9 ms·

Nothingness (2017)

55 points by KenoFischer 6y ago

aliabd 6y ago
The Sufis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism) consider nothingness to be the fifth element of nature.
- odomojuli 6y ago
  This is the largely case for the Japanese Buddhism as well in sync with Chinese Taoism. The fifth element is synonymous with "void" or "sky", ie "空". For a slightly abstract and colorful philosophy of martial arts, you may enjoy Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Void. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Five_Rings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Five_Rings It is more related to Aether in its Sanskrit origins. "आकाश" If you're willing to make a linguistic leap, you could argue that "nothingness" or "無" constitutes the essential foundation of modern Japanese philosophy or philosophical Buddhism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    MCDP 1 always reminded me of Clausewitz in powerpoint form, but TIL Musashi had covered much of the material earlier. Consider: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmLfnWwP0g0&t=280 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmLfnWwP0g0&t=280 (4:40 to 7:00) IIUC (and with apologies to Grothendieck), Ishida succeeded at 3-dan with a fire spirit, overpowering his opponents. At 8-dan, however, the examiners are looking for the void spirit. A fire spirit cracks a nut by using a hammer and chisel, striking as needed until the shell cracks. A void spirit gets the meat by immersing the nut in a softening agent until hand pressure suffices to decorticate, like a perfectly ripened avocado.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    I'd always thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin#Examples anecdotes are reminiscent of koans. TIL Shamil[1] was a نقشبندية‎ Sufi, probably one of the few to have his own ניגון tune[2]. [1] of whom I am always reminded when people in the US write about being "caucasian". Here are actual caucasians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTdXQabTTRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTdXQabTTRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-V9vStmsLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-V9vStmsLA [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwaXiur3GK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwaXiur3GK8
david-cako 6y ago
Kabbalistic Judaism also addresses the capacity for somethingness to emerge from nothingness. Very interesting interpretations of these metaphysical puzzles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayin_and_Yesh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayin_and_Yesh Tzimtzum, "contraction", proposes that the physical world is infinite somethingness/nothingness (essentially equal representations of one thing) made manifest in the realm of light/waves and distinctions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzimtzum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzimtzum
- jedimind 6y ago
  Nope, you should read your sources properly, it clearly says that the divine creates something from nothing, NOT that something emerges from nothing by nothing: "before the universe was created there was only Ayin, and the first manifest Sephirah (Divine emanation), Chochmah (Wisdom), "comes into being out of Ayin."[1] In this context, the sephirah Keter, the Divine will, is the intermediary between the Divine Infinity (Ein Sof) and Chochmah"
- naringas 6y ago
  so basically, the God entity withdrew (contracted, rescinded) its infinite presence and thus us finite creatures came to be? I had thought that the nature of the void (i.e. nothingness), or rather, its lack of a nature is what allowed stuff to freely appear into existence (as many times as it wants). the void imposes no restrictions because it is not really there to impose them. stuff pops freely into being without requiring any reasoning; requiring a reason would be a restriction which would need to be somehow imposed. in contrast, they say that, in fact, there wasn't a void, there was only a God entity filling up everything until this entity withdrew from a part of itself (from another part of itself I suppose) so form a space (or a void?) into which creation subsequently appeared
mmazing 6y ago
Sorry, it's hard to get past the first section. The author TOTALLY misses the point of the question "why is there something rather than nothing". Of course there is something, hence why we are here talking about this at all. The main problem people grapple with in the question of "why is there something instead of nothing" is how if there was at one point nothing, how is there now something? What caused it? Further, if there WASN'T at one point nothing, where the hell did all of this something come from?
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Considering the first section compresses 1600 years of thoughts it would be surprising if it weren't difficult to digest. Is nothing really qualitatively different from something? Some greeks held that numbering started at 2, because 1 of something is not a "number of things". It took much longer after 1 was generally accepted as a whole number for 0 to be. These days we often look askance at formal systems which don't have an identity. (going further back, many old languages have a plural that applies to 3 or more, because 2 of something gets the dual, with its own marking)
- istjohn 6y ago
  > Further, if there WASN'T at one point nothing, where the hell did all of this something come from? That's easy. "All of this" came from what came before it, and all of that came from what before it, and so on, and so on. Your first question, "If there was at one point nothing, how is there now something?" is far more vexing.
  - jedimind 6y ago
    It's actually the same question in a sense, because of the principal of causation and the impossibility of infinite regress, one naturally ponders about the first cause. Before the steady state theory was proved wrong, some would just say that there was no first cause and that the universe had no beginning and no end, but science knows that to be false now.
