell me

Face81

perhaps the thread is about the subject of nothingness?

Rumble Tumble

So what can we say about nothingness

novita77

empty and blank ...

Rumble Tumble

Nothing

We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.

Charles S. Peirce

LakesLassie

Bit heavy goin for a Friday RT!

Rumble Tumble

LOL it is Friday the 13th tho .

Face81

Hows this for light reading....


Since metaphysics is the study of what exists, one might expect metaphysicians to have little to say about the limit case in which nothing exists. But ever since Parmenides in the fifth century B.C., there has been rich commentary on whether an empty world is possible, whether there are vacuums, and about the nature of privations and negation.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Well, why not? Why expect nothing rather than something? No experiment could support the hypothesis ‘There is nothing’ because any observation obviously implies the existence of an observer.

Is there any a priori support for ‘There is nothing’? One might respond with a methodological principle that propels the empty world to the top of the agenda. For instance, many feel that whoever asserts the existence of something has the burden of proof. If an astronomer says there is water at the south pole of the Moon, then it is up to him to provide data in support of the lunar water. If we were not required to have evidence to back our existential claims, then a theorist who fully explained the phenomena with one set of things could gratuitously add an extra entity, say, Atlantis. We recoil from such add-ons. To prevent the intrusion of superfluous entities, one might demand that metaphysicians start with the empty world and admit only those entities that have credentials. This is the regime imposed by Rene Descartes. He clears everything out and then only lets back in what can be proved to exist.

St. Augustine had more conservative counsel: we should not start at the beginning, nor at the end, but where we are, in the middle. We reach a verdict about the existence of controversial things by assessing how well these entities would harmonize with the existence of better established things. If we start from nothing, we lack the bearings needed to navigate forward. Conservatives, coherentists and scientific gradualists all cast a suspicious eye on ‘Why there is something rather than nothing?’.

Most contemporary philosophers feel entitled to postulate whatever entities are indispensable to their best explanations of well accepted phenomena. They feel the presumption of non-existence is only plausible for particular existence claims. Since the presumption only applies on a case by case basis, there is no grand methodological preference for an empty world. Furthermore, there is no burden of proof when everybody concedes the proposition under discussion. Even a solipsist agrees there is at least one thing!

A more popular way to build a presumption in favor of nothingness is to associate nothingness with simplicity and simplicity with likelihood. The first part of this justification is plausible. ‘Nothing exists’ is simple in the sense of being an easy to remember generalization. Consider a test whose questions have the form ‘Does x exist?’. The rule ‘Always answer no!’ is unsurpassably short and comprehensive.

As far as simplicity, there is a tie between the nihilistic rule ‘Always answer no!’ and the inflationary rule ‘Always answer yes!’. Neither rule makes for serious metaphysics.

Even if ‘Nothing exists’ were the uniquely simplest possibility (as measured by memorability), why should we expect that possibility to be actual? In a fair lottery, we assign the same probability of winning to the ticket unmemorably designated 6,437,446 as to the ticket memorably labeled 1,111,111.

Indeed, the analogy with a lottery seems to dramatically reverse the presumption of non-existence. If there is only one empty world and many populated worlds, then a random selection would lead us to expect a populated world.

Peter van Inwagen (1996) has nurtured this statistical argument. In an infinite lottery, the chance that a given ticket is the winner is 0. So van Inwagen reasons that since there are infinitely many populated worlds, the probability of a populated world is equal to 1. Although the empty world is not impossible, it is as improbable as anything can be!

For the sake of balanced reporting, van Inwagen should acknowledge that, by his reasoning, the actual world is also as improbable as anything can be. What really counts here is the probability of ‘There is something’ as opposed to ‘There is nothing’.

The trouble sustaining multiple voids may push us to the most extreme answer to ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’, namely, ‘There must not only be something but there must not be any emptiness at all!’.

Parmenides maintained that it is self-defeating to say that something does not exist. The linguistic rendering of this insight is the problem of negative existentials: ‘Atlantis does not exist’ is about Atlantis. A statement can be about something only if that something exists. No relation without relata! Therefore, ‘Atlantis does not exist’ cannot be true. Parmenides and his disciples elaborated conceptual difficulties with negation into an incredible metaphysical monolith.

