RE: Does nothing exist?
March 15, 2010 at 8:09 am
(This post was last modified: March 15, 2010 at 5:23 pm by Violet.)
(March 14, 2010 at 11:19 am)downbeatplumb Wrote: Nothing exists as a concept only.
Similar to infinity, infinity is a descrioption of a process not a 'thing' in its own right.
'Nothing' is just a description of an absecnece of things.
Basically I reject your assertion that it can be a thing and you'll have to be bloomin convincing to move me from that position.
How can a process not be a 'thing'?
Illustrate to me how the existence of a process is different than the existence of a thing?

Example being say evolution. Would you not posit that evolution exists? If so... then why would you say that infinity and nothingness do not in fact exist (as more than concepts, and if you do in fact think of them as a 'process')?
And yet we have a name for that absence of things. Similar to how a lack of theism would be atheism... itself descriptive only as what it is not. No thing is only descriptive so far as its not being a thing... but then what is it? Is it at all? How could it be an it in the first place if it does not first exist?
Perhaps nothing doesn't posit that it doesn't exist at all... but rather that it exists in a state where it is not a thing (that being what specifically does being a thing entail?)? If 'thing' is defined as an object... then its existence is fine. But what about nonexistence, even granting that nothing exists? Does nonexistence exist? A state that does not exist... surely that must exist if only by not existing (In the way atheism exists only in its not being theism)?

^ More counterpoints.

Please give me a home where cloud buffalo roam
Where the dear and the strangers can play
Where sometimes is heard a discouraging word
But the skies are not stormy all day