    - solipsism 6y ago
liberal_098 6y ago
The question can be reformulated as whether non-existence (nothingness) exists which is obviously a contradiction. Nothingness is the opposite of existence and hence it does not exist by definition.
- barrenko 6y ago
  Yup, you may as well say how can unicorn exist. First prove they do.
- stareatgoats 6y ago
  Very clever. A whole article (book?) could no doubt be devoted to that logical trick; how a seemingly reasonable argument can lead to such absurd conclusions. Maybe it was covered in the article, which I didn't read yet (either?). I might have to though, because it touches on a subject which interests me more and more; that of language, perception and meaning vs reality. For example, in the case of "nothing" I would propose that it has a meaning in everyday language that doesn't make it into the dictionaries or thesauri: that it partly means (or can mean) that which has not been discovered yet. This type of definition differs from a strict logical definition (in which nothing would mean absolutely nothing, void, emptiness, non-existence). Much confusion can be had from mixing the logic of language (terms that are logical/mathematical in nature if you will), with meaning, which is has to be the essence of language.
goblin89 6y ago
I like to ponder whether the territory is some giant graph of abstract conscious agents, and space-time as perceived is a simplified map of one’s adjacent nodes (connected agents). Of course, this puts conventional causality on its head and at this point is ultimately unfalsifiable.
tonyfaull 6y ago
For an article (a book really) about nothingness it is inordinately long. Much ado about nothingness.
- mellosouls 6y ago
  The opposite - it demonstrates the power of inquiry using philosophy.
barrenko 6y ago
If anyone has got a few years to kill to meditate on this I recommend "Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance" followed by Jed Mckenna books.
Animats 6y ago
Nothingness in mathematics is an issue and a problem. Proof by contradiction was at one time controversial. That the empty set is unique is an axiom in some versions of set theory. An operational definition of nothingness is that you apply a sensing operation to something, and if the sensing operation does not succeed, the thing being sensed is a nothingness. Nothingness is defined by the sensing operation. This resolves some, but not all, of the problems. The other side of this is "what is a something"? That's what led Democritus to invent atoms as a philosophical primitive. Everything bigger than an atom is a grouping of atoms and is defined by some abstraction over the primitives. Straightforward. Then came subatomic physics. The article contains a theological discussion which is just the first cause argument for God. The answer to "who created God" is usually "shut up, kid". That argument hasn't had much traction in recent centuries. (I once took "Epistemological problems in artificial intelligence" from John McCarthy. People were serious about this stuff when the logicians ruled AI. Today, not so much.)
- naringas 6y ago
  the notion of "everything" is also quite problematic. it gets us into paradoxes such as: does the set of all sets contain itself?
jedimind 6y ago
> The answer to "who created God" is usually "shut up, kid". No, that's rather a popular atheist misrepresentation of the theist position. The question itself has a hidden, but false premise, namely that God is created. The position of abrahamic religions is that God, by definition, is an uncreated being and thus a created God is commonly referred to as an idol, a false God.
- omeze 6y ago
  The OP is being cheeky with that comment - God as a first cause is really orthogonal to abrahamic religion and many arguments are in full agreement with the "original cause" being uncreated. OP is likely alluding to current popular conceptions of time as finite [1] (which has implications/problems for any hypothetical first cause). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_finitism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_finitism
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jedimind 6y ago
    > The OP is being cheeky with that comment Most people are being cheeky when they use that popular misrepresentation of the theistic position, because in many cases it goes unchallenged, thus it becomes a low effort high result quip that perpetuates false ideas.
    - ninkendo 6y ago
      Personally I don’t see a distinction between: “God has always been” and: “Don’t ask what created god” Either explanation dismisses outright the idea that we should even care what came before god, or what created him, etc.
      - jedimind 6y ago
        You don't see a distinction, because you don't want to see a distinction. It's very simple, not only does asking "what came before god, or what created him", bring you to where we started - the impossibility of infinite regress, thus nothing existing - but also the fallacious nature of your question implying that God is a created being, which is false, created Gods are idols. As explained above: "that's like looking at the painting of Mona Lisa and asking "but who painted Leonardo Davinci?", while Davinci is the painter, he is a human, not a painting, creator and created don't have to be of the same nature." It's one thing to deepen the discussion by contributing new ideas and a whole other thing to just stubbornly insist on making fallacious arguments and repeat them like you did. So unless you prove this time that you're not deaf to the arguments being made, I won't even bother next time...
openfuture 6y ago
I have no idea what the obsession with 'Cameron Winklevoss' is but it's kind of funny that he's an actual person and not some tradition like 'Alice' and 'Bob' in cryptography. Also the inhabitant of the empty set is omnipotent, so the first assumption is actually that there is no God.

