The Absolute Impossibility of Nothingness - ever

[SpheresOfBalance]

What a load of horseshit. Before I was created, I was nonexistent. I get that you can argue that physical nothingness is impossible, but don't confuse this with no consciousness, which is the nothing of the observer. Here you're just wrong. And why most don't appreciate the subtleties of antinatalism. I just don't get where exactly your blind spots are, that you don't get this.

there was no you, but the shit of which you are comprised was already in existence, and when you die and rot away the shit of which you are comprised will dissipate.
In fact the shit of which you are comprised changes everyday. You do not possess a single atom in your body that you had seven years ago, except maybe your teeth; but even they grow and fade, depositing new calcium and flouride from the inside to the outside, continually wearing away.

Nutters want to tell you that some part of what makes you, you, persists; this is just wishful thinking. They are also going to rot and die. Things come to be and things pass away. What makes you, yourself is the organisation of matter for a temporary period struggling against the inevitability of death and decay.
Of course I agree with all of this above.

But you shall never know nothing,
But to say anyone shall never know nothing is ridiculous, a no-brainer, totally absurd to even consider.

and being nothing is a contradiction in terms.
Same here concerning those constituents (elements) that allow us to function as we do. But elements are not all we are made of, our brains work with electricity, electromagnetic radiation, you cannot prove that part of us continues; that magical spark, without which, life would not exist. It seems to run the show, yet no man can, as of yet, get a handle on it. Where is it, where does it come from, where does it go, is it everywhere, does it behave much like we believe we see at the quantum level, in and out of existence? Is it just love and miracles out of nowhere? The forces that are the glue of this universe are still a mystery, yet some of you foolish people talk as if you can know...

...for those of you that believe such, your faith betrays your intellect.

Mans knowledge indeed, hah!!!!

[Hobbes' Choice]

Of course I agree with all of this above.]

I no longer give a flying fuck what you agree with . I did not address the comment to you and never read the rest of your verbal diarrhoea.

[SpheresOfBalance]

Of course I agree with all of this above.]

I no longer give a flying fuck what you agree with . I did not address the comment to you and never read the rest of your verbal diarrhoea.

How old are you again? 12?
So it surely seems!

[Hobbes' Choice]

Of course I agree with all of this above.]

I no longer give a flying fuck what you agree with . I did not address the comment to you and never read the rest of your verbal diarrhoea.

How old are you again? 12?
So it surely seems!

I'm old enough to figure out that life is far too short to waste any more time on a nappy-headed twat like you

[SpheresOfBalance]

I no longer give a flying fuck what you agree with . I did not address the comment to you and never read the rest of your verbal diarrhoea.

How old are you again? 12?
So it surely seems!

I'm old enough to figure out that life is far too short to waste any more time on a nappy-headed twat like you

Nappy-headed? I'm as white as white can be, remember, I'm a mushroom. You could do a hell of a lot worse than listening to my ideas, and you know it, so screw you too, pea brain!

[Dontaskme]

Nothing is the most meaningless expression or thought that there is. And it is probably expressed more than anything else.

But the word does not have a meaning because there is always something even though it may not be perceivable.

Something doesn't dissolve into nothing...something always dissolve back into that something from which it came and which it always forever is.

That something is the one thing that can't be imagined. That something is what no word, expression, thought, sensation, idea, concept, dream, nightmare, illusion, hallucination, drug, trip, fantasy, mirage, imitate, create, articulate, deviate, situate. Nothing can describe that something.

[Dalek Prime]

Another thought. Based on antinatalism, terraforming other worlds would be doing those worlds an injustice. Basically we'd be agitating the surface geology that had been obviously "asleep" for millennia, forcing those molecules into biological processes where pain and suffering can be experienced.

On the other hand, seeding other worlds also brings the potential for intelligent life to eventually transcend suffering. What if suffering is only a temporary state to be transcended for most of the universe's lifespan? Billions of years dominated by ever more decent and contented beings that are never smug about it.

