^..meaning the statement: "there's nothing there.." is Never true.. sure, but i accept Paradoxes..
DeMenTed wrote: ..{..} added to emphasise my point..but please, i don't want someone to launch a 'there's no outside the universe' debate..!
..also, another point of view of Nothing is looking at it's meaning..i.e No-Thing..i.e what is a 'thing'..
the immersion in absolute infinity of every sense, direction and aspect could be said to be a singularity, where 'no thing' is experienceable, only absoluteness which has no partitioning/quantization..the 'clear' light..
just my opinion too..i enjoy these mental exercises..

I feel this thinking is incorrect. Not to get too word play-ish but your trying to make the absence of something a thing and it doesn't work that way. Right there in your sentence your saying nothing exists but its the exact opposite of that. There is NOTHING to exist. Nothing can not exists. It reminds me of the flawed argument that lack of belief is in itself a belief which is isn't.

Lets say there was an area within space that was a total negative vacume and within this empty space there was no matter or mass, no mass-less particles, no time, no potential wave functions nada. The only reason your thinking that this void is a thing is because you are conceiving or thinking about it. That thought is a something but this void itself is nothing.

At least that's how I see it. Its impossible for us to accurately imagine nothing because the very act in itself is something. But remove the thinker from the equation and there is nothing there.

If there is such a void, then the void exists. If someone were to ask what exists at that area in space, you wouldn't say that there is no such area. The area is very real, in my opinion, even if there is nothing in it. We're getting into areas of strong uncertainty, I think, because you could never prove that such a void existed without putting something in it, thus destroying its voidness. I agree that this thread is riddled with word play, but I would argue that statements such as "X does not exist" either assume that X exists and are thus contradictory, or are completely meaningless in the case where "X" does not refer to anything.

I agree. Like seeing beyond the event horizon of a black hole, or past the background cosmic microwave radiation. Its not possible. To observe nothingness, is to receive information from it. No information exists in nothingness, so thats an impossible goal. We have no reference to compare it to.

I tend to lead towards a quantum foam/matrix. The possibility of everything, or fluctuation in energy (whether it be matter/light/particles/unknown). This implies nothingness does not exist. Just the possibility for something to exist. Which is something.

Perhaps by observing nothing we create something simply though the act of doing so. Perhaps its all random, and the only reason things exist is pure chaos. Natural selection dictates the chronological life of said fluctuation. Whatever/wherever this is, is a successful possibility of energy potential. A quanta in the infinite sea of possibility, beyond universes, dimensions, etc. The random energy potential fluctuation of the quanta dictates whether its a big bang that expands into a universe, or a energy potential that destroys itself/cancels itself out upon conception.

The fluctuations of all other quanta in the system play into the probability of a particular fluctuation of a quanta perpetuating/existing, or self destructing. The potential for something is what negates the idea of nothingness.

Otherwise, you have to grapple with the idea of a "big bang" creating everything, from a single point in nothingness without potential energy fluctuation/potential. This requires belief in a action to set it into motion, and is no different than theological explanations of existence. infinite possibility of quanta in a randomly fluctuating energy matrix without scale does not.

Lol this is fun but makes my head hurt.

Again I disagree and can hopefully explain myslef better.


If there is such a void, then the void exists. No the perimeters of the space or the void is what exists but withn them there is nothing. I used the example a void within space and time as a way to think and picture my idea but you got hung up on the area itself, the void, rather than the nothingness.

So one cold ask- Is there a void in space that contains nothing? and the answer would be yes and that void or area of space is a something but when asked what is in the void the answer is not the void, aka a something, the answer is nothing is in the void.



If someone were to ask what exists at that area in space, you wouldn't say that there is no such area. No because your not being asked about the area your being asked whats inside that area and the answer if hypotheticaly possible would be...NOTHING.

But the area must exist before we can claim that there is nothing within it. So whether or not something exists within the area is related to whether or not the area exists.

Personally I think the terminology is incorrect as rather the word nothingness the word emptiness should be used.

Tai Situpa describes emptiness incredibly eloquently: emptiness is where everything has limitless possibilities and potential; there is nothing which is not the manifestation of everything, that is more than manifestation of everything, that is less than manifestation of everything.

Which reverts back to the Holographic Universe perspective...


