Something Instead of Nothing

And not for a fait accompli, that this nothingness again to a mere nothing, a trifle not worth inquiring into, that individuality be reinstalled, even by self sacrificial means of which Ec.so skillfully maintains his licence to liscenciousness.And I concur to reserve that right.

That’s what he meant by “the question, a denial of the something, there is.”

Again, we need an actual context here. We need things that we can point to or not point to and say something or nothing.

Or, with respect to existence itself, somethingness and nothingness.

Given somethingness, we need to make the distinction between existence where some things exist in that particular context and some things do not. Then the distinction between the either/or and is/ought worlds.

Then we need to go all the back to whatever brought into existence the existence of existence itself. And then speculate [and that’s all it will ever probably be among mere mortals] about the possibility of everything there is simply “exploding” into existence out of nothing at all.

And then, finally, while noting that it is always fascinating to speculate about these things [the biggest of the Big Questions] what are the odds that infinitesimally tiny specks of existence like “you” and “I” will ever really know?

That is, before “I” is dead and gone, becoming nothing at all save for the elements that will eventually devolve back into star stuff.

Then: Cue God?

The problem with the question is in the only way in which “nothing” can be understood.

Any way in which anyone ever refers to “nothing” is within a frame of something. E.g. nothing in the box: framed by the box. Nothing in the vacuum: framed by that which is outside of the vacuum, in particular all the things that are known to normally fill what isn’t a vacuum - like air. Nothing in space: no light, no particles or waves - at least conceived and understood in terms of somethings that are conceptually outside the nothingness even if they weren’t even spatially outside the nothingness. It has to be framed by “space” to be understood as nothing in our minds, else it is meaningless, and space is something, so the proposition contradicts itself even here.

“True” nothingness would have to be, amongst everything else, not-with-meaning (meaning is a something) - hence meaningless to us.

The question “why” asks for meaning. Ask “why” about meaninglessness, and you can’t get an answer from the outset. An answer has meaning - and how can something (meaning) meaningfully come from nothing (meaningless)?

It’s all contradiction, just like the grammar suggests. If there were to “be” nothing rather than something, how does that work? If we’re talking about “why is there ” - it has to be a something.

The question is trying to be “why do things like mass and energy exist, when presumably there must be some possible scenario where they didn’t come to exist”, at least in the minds of scientists - who answer “why” questions with “how”. The best that even they can do is to frame a possibility of nothingness with the somethingness of some mechanism that isn’t really nothingness, because a mechanism at least needs conceptual somethings to “work”.

A better question might be “is this a valid question, and even if it was, what would we do with it?”
It seems to me more like an exercise question than a valid one.

2op
If there were only nothingness, there would be an infinite amount of it which is a whole and not nothing [it would be 1 ‘something’].

fc

From what does all that derive? God/Christ made ordinary people stronger than they were before, then the collective value is greater. a collective strength requires determination of the individual + concession to the greater good ~ between individuals [even if that is not known].
In practice casting the mind over history and its lessons: we could take Spartan equals, then ask; why are first born males superior? Then lets say they generally are superior fighters for various reasons e.g. being decision makers etc, well; are not third born’s better archers, and second born’s cavalry. Next level on, we can ask; is not the superior blacksmith of equal importance, would spartans defeat knights or Romans trained to work together by all their skills? It all ends up at intelligence and collectives winning. Which isn’t the same as being weak ~ the Romans were not weak, and their strength was collective.

_

Nothing is, at least to me, more an absence of something material capable of being seen lol and nothingness is more an emotional experience or a mood.

Stated in this way, the difference would have to be something which I would have to give more thought to. It is an interesting question.

That stardust has been lost for ages… Kind of like the suns of 2 hyper-giants or something ridiculous

Damn thanks all or these elaborated replies. I think this was a real philosophical question I accidentally asked.
Meno and Silhouette first, they make a great difference, I need to wrap my head round this difference first.

Nothing is a dimension which has no things or a trick in a training question.

Beurk. That is really difficult.