Assuming suffering can ever be transcended. And in the process of trying to transcend suffering, billions will suffer for your non-suffering hypothetical beings to reach their bliss. Which is pointless anyways, as both bliss and suffering needn't be in the first place. Again, you're making the assumption that consciousness needs to be at all, merely because you can't imagine otherwise. It's nostalgia for your own existence.

[Conde Lucanor]

That you play word games is nothing new, invalid logic yields nothing. Well nothing of any real value!

By definition, nothingness is nonexistence; not being. So only a fool would say: "...nonexistence cannot exist." Why simply repeat the definition, simply reiterate, as if that actually says something.

Well, it seems obvious then that you're absolutely unaware of the existence of analytic propositions in philosophy and their importance in understanding the type of truths they convey. Kant, Quine and the like, such fools.

Read the topic, it says absolutely nothing about existence.

When it comes down to propositional statements, the original post includes a lot of assertions about something that "is", about "being", which conveys existence. And yet you say it says absolutely nothing. Did you ever read it?

What was here before the big bang? What banged? Where did that which banged come from?

The absolute impossibility of nothingness implies that there had to be something. That's because "nothing" and "something" are mutually exclusive, they cannot both be true.

If it expanded that means it had to expand somewhere, and if it expanded into something, then it wasn't our origin, as the something it expanded into had to be here first. Could it have expanded into nothing, the nothing being a void; simply space? Is nothing simply space? The opposite of nothing is forever being, ad infinitum. Really, there has always been something, to infinity? Can you envision infinity?

It may be hard, but it surely makes more sense than envisioning its finite boundaries.

[Greta]

Another thought. Based on antinatalism, terraforming other worlds would be doing those worlds an injustice. Basically we'd be agitating the surface geology that had been obviously "asleep" for millennia, forcing those molecules into biological processes where pain and suffering can be experienced.

On the other hand, seeding other worlds also brings the potential for intelligent life to eventually transcend suffering. What if suffering is only a temporary state to be transcended for most of the universe's lifespan? Billions of years dominated by ever more decent and contented beings that are never smug about it.

Assuming suffering can ever be transcended. And in the process of trying to transcend suffering, billions will suffer for your non-suffering hypothetical beings to reach their bliss. Which is pointless anyways, as both bliss and suffering needn't be in the first place. Again, you're making the assumption that consciousness needs to be at all, merely because you can't imagine otherwise. It's nostalgia for your own existence.

It's clear that suffering can be alleviated, even if at the expense of the disempowered amongst both our species and others. The alternative is that everyone suffers together with no hope of improvement until the Sun expands and the surface is cooked.

Almost everyone is guaranteed to die on Earth by the time the Sun grows, so better to go with some life preserved that's capable of moving elsewhere IMO. You obviously prefer that the whole mess of life be extinguished and no one need suffer again. Nor feel contentment or joy. You favour the former over the latter because you believe the problem of suffering to unsolvable, making life a predatory/parasitic entity imposing the pain of existence on once-innocently inert material.

You have previously suggested that my ideas are flavoured by wishful thinking just as I've suggested yours are coloured by negativity bias. Yes, suffering appears to be more predominant and influential than pleasure. Currently.

I see our conversation as evidence of our progress; safely loafing about, tapping idly in code about the nature of reality, never for a moment living in fear of being jumped by a predator intent on turning our entrails into soup. That safety was hard won by many generations of courageous (often wildly unethical) ancestors and I, for one, am grateful for their efforts. Living wild looks like it would absolutely suck. I think any dominant species would insulate themselves from danger by whatever means, and that's especially important for helplessly lead-footed, thin-skinned, small-mouthed, small-toothed, clawless and armourless apes.

The way I see it, consciousness exists because life exists because organic chemistry exists because inorganic chemistry exists and so forth. Consciousness is inevitable because it's efficacious in terms of survival; it's useful to have some idea of what's going on. Living forms that are most flexibly efficacious are the ones that persist.

