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What is nothing? You can't have nothing without a something

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What is nothing?

You can't have nothing without a something to contrast, right? So how can there be absolutely nothing, with no something at all.

Is it just a failure of language?

I don't know anything about philosophy, was wondering if you lot did.
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Everything's relative. There can be absolutely nothing worthwhile on 4chan today, for example.
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>>8698020
It's quite simply just a figure of speech. no-thing.
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Stop being an asshat and realise that language was never perfect and never will be, it does not define our thoughts, but merely outlines it. It's the same asinine shit as with Hume
>DUDE how can a thing exist if you can only describe its properties but not the thing itself LMAO
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>>8698029
Nothing worthwhile to you maybe. And yet you are commenting here.
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>>8698029
And yet here you are.
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Focus on the fourth term, which is one.
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>>8698020
Being and nothingness are the same, see Heraclitus/Hegel.

Simply, to say something is "red" is impossible if everything is "red" - if there exists a whole field of red, there's no differentiation, so the descriptor is meaningless. Applied to Being, everything is being and nothing is Not, so there is no differentiation, so Being is just a word for that state. With Nothingness, there is nothing that Is, only Not, so again no differentiation. Existence is a sublation of Being and Nothing, that is, the constant transition from something to nothing (to change to something else, which is Becoming.
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>>8698020
Nothing, in the sense of The Void -- that is, the complete absence of anything which might be called a "thing" is impossible.

In the Sartrean sense, "nothing" is what we call it when an object is absent where it might be expected to be present. In this sense, nothing certainly makes a lot of sense, exemplified in the following joke: Sartre has fallen on hard times an has taken a job as a barista to make ends meet. A woman visits his coffee shop and orders a coffee without cream. Sartre says, "Désolé Madame, we don't have cream. Would you like coffee without milk?" There are other concepts of nothing a la Hegel, Heidegger, and so on that also fit our real linguistic usage of the term.

But in the Eleatic/Aristotelian sense of the term, the way that certain physicists and cosmologists such as Lawrence Krauss abuse to defend their religious beliefs, a "no-thing," if you will, is completely impossible. If it were possible, we could eliminate things from our universe until we have proper nothing left. Put an object in your hand, anything will do. Now take it away. Is there no-thing there in your hand? Of course not! There's air and particles of dust in the space formerly occupied by the object. Now remove all of the air and dust so that there isn't a single atom: the space directly above your hand is now a perfect vacuum. The only problem is, there's still other particles. Photons, neutrinos, bits of matter and anti-matter popping in and out of existence, tiny particles of shifting eigenstates, all of these are still present. Eliminate them as well, and get rid of any energy that might still be left in the system too. Is this then "no-thing?" Not at all. Fields (like the Higgs field or the electromagnetic field or the gravitational field) are still stretched across this area of space. So we'll eliminate them too (at this point, coherent reality is starting to fall apart). Do we now have void? Nope! We still have metaphysical objects, if these are at all possible. Possible worlds, Platonic forms, etc. might still exist, so we'll discount them from our potential no-thing. You still have dimensions of space (maybe time as well, depending on your philosophical point of view; I'd say not, but we'll entertain time as a "thing" for the time being) that occupy the space itself. So we'll collapse all dimensionality and temporality completely. In this respect, even if there were an object, an object couldn't be relative to any other object, nor could it come before or after or be simultaneous with any other object. Is this then no-thing? I would say no. This is still a thing! It's not particularly describable in thinkable terms (considering we've eliminated those elements required for human thought), but it still seems to me an object with a discernible ontology. Even still, there's nothing (in Sartre's sense) to be eliminated. We've arrived at a some-thing which is essential to being. Does that make sense to you?
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read Heidegger's "What is Metaphysics?"

I recommend the Werner Brock translation, if you're reading in english
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>>8698610
I am the suuuuun
Thread posts: 11
Thread images: 3


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