Nothingness (2017)

55 points by KenoFischer 6y ago

The Sufis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism) consider nothingness to be the fifth element of nature.

odomojuli 6y ago
This is the largely case for the Japanese Buddhism as well in sync with Chinese Taoism. The fifth element is synonymous with "void" or "sky", ie "空". For a slightly abstract and colorful philosophy of martial arts, you may enjoy Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Void. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Five_Rings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Five_Rings It is more related to Aether in its Sanskrit origins. "आकाश" If you're willing to make a linguistic leap, you could argue that "nothingness" or "無" constitutes the essential foundation of modern Japanese philosophy or philosophical Buddhism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  MCDP 1 always reminded me of Clausewitz in powerpoint form, but TIL Musashi had covered much of the material earlier. Consider: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmLfnWwP0g0&t=280 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmLfnWwP0g0&t=280 (4:40 to 7:00) IIUC (and with apologies to Grothendieck), Ishida succeeded at 3-dan with a fire spirit, overpowering his opponents. At 8-dan, however, the examiners are looking for the void spirit. A fire spirit cracks a nut by using a hammer and chisel, striking as needed until the shell cracks. A void spirit gets the meat by immersing the nut in a softening agent until hand pressure suffices to decorticate, like a perfectly ripened avocado.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  I'd always thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin#Examples anecdotes are reminiscent of koans. TIL Shamil[1] was a نقشبندية‎ Sufi, probably one of the few to have his own ניגון tune[2]. [1] of whom I am always reminded when people in the US write about being "caucasian". Here are actual caucasians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTdXQabTTRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTdXQabTTRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-V9vStmsLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-V9vStmsLA [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwaXiur3GK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwaXiur3GK8

david-cako 6y ago

Kabbalistic Judaism also addresses the capacity for somethingness to emerge from nothingness. Very interesting interpretations of these metaphysical puzzles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayin_and_Yesh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayin_and_Yesh Tzimtzum, "contraction", proposes that the physical world is infinite somethingness/nothingness (essentially equal representations of one thing) made manifest in the realm of light/waves and distinctions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzimtzum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzimtzum

jedimind 6y ago
Nope, you should read your sources properly, it clearly says that the divine creates something from nothing, NOT that something emerges from nothing by nothing: "before the universe was created there was only Ayin, and the first manifest Sephirah (Divine emanation), Chochmah (Wisdom), "comes into being out of Ayin."[1] In this context, the sephirah Keter, the Divine will, is the intermediary between the Divine Infinity (Ein Sof) and Chochmah"
naringas 6y ago
so basically, the God entity withdrew (contracted, rescinded) its infinite presence and thus us finite creatures came to be? I had thought that the nature of the void (i.e. nothingness), or rather, its lack of a nature is what allowed stuff to freely appear into existence (as many times as it wants). the void imposes no restrictions because it is not really there to impose them. stuff pops freely into being without requiring any reasoning; requiring a reason would be a restriction which would need to be somehow imposed. in contrast, they say that, in fact, there wasn't a void, there was only a God entity filling up everything until this entity withdrew from a part of itself (from another part of itself I suppose) so form a space (or a void?) into which creation subsequently appeared

mmazing 6y ago

Sorry, it's hard to get past the first section. The author TOTALLY misses the point of the question "why is there something rather than nothing". Of course there is something, hence why we are here talking about this at all. The main problem people grapple with in the question of "why is there something instead of nothing" is how if there was at one point nothing, how is there now something? What caused it? Further, if there WASN'T at one point nothing, where the hell did all of this something come from?

082349872349872 6y ago
Considering the first section compresses 1600 years of thoughts it would be surprising if it weren't difficult to digest. Is nothing really qualitatively different from something? Some greeks held that numbering started at 2, because 1 of something is not a "number of things". It took much longer after 1 was generally accepted as a whole number for 0 to be. These days we often look askance at formal systems which don't have an identity. (going further back, many old languages have a plural that applies to 3 or more, because 2 of something gets the dual, with its own marking)
istjohn 6y ago
> Further, if there WASN'T at one point nothing, where the hell did all of this something come from? That's easy. "All of this" came from what came before it, and all of that came from what before it, and so on, and so on. Your first question, "If there was at one point nothing, how is there now something?" is far more vexing.
- jedimind 6y ago
  It's actually the same question in a sense, because of the principal of causation and the impossibility of infinite regress, one naturally ponders about the first cause. Before the steady state theory was proved wrong, some would just say that there was no first cause and that the universe had no beginning and no end, but science knows that to be false now.
  - solipsism 6y ago

liberal_098 6y ago

The question can be reformulated as whether non-existence (nothingness) exists which is obviously a contradiction. Nothingness is the opposite of existence and hence it does not exist by definition.