“is this a valid question, and even if it was, what would we do with it?”

maybe we can assume it is in some hidden way a valid question and this valid question is then also an answer about how to ask questions?

Ok so if im correct, nothing is objective and nothingness is subjective?

No sir I disagree with you. First of all speculating is not philosophy and second I do a hell of a lot more than speculating. I can speculate that I may get in this pussy but when Im in it Im no longer speculating. I mean to begin with. That is how I was born by some dude not anymore speculating but doing the thing to some girl.

Or am I alone here?

Logic is definitely not speculative if you have a definitional logic.
You just begin with something real, which is always an action.

barbarianhorde

Yes, this is the way that I was looking at it. The former can be material while the later is ethereal or psychical ~~ though they both call to mind a kind of emptiness.

At the same time, when one thinks of the Universe before there was anything, if that was even so ~~ how can one ever comprehend it, one can call THAT (before all creation) nothing and nothingness… or devoid of space. lol I do not mean to convolute here.

At the risk of showing my ignorance here, what is the valid question if there is one in particular?

What would be the criteria for making a question valid? Would it be the proof in the pudding meaning whether or not the answers which come from it are seemingly valid and not non-sensible…if that made sense.

It does seem paradoxical that we can question “Why something rather than nothing?” given that a second’s thought to the matter makes us realize you can’t have nothing. This says something about the way we conceptualize ‘things’. Even when we contemplate the whole of existence, we make it into a ‘thing,’ and a thing is conceptualized as an entity in existence, not as existence itself. Therefore, it seems incomplete. It seems like there ought to be other things around it, a background from which it came, a source, a greater universe to give existence to it. So to ask “why something?” is to ask: what is the greater existence that spawned the existence we know of? And how did it do it?

Hold on, stop the pony, I just realized the Sun is nothingness.

all the things in it are destroyed constantly, it is just the failure of many things at once to exist impeding each other constantly and destroying. No city can ever be built in the Sun, no hammer forged. No thing can be made.

I find it far off to deny the Sun is a thing, but he is a thing as a negation of thingness. Thats a pretty special (and weird) thing.

That explains Christmas.

So is the Sun the things that are destroyed in it? What is the “it” in which they are destroyed?
The Sun, surely?

Ironically, it is within stars like the Sun that all chemical elements are created.

Every single thing that you might consider to be a thing that would be destroyed by the Sun is historically a product of stars like the Sun.

Is not, also, “destruction” a form of “creation” - albeit a creation of something with more entropy?
Consider the “conservation of energy” that dictates that the energy taken to destroy is equally given off in another form such as light and heat. The light and heat at least are the Sun, surely? It’s all some existent matter and energy behaving in some way or other, no matter how relatively violently and impermanently.

Great reply because it makes it even more interesting for me, I stick with my discovery. Because listen, what gets destroyed the most in the Sun is hydrogen right? And hydrogen isn’t made in the Sun it is what the Sun is made of when a cold cloud collapses.

So the sun is the thing that wrecks the stufflings of which it is made but then …it makes carbon and oxygen because of where it dies and reincarnates into a red giant where all the heavier elements get prepared to get spat out into space when it dies for good and a neutron corpse star remain which is a thing … because… it is totally still and dead.

So when the un-thing or nothingness dies it becomes things.

Still, an understanding of somethingness involves somehow connecting the dots between what some insist was nothing at all exploding into existence into everything there is evolving over billions of years into matter mindful enough to speculate about the meaning of it all here and now.

Then the part where my somethingness topples over into the abyss that some insist is nothing at all, but: But the stuff we started out as.

And how preposterous does that sound?

I’m trying to imagine the star that you came from. This and how star stuff can somehow evolve into pussy.

Or, for that matter, dickheads. :-"

Nothing having ever evolved doesn’t sound like a fairy tale stories. This sounds like relative facts. But still a source upon if we throw again a book at someone like the road to evolution or something. Than there might possibly only one sort of element people are forgetting in the mind. Carbon.