Alas, Dalek, you were born 13 billion years too early. You might have rather liked the universe back then, just innocently inflating, exploding and colliding. No fighting or squabbling (unless you count cosmic collisions). No pain. No cruelty. No loss. No rejection. No betrayal. No reality TV. Just stuff happening ... although with the inevitable result of today's circumstances occurring 13 billion years later.

Even if we consider the state of reality 14 billion years ago (imposing our time on what's apparently timeless), that so-called nothingness still wasn't "nothing enough" to avoid the events that resulted in today's circumstances. No matter how you approach the issue of something v nothing, we have something now and that seems to have always been the case, and in primordial times whatever was present (from which the BB emerged) was not something we understand, so we call it "nothingness".

[sthitapragya]

Even if we consider the state of reality 14 billion years ago (imposing our time on what's apparently timeless), that so-called nothingness still wasn't "nothing enough" to avoid the events that resulted in today's circumstances. No matter how you approach the issue of something v nothing, we have something now and that seems to have always been the case, and in primordial times whatever was present (from which the BB emerged) was not something we understand, so we call it "nothingness".

I think the so-called nothingness is just misunderstood. I don't think there is any claim by physicists that there was nothing. All they say is that as we look backward in time, all the matter and energy in the universe contracted to infinite density in what we call a singularity inside which time and space did not exist. We only can look forward from this point as space time started developing within the singularity and expanding. The density started reducing as volume started increasing and interesting things started happening to matter and energy as the temperature started to decrease.

The absence of space time within the singularity somehow led to the interpretation that since there was no space and no time there was nothing. In actuality all they say is that there was no space and time within the singularity and since there was no space, there was no outside of the singularity either. And as space started expanding, we now have the universe. However, there is no outside of the expanding space time.

At least this is what I have understood so far. but then I have always been bad at this science stuff.

[Greta]

I think the so-called nothingness is just misunderstood. I don't think there is any claim by physicists that there was nothing. All they say is that as we look backward in time, all the matter and energy in the universe contracted to infinite density in what we call a singularity inside which time and space did not exist. We only can look forward from this point as space time started developing within the singularity and expanding. The density started reducing as volume started increasing and interesting things started happening to matter and energy as the temperature started to decrease.

The absence of space time within the singularity somehow led to the interpretation that since there was no space and no time there was nothing. In actuality all they say is that there was no space and time within the singularity and since there was no space, there was no outside of the singularity either. And as space started expanding, we now have the universe. However, there is no outside of the expanding space time.

At least this is what I have understood so far. but then I have always been bad at this science stuff.

Certainly Lawrence Krauss has used the term "nothing" wryly. However, it's a very common for physicists and others to claim there was nothing before the big bang, usually followed by "not even time".

I am personally leery of the idea that the universe stemmed from a singularity within nothingness. Many physicists don't believe the singularity was real, just a hypothetical construction that appears to be the logical conclusion based on running time backwards. The claim that time did not exist before the BB assumes absolute nothingness. After all, time is change. If they are not assuming nothingness with a claim of pre-BB timelessness, then they posit time as - not the rate of change per se - but something that only exists if we can measure it via cyclic rotation or decay rates. Practical, but not useful in terms of ontology. If Krauss's soup of virtual particles

Also, the idea of a lone singularity brings in relativity of scale. What is the difference between the hypothesised singularity - an infinitely small trillion degree spot of supercompressed plasma - and a single long wave photon in space at the projected heat death of the universe, further from its nearest decayed photon neighbour than the entire diameter of today's universe?

If what surrounds those stray slowly-decaying photons is true nothingness, then how can it be said that the photon's energy is small or large? That photon would be everything (unless you counted its sparse "neighbours" quintillions of light years away).

[sthitapragya]

I think the so-called nothingness is just misunderstood. I don't think there is any claim by physicists that there was nothing. All they say is that as we look backward in time, all the matter and energy in the universe contracted to infinite density in what we call a singularity inside which time and space did not exist. We only can look forward from this point as space time started developing within the singularity and expanding. The density started reducing as volume started increasing and interesting things started happening to matter and energy as the temperature started to decrease.

