
Nothingness (2017) - KenoFischer
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nothingness/
======
aliabd
The Sufis
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism))
consider nothingness to be the fifth element of nature.

~~~
odomojuli
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
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)

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

------
david-cako
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
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"

------
barrenko
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.

------
goblin89
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
For an article (a book really) about nothingness it is inordinately long. Much
ado about nothingness.

~~~
mellosouls
The opposite - it demonstrates the power of inquiry using philosophy.

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openfuture
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.

------
liberal_098
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.

~~~
stareatgoats
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.

------
mmazing
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?

~~~
Schiphol
It's not likely that the author of the article on nothingness in the most
important academic encyclopedia of philosophy is missing the point of the
'something rather than nothing' question.

~~~
mmazing
Throw everything else away.

There are two possibilities -

1\. There is something, and it has always existed. 2\. There is something, and
it once did not exist.

Either one is weird.

The author doesn't address this, and I feel, despite their sparkling
credentials, that they should have.

~~~
jedimind
It's actually just 1., because 2. just rerolls the question, what caused that
something to begin existing?

~~~
naringas
but why should it be a matter of causing something to begin exising? maybe
it's also about not preventing anything from existing?

~~~
jedimind
Because it violates the principal of causality ( it also violates common
sense, ex nihilo nihil fit).