Much Peace and Kindness

I highly recommend a book called "The face of the deep : A Theology of becoming" By Cathine Keller, she discusses amongst other thing's how the universe evolved from the "chaos".

This is something I'm faced with again and again, in all of my thoughts on creation, we as a society somehow think we can comprehend the "infinite" of creation. ZERO did not exist in modern mathematics for quite some time, this leads me on to what I'm going to say next.

It has always been 1, it was never nothing, it was always something. There was never a beginning or an end, it always has been something, just different conscious levels of the same something, constantly changing and warping into something else, at one point, it could have been percieved as nothing, yet still warping and ever changing into new more complex or simpler forms.

"In the beginning the earth was formless and void" is describing the chaos, the liquid state of the universe. A new theory named Quantum Graphity also described this state, in which the universe in this form created it's entirely self instantly. Most major religion from my own readings speak of this too. In my own spiritual experience which is new and developing constantly, I have seen it and described it as a torus, breathing in on itself and breathing out of itself constantly, flowing into more complex shapes.

One cannot comprehend in the infinite and in doing so, one is trying to comprehend permanence, in which nothing is permanent.

Would you say that zero is something? I like tori too, by the way.

That zero didn't exist in Western mathematics for quite some time is what let it languish behind Indian and Chinese mathematics for centuries.

Zero exists in the universe of possibilities, and in the world of mathematics. What we call mathematics cannot function without it. That's why begrudgingly the Church based western science finally adopted it. Hundreds of years after Italian traders had borrowed it from the Indians and Chinese for commerce.

In Hindi Zero is "Bindu". The infinitely small 'dot' or point. [see J. Barrow The Book Of Nothing]

It's spoken of as exactly that, a small dot. A small dot is still something, look at it from the view point of the tao, all thing's are liquid and flow into objects like water, they fill the space they are given. Nothing is ever void of anything, it is always something and always has been. When I move my hand through the air, each and every place my hand flows through fills with something, when I dig a hole in the ground, the space made available flows and fills with something, when I put liquid into a container, it fills with something.

Nothing ever existed or ever with exist, it just always has been. It never starts, it never ends, just flow's from one thing into the next thing, impermanence. 0 In our mathematical sense is to say "and" to something linguistically, like 100,000 and 1. 0 does not come before one, it is one, being that one cannot be divided by itself or subtracted from itself. It is representative of the power point of symetical reflection of itself.

Semantics makes this a difficult topic to discuss .

I think rather than the blocks of text i usually hash out, i would define "nothing" as the classically defined nothing, IE absolutist idealistic nothingness, which does not exist imho. Thus the term is not relatable to anything we observe or percieve outside of our mind, and since thats part of it all, i guess it does exist afterall. Do thoughts count as something? Does the thought of the existence of nothing make it exist? Those are questions i tend to avoid.

There is only relative potential. The indefinable math/quanta of existence dictates how that potential is used. One of the matricies that exists in this foundation, is our universe. Born of a single fluxuation, allowed to grow/expand/fill potential by chance, by relation of the energy of the system as a whole. Like if you could cognify the infinity it gave rise from, it would be modelable. Thats just not in any way possible.

Its important, imho, to not define all that is, or will be as the universe. The universe is a framework we inhabit, part of a larger energy system whose dimensions/properties are beyond limit or comprehension.

At the same time, that framework, the root energy system is around us, its what is. And its what makes the pursuit of understanding the universe/its origins, imho, impossible, since you have to factor infinity into everything. The possibility for anything. Kind of like our universe is an electron, or what exists below that, in an atom, in a molecule, in a protein, in a cell, in an organ, in a living creature, living in the same framework. Infinity of all scales, and possibility.

Pondering upon this stuff too much can get psychologically risky

The Meddling Monk wrote:

Mystic0 wrote:

..mystic0, it means 'infinitely small', as monk said..there is Nothing there, but it is something!
in maths a 'point' is not a dot of ink on paper..it's 'nothing'..and yet it's something..

i can accept that 0=1 or 2=0 or 1+1=3

but not 0=0..