The absence of space time within the singularity somehow led to the interpretation that since there was no space and no time there was nothing. In actuality all they say is that there was no space and time within the singularity and since there was no space, there was no outside of the singularity either. And as space started expanding, we now have the universe. However, there is no outside of the expanding space time.

At least this is what I have understood so far. but then I have always been bad at this science stuff.

Certainly Lawrence Krauss has used the term "nothing" wryly. However, it's a very common for physicists and others to claim there was nothing before the big bang, usually followed by "not even time".

I am personally leery of the idea that the universe stemmed from a singularity within nothingness. Many physicists don't believe the singularity was real, just a hypothetical construction that appears to be the logical conclusion based on running time backwards. The claim that time did not exist then assumes absolute nothingness since time is change. Either that or the claim that time didn't exist posits time, not as a rate of change per se, but only as something that exists if we can measure it via cyclic rotation or decay rates (practical but not ontologically useful).

Also, the idea of a lone singularity brings in relativity of scale. What is the difference between the hypothesised singularity - an infinitely small trillion degree spot of supercompressed plasma - and a single long wave photon in space at the projected heat death of the universe, further from its nearest decayed photon neighbour than the entire diameter of today's universe?

If what surrounds those stray slowly-decaying photons is true nothingness, then how can it be said that the photon's energy is small or large? That photon would be everything (unless you counted its sparse "neighbours" quintillions of light years away).

But what surrounds those stray photons is not true nothingness. There is real space between them which did not exist at the big bang. However, what surrounded all the matter and energy of the universe at the singularity would be true nothingness as there literally was nothing outside of it and no space time inside of it. At least that seems to be the theory.

Also, from, what I understand, the infinitesimally small singularity is with reference to only the observable universe. The relative singularity of the whole universe is not what they are talking about here as that is undefined. We have no real idea of the size of the whole universe, how much larger than the observable universe it is. If the whole universe is actually infinite, then the singularity of the whole universe could also be at least observably infinite. Basically it would be all the matter and energy in the whole universe compressed to the extent that there is no space inside of it and that could mean anything depending upon the actual matter and energy in the whole universe.

[Greta]

But what surrounds those stray photons is not true nothingness. There is real space between them which did not exist at the big bang. However, what surrounded all the matter and energy of the universe at the singularity would be true nothingness as there literally was nothing outside of it and no space time inside of it. At least that seems to be the theory.

My old forum pal, Obvious Leo (who, based on the obits, passed away recently ) would have had apoplexy at the idea of "real space". There is still much debate about the idea of "space", eg. http://www.onlinephilosophyclub.com/for ... 1&start=45

The question is, would this "real space" physically differ from the nothingness of pre BB reality?

[sthitapragya]

But what surrounds those stray photons is not true nothingness. There is real space between them which did not exist at the big bang. However, what surrounded all the matter and energy of the universe at the singularity would be true nothingness as there literally was nothing outside of it and no space time inside of it. At least that seems to be the theory.

My old forum pal, Obvious Leo (who, based on the obits, passed away recently ) would have had apoplexy at the idea of "real space". There is still much debate about the idea of "space", eg. http://www.onlinephilosophyclub.com/for ... 1&start=45

The question is, would this "real space" physically differ from the nothingness of pre BB reality?

That is really sad news. I learned a lot from Leo and he set me right on so many physics issues I had. I was in fact thinking of sending him a message asking him to come back to the forum. This is shocking.

[Greta]

That is really sad news. I learned a lot from Leo and he set me right on so many physics issues I had. I was in fact thinking of sending him a message asking him to come back to the forum. This is shocking.

That's how I felt. He sorted me out on a number of physics issues too and was always entertaining. He wasn't coming to the forum and hadn't replied to my last email to him. I emailed him again without luck. So then I checked the obituaties and found someone of his name, location and vintage who'd passed away in June so I assume it's him.