The Parmenideans were opposed by the atomists. The atomists said that the world is constituted by simple, indivisible things moving in empty space. They self-consciously endorsed the void to explain empirical phenomena such as movement, compression, and absorption.

Parmenides's disciple, Zeno of Elea, had already amassed an amazing battery of arguments to show motion is impossible. Since these imply that compression and absorption are also impossible, Zeno rejects the data of the atomists.

Less radical opponents of vacuums, such as Aristotle, re-explained the data within a framework of plenism: although the universe is full, objects can move because other objects get out of the way. Compression and absorption can be explained by having things pushed out of the way when other things jostle their way in.

Aristotle denied the void can explain why things move. Movement requires a mover that is pushing or pulling the object. An object in a vacuum is not in contact with anything else. If the object did move, there would be nothing to impede its motion. Therefore, any motion in a vacuum would be at an infinite speed.

Aristotle's refutation of the void persuaded most commentators for the next 1500 years. There were two limited dissenters to his thesis that vacuums are impossible. The Stoics agreed that terrestrial vacuums are impossible but believed there must be a void surrounding the cosmos. Hero of Alexandria agreed that there are no naturally occuring vacuums but believed that they can be formed artificially. He cites pumps and siphons as evidence that voids can be created. Hero believed that bodies have a natural horror of vacuums and struggle to prevent their formation. You can gauge the strength of the antipathy by trying to open a bellows that has had its air hole plugged. Try as you might, you cannot separate the sides. However, unlike Aristotle, Hero thought that if you and the bellows were tremendously strong, you could separate the sides and create a vacuum.

Hero's views became more popular after the Church's anti-Aristotelian condemnation of 1277 which required Christian scholars to allow for the possibility of a vacuum. The Medievals fiercely debated various recipes for creating vacuums.

Hero was eventually refuted by experiments with barometers conducted by Evangelista Torricelli and Blaise Pascal. Their barometer consisted of a tube partially submerged, upside down in bowl of mercury. What keeps the mercury suspended in the tube? Is there an unnatural vacuum that causes the surrounding glass to pull the liquid up? Or is there no vacuum at all but rather some rarefied and invisible matter in the "empty space"? Pascal answered that there really was nothing holding up the mercury. The mercury rises and falls due to variations in the weight of the atmosphere. The mercury is being pushed up the tube, not pulled up by anything.

When Pascal offered this explanation to Descartes, Descartes wrote Christian Huygens that Pascal had too much vacuum in his head. Descartes identified bodies with extension and so had no room for vacuums. If there were nothing between two objects, then they would be touching each other. And if they are touching each other, there is no gap between them.

Well maybe the apparent gap is merely a thinly occupied region of space. On this distributional model, there is no intermediate "empty object" that separates the two objects. There is merely unevenly spread matter. This model is very good at eliminating vacuums in the sense of empty objects. However, it is also rather good at eliminating ordinary objects. What we call objects would just be relatively thick deposits of matter. There would be only one natural object: the whole universe. This may have been the point of Spinoza's attack on vacuums (Bennett 1980).

Descartes was part of a tradition that denied action at a distance. Galileo was disappointed by Johannes Kepler's hypothesis that the moon influences the tides because the hypothesis seems to require causal chains in empty space. How could the great Kepler believe something so silly? When Isaac Newton resurrected Kepler's hypothesis he was careful to suggest that the space between the moon the Earth was filled with ether.

Indeed, the universality of Newton's law of gravitation seems to require that the whole universe be filled with a subtle substance. Hunger for ether grew as the wave-like features of light became established. A wave must have a medium.

Or must it? As the theoretical roles of the ether increased, physicists began to doubt there could be anything that accomplished such diverse feats. These doubts about the existence of ether were intensified by the emergence of Einstein's theory of relativity. He presented his theory as a relational account of space; if there were no objects, there would be no space. Space is merely a useful abstraction like your family tree. (There is controversy over whether Einstein's characterization of his relationism is accurate.)