1=1 reflect it and 1 becomes 2. All numbers are inherently language, they shape and form into more complex things, zero in itself, becomes an infinite reflection. It is representative of self and the infinite which is exactly what Bindu is representative of. The small dot, not a number, 0 being infinite, infinitely small implies a never ending state. With impermanence, it flows and changes from this never ending state into all other being. In that infinitely small dot, it could contain all language, all numbers, all referrence to consciousness and the universe itself.

glad to see this thread has gotten so much attention, and has inspired so much thought.

i thought i would just elaborate more on my thoughts of the OP:


if you had one unit of pure light, and another unit of pure dark (obviously not a thing, but for the sake of argument...).

each would be a unit, or thing. in this case the light would be positive and the dark negative.


now you take these 2 units, and add them together... what do you have?
something that is neither light nor dark.

it has no qualities of thingness, for a thing it is not. it would be... no thing.

in this sense, i am trying to say that you can take an absolute nothingness (With no qualities of thingness) and divide it into a positive and a negative thing.

is there a reason this thought is wrong?
it seems too obvious to be correct.

^..hey Parshvik..enjoying your thread too..
..except that 'nothing' isn't even dark..i'm not sure that existence/non-extistence are exactly 'polar' opposites like hot/cold etc..as in, i don't know that we can 'mix' existence with non-existence..?

..i must say olympus mon sure takes the mind-bender award for me for this topic..! ..i think this is quite a key statement here:
..great stuff!

..there is more than one kind of 'Nothing'..
and as i said, i except paradox..the answer, to me, lies somewhere in the paradox..
.

Earlier this evening, a mentor told me that answers are not important. He said that discovery starts with important questions rather than concise answers. His point was that physicists who win the Nobel Prize often give very vague or tentative answers, but that they win the Nobel Prize because they used their knowledge of a topic to formulate a pertinent question that had never been asked before.

The distinction between something and nothing is perhaps best left as a well-formulated question rather than as a specific answer. Asking questions is a good thing, but we become delusional when we start accepting the cookie-cutter answers. As nen888 said, sometimes (if not every time) the answer is a paradox.

"Is nothing something?"

Perhaps the duality of light/dark is the wrong way to approach the question.

Say you have inequal units of light dark in regards to their energy, the combination would result in a relative scale of difference in the framework of how light/dark it is. Assuming were not beaking things down to fundamentalism, IE the root of all that is is light/dark quanta of equal energy.

I tend to thing, that random fluxuation creates potential, and anti-potential. Dark/light energy (and at higher levels of density matter). The net sum of the system is O in terms of adding all the light/dark, positive/negative, ect; together. The system is equal in terms of light/dark, but the potential for expansion is infinite. Its a balanced, infinte, self perpetuating energy system.

IMHO, that is nothing by definition classically. But since the equalization of relative potential light/dark, affects other light/dark quanta interactions, it perpetuates via action/reaction. I don't think any quanta of light/dark (whatever duality you want to use to describe a relative potential between the two variablly different quanta) are equal, so equalization of the two to create nothingness leaves something behing (light or dark). This plays into the interactions of the system as a whole, and perpetuates it.

In a way, you could say we live within nothigness fundamentally, if all opposing forces equalized. But since no two have the same energy magnitude imho, the leftovers perpetuate the novelty of the difference in energy potential of the system as a whole when they interact with light/dark.

In summary, all that is, is nothing, but since conservation of energy exists beyond the universe imho, perhaps equalization of light/dark, even if theres leftovers, creates more potential/room for creation of new quanta of light/dark with unique random energy potentials since the surrounding system plays into how that potential "void" is filled.

No need for creation, or a starting point, just infinite opposing forces, of different magnitudes, in constant interactions/equalizatinos, that leave behind whatever had more energy potential. That interacts with other light/dark depending on what quanta had more potential, and on and on. When light/dark is equalized, room is created for more potential, but factoring in infinity that becomes irrelevant, since theres always more room, and light/dark being created to interact with its preexisting relative analogs.

All taking into consideration, light is not something, and dark is not nothing, just opposing(or perhaps attractive self destructive) forces. The nothing is that if you theoretically were able to add up the pluses and minuses, it would be zero.

Here i go again flirting with insanity thinking about this stuff.

i am not suggesting dark would be nothing
it would be the -1 in the equation 0=1-1

the dark in combination with the light cancel each other out.

Photons are their own antiparticle, so perhaps light is both the 1 and -1 in your analogy.