barrenko 6y ago
Yup, you may as well say how can unicorn exist. First prove they do.
stareatgoats 6y ago
Very clever. A whole article (book?) could no doubt be devoted to that logical trick; how a seemingly reasonable argument can lead to such absurd conclusions. Maybe it was covered in the article, which I didn't read yet (either?). I might have to though, because it touches on a subject which interests me more and more; that of language, perception and meaning vs reality. For example, in the case of "nothing" I would propose that it has a meaning in everyday language that doesn't make it into the dictionaries or thesauri: that it partly means (or can mean) that which has not been discovered yet. This type of definition differs from a strict logical definition (in which nothing would mean absolutely nothing, void, emptiness, non-existence). Much confusion can be had from mixing the logic of language (terms that are logical/mathematical in nature if you will), with meaning, which is has to be the essence of language.

goblin89 6y ago

I like to ponder whether the territory is some giant graph of abstract conscious agents, and space-time as perceived is a simplified map of one’s adjacent nodes (connected agents). Of course, this puts conventional causality on its head and at this point is ultimately unfalsifiable.

tonyfaull 6y ago

For an article (a book really) about nothingness it is inordinately long. Much ado about nothingness.

mellosouls 6y ago
The opposite - it demonstrates the power of inquiry using philosophy.

barrenko 6y ago

If anyone has got a few years to kill to meditate on this I recommend "Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance" followed by Jed Mckenna books.

Animats 6y ago

Nothingness in mathematics is an issue and a problem. Proof by contradiction was at one time controversial. That the empty set is unique is an axiom in some versions of set theory. An operational definition of nothingness is that you apply a sensing operation to something, and if the sensing operation does not succeed, the thing being sensed is a nothingness. Nothingness is defined by the sensing operation. This resolves some, but not all, of the problems. The other side of this is "what is a something"? That's what led Democritus to invent atoms as a philosophical primitive. Everything bigger than an atom is a grouping of atoms and is defined by some abstraction over the primitives. Straightforward. Then came subatomic physics. The article contains a theological discussion which is just the first cause argument for God. The answer to "who created God" is usually "shut up, kid". That argument hasn't had much traction in recent centuries. (I once took "Epistemological problems in artificial intelligence" from John McCarthy. People were serious about this stuff when the logicians ruled AI. Today, not so much.)

naringas 6y ago
the notion of "everything" is also quite problematic. it gets us into paradoxes such as: does the set of all sets contain itself?

jedimind 6y ago

> The answer to "who created God" is usually "shut up, kid". No, that's rather a popular atheist misrepresentation of the theist position. The question itself has a hidden, but false premise, namely that God is created. The position of abrahamic religions is that God, by definition, is an uncreated being and thus a created God is commonly referred to as an idol, a false God.

omeze 6y ago
The OP is being cheeky with that comment - God as a first cause is really orthogonal to abrahamic religion and many arguments are in full agreement with the "original cause" being uncreated. OP is likely alluding to current popular conceptions of time as finite [1] (which has implications/problems for any hypothetical first cause). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_finitism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_finitism
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jedimind 6y ago
  > The OP is being cheeky with that comment Most people are being cheeky when they use that popular misrepresentation of the theistic position, because in many cases it goes unchallenged, thus it becomes a low effort high result quip that perpetuates false ideas.
  - ninkendo 6y ago
    Personally I don’t see a distinction between: “God has always been” and: “Don’t ask what created god” Either explanation dismisses outright the idea that we should even care what came before god, or what created him, etc.
    - jedimind 6y ago
      You don't see a distinction, because you don't want to see a distinction. It's very simple, not only does asking "what came before god, or what created him", bring you to where we started - the impossibility of infinite regress, thus nothing existing - but also the fallacious nature of your question implying that God is a created being, which is false, created Gods are idols. As explained above: "that's like looking at the painting of Mona Lisa and asking "but who painted Leonardo Davinci?", while Davinci is the painter, he is a human, not a painting, creator and created don't have to be of the same nature." It's one thing to deepen the discussion by contributing new ideas and a whole other thing to just stubbornly insist on making fallacious arguments and repeat them like you did. So unless you prove this time that you're not deaf to the arguments being made, I won't even bother next time...

openfuture 6y ago

I have no idea what the obsession with 'Cameron Winklevoss' is but it's kind of funny that he's an actual person and not some tradition like 'Alice' and 'Bob' in cryptography. Also the inhabitant of the empty set is omnipotent, so the first assumption is actually that there is no God.