Even those physicists who wished to retain substantival space broke with the atomist tradition of assigning virtually no properties to the void. They re-assign much of ether's responsibilities to space itself. Instead of having gravitational forces being propagated through the ether, they suggest that space is bent by mass. To explain how space can be finite and yet unbounded, they characterize space as spherical. When Edwin Hubble discovered that heavenly bodies are traveling away from each other (like sleepy flies resting on an expanding balloon), cosmologists were quick to suggest that space may be expanding. "Expanding into what?" wondered bewildered laymen. "How can space bend?" "How can space have a shape?"

Historians of science wonder whether the ether that was pushed out the front door of physics is returning through the back door under the guise of "space". Quantum field theory provides especially fertile area for such speculation. Particles are created with the help of energy present in "vacuums". To say that vacuums have energy and energy is convertible into mass, is to deny that vacuums are empty. Many physicists revel in the discovery that vacuums are far from empty.

Are these physicists using ‘vacuum’ in a new sense? If they are trying to correct laymen, then they need to couch their surprises in sentences using the ordinary sense of ‘vacuum’. Laymen are generally willing to defer to scientists when they are characterizing natural kinds. But vacuums do not seem like natural kinds because they do not seem be substances — or anything at all. Plato introduced the notion of a natural kind with an analogy featuring a butcher cutting an animal at it joints. There do not appear to be natural boundaries between voids and objects.



After a mystical experience in 1654, Blaise Pascal's interest in nothingness passed from its significance to science to its significance to the human condition. Pascal thinks human beings have a unique perspective on their finitude. His Pensees is a roller coaster ride surveying the human lot. Pascal elevates us to the level of angels by exalting in our grasp of the infinite, and then runs us down below the beasts for wittingly choosing evil over goodness. Pascal takes us up again by marveling at how human beings tower over the microscopic kingdom, and then plunges us down toward insignificance by having us dwell on the vastness of space, and immensity of the eternity.

He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption.

For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up. (Pensees sect. II, 72)

Pascal's association of nothingness with insignificance and meaninglessness presages themes popularized by existentialists in the twentieth century.

In The Concept of Dread, Soren Kierkegaard claims that nothingness wells up into our awareness through moods and emotions. Emotions are intentional states; they are directed toward something. If angered, I am angry at something. If amused, there is something I find amusing. Free floating anxiety is often cited as a counterexample. But Kierkegaard says that in this case the emotion is directed at nothingness.

According to Heidegger, we have several motives to shy away from the significance of our emotional encounters with nothingness. They are premonitions of the nothingness of death. They echo the groundlessness of human existence.

Some have hoped that our recognition of our rootlessness would rescue meaningfulness from the chaos of nothing. But Heidegger denies us such solace.

Heidegger does think freedom is rooted in nothingness. He also says we derive our concept of logical negation from this experience of nothing. Since Heidegger does not think that dogs have such experiences, he is committed to skepticism about animal reasoning involving negation. Consider the Stoic example of a dog that is following a trail. The dog reaches a fork in the road, sniffs at one road and then, without a further sniff, proceeds down the only remaining road. The Stoics took this as evidence that the dog has performed a disjunctive syllogism: "Either my quarry went down this road or that road. Sniff — he did not go down that road. Therefore, he went down this road." Heidegger must discount this as anthropomorphism.

Heidegger is sensitive to the hazards of saying that nothing exists and instead says "The nothing nihilates" (Das Nichts selbst nichtet). Rudolph Carnap made this remark famous by exhibiting it as a paradigm of metaphysical nonsense.

Other critics deny that Being and Time suffers from an absence of meaning. Just the reverse: they think Heidegger's passages about nothing involve too many meanings. Consider the following riddle:

What does a man love more than life?
Hate more than death or mortal strife?
That which contented men desire,
The poor have, the rich require,
The miser spends, the spendthrift saves,
And all men carry to their graves?

(Leemings, 1953, 201)

The answer, Nothing, can only be seen through a kaleidoscope of equivocations.




Now isnt that interesting?

MJC

glad to know the old cut and paste trick is alive and kicking at Face's place!