Dontaskme wrote:Nothing may be the single most prolific idea ever to plop into the human brain.... Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens.
--Mary Ellen Curtin
"Nothing" turns out to be a lot more interesting than it first seems. Check out Satre's Being and Nothingness" or Nietzsche's Nihilism.
Take a line drawing of a cube. We see one face forward and then can make a decision to try to see it with the back face forward instead. Or take the famous profile vase image
https://www.google.com.au/search?site=& ... QTm1x1AHVM:
What's different? Where we assign being and where we assign nothing.
Our perception of space (the nothing in which what we call physical objects exist) is actually created by our brains. Hoever, it is different to think of something one way and to see it be that way. In fact we think of a line drawing of a cube as flat. It is after all drawn on a flat paper, but we dont see it that way. Our minds manipulate being and nothingness in a three dimensional imagination that "space" is a partial descripton of. In empty space we then find nothing. Very few suspect this.
Thinking in the narrow sense is not the only thing our bains do with ideas. You have to see and even feel - not just think in the narrow sense to get the implications of the idea of nothing.. We actually perceive in terms of nothing and being not just think in the narrow sense. Look into the night sky and try to see the white holes in the black thing instead of the stars. It appears that the color of nothing is black.
It is also very relevant to consciousness as it isn't anything. Understanding that "to be" does not mean "to be something" is necessary in order to understand consciousness. And you can't understand what it means to be something without understanding how we introduce nothingness into the plenum of being. The nihilation withdrawal that makes it not just seeing something but something in itself. The nihilation withdrawal that defines space. The Nothing of a literal vacuum.
But more profoundly there are very deep forms of nihilation that connect our cognitive biology to our hormonal or nerotransmitter responses. The nihilation of being as meaningless can lead to very painful states of boredom, anxiety, and nausea caused by the pain of extreme experiences of the negation of Being. it is not a neutral or purely intellectual experience in the narrow sense. Again it's not just a case of thinking in the narrow sense but how our brains can get into states of extreme experiences of nothingness as a kind of horrible fatherless anxiety and an extreme experience of life as being worthless, painful, helish..
We engage in fantasies of sadism and masochism manipulating this nothingness in others around us and in ourselves.
Likewise, being able to thrust aside this tendency can lead to ecstatic experiences - as sudden in their arrival as the spring change from the vase to the profile and reports of profound Enlightenment follow from accomplishing an actual cessation of this nihilation. When that happens somehow we are flooded with hormones or some form of chemical substances that induce ecstasy and what the Buddhists call the cessation of desire.
An it leaves you intellectually changed forever.
In humor you can even see a role for this profound negation in the difference between joking and mocking.
Our inability to cease nihilation at will is the source of our lack of Enlightenment and is ultimately the reason we primates have build fields of nuclear tipped muscles all ready to inflict massive suffering and pain with millions wandering with infected third degree burns in a hospital-less world. Why? Very deep instinctive patterns of negation and how they function in our primate neurology.
Understanding the epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, linguistic, artistic, scientific, political, and religious experiences of nothing is truly a difficult study on which the philosophical destiny of our biology depends.
Hopefully we will understand our mammalian heritage and salvage our experience of freedom from this profound negation, from the wrecking aspects of nothingness, and restore our relationship to being as we engineer our neurology ino the future. If we don't we become like some borg hive.
We just need to see existence as time not as some vacuum of space in which some regions are designated as being and understand why and how our brains react when we do. Then we can remove what is variously called Maya or original sin or whatever you want to call what prevents us from experiencing the ecstasy of being instead of thrusting us into non existent or baseless competitive fantasies that currently wreck our behavior.