(February 8, 2018 at 11:14 pm)Grandizer Wrote:(February 8, 2018 at 1:41 pm)SteveII Wrote: Your problem continues to be that the pronoun 'nothing' means the negation of the word it is referring to!!
You had nothing for lunch. That means lunch did not happen.
You saw nobody. Means that seeing a person did not happen.
None of the people ate to cookie. Means that eating did not happen.
Nothing existing. Means that existing did not happen.
So no, it does not look to be a logical contradiction--in the slightest. You MUST have tried to look this up. Didn't the fact that you couldn't find anything give you pause?
It is a logical contradiction, but I was missing some intermediate steps there to get to that conclusion.
The negation of everything in existence still requires something to exist for such a state of affairs to be possible. And in fact, the negation itself must be expressed as a possible world/state, one that has to be "concrete" in order to be possibly actual. But we can't speak of something like that as true "nothingness". And so "nothing exists" does translate to "nothing is something" and, therefore, is illogical.
Fine, I will grant that the concept of existence must be present in every possible world and that concept is something (much like numbers, logic, and other abstract objects). However, this whole discussion started when I made the statement that the universe does not necessary exist. That is still the case.
