(May 5, 2018 at 1:40 am)Hammy Wrote:(May 4, 2018 at 11:19 am)Jörmungandr Wrote: It's not clear that virtual particles which exist on the edge of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle are indeed something as most ontologies consider the concept of substance. They seem to be neither substance nor nothing, making your lumping them into one or the other category more a rhetorical flourish than anything.
And what is "neither something nor nothing" supposed to even mean exactly?
It means that traditional ontologies are inadequate for describing Nature as she is, and language and arguments built upon conventional ontological assumptions are therefore likely to be flawed. ("Ex nihilo nihl fit", for example.)
(May 5, 2018 at 2:28 am)Anomalocaris Wrote:(May 4, 2018 at 11:19 am)Jörmungandr Wrote: It's not clear that virtual particles which exist on the edge of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle are indeed something as most ontologies consider the concept of substance. They seem to be neither substance nor nothing, making your lumping them into one or the other category more a rhetorical flourish than anything.
Hawking radiation depends on virtual particles being substance. Otherwise the substance that is blackhole transmutates through Hawking radiation into neither substance nor nothing, thus violating the general conservation of substanceness.
The general conservation of substanceness? Did you just pull that out of your ass? Regardless, the traditional ontological conception is that nothing comes from nothing, and that something always comes from something else. However, if, as I suggest, traditional ontology is flawed and incomplete, you can't use the strictures of traditional ontology to argue against something that calls those very assumptions into doubt. That would be invalid. In addition, Hawking radiation is the result of combining gravity and virtual particles, and gravity is not nothing, so the rules of traditional ontology are not violated anyway.
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