"That's not nothing"

[Mister Agenda]

[quote='Mister Agenda' pid='670904' dateline='1400168597']
Despite carefully explaining exactly what he means: there is no such thing as absolute nothingness, at the closest we can get to it, there is still quantum foam.

That doesn't escape the equivocation fallacy. Saying "The closest we can get to X is Y, therefore X is Y" is clearly fallacious.

Krauss doesn not claim quantum foam is absolute nothingness. That's a philosophical term, not a scientific one. He explains, in effect, that when he says 'X', he means 'X1', which in reasonable discourse would get you out of a charge of equivocation which is a form of using unclear language in order to deceive. But if you feel butthurt about it, I'm sure he's got a website or a blog where you can register you dissatisfaction. He'll probably be interested in your explanation of how he's using the equivocation fallacy when he's precisely defining his terms. A casual observer might think there's no fallacy involved, just you not liking his choice of words.

"'No potentiality for creation' is a property, and an awfully convenient one for Craig to apply to nothingness, given that he wants to conclude that 'nothing can come from nothing'."

Again, that's just obviously playing on language. Not having any properties is NOT a property. And if you're going to be consistent, you might as well say that non-existent things have the property of non-existence. It's absurd, but that's what is entailed by what you're saying.

Maybe I am wrong, I'm no professional philosopher. However, as far as your explanation for WHY I'm wrong, I don't see any issue at all with saying non-existent things have the property of non-existence, and I don't see how it's absurd to say so. What would be absurd would be to say that non-existent things DON'T have the property of non-existence, because that would mean they exist.

"That is true. It is also true that if the energy balance of the universe ('negative' energy plus 'positive' energy) is not exactly zero, it is very, very, close to zero."

So? These are still existent things. They couldn't (even in principle) balance off to be "nothing".

That's what people in the logic biz call 'an unsupported assertion'.

"The quantum fluctuations themselves are something from nothing. There is no true nothingness because nothingness 'fizzes'."

And here we go again. Are you saying there isn't anything, and yet it "fizzes"? If you are, then you're contradicting yourself. Processes require there to be something going through the process or action, i.e you don't have rolling going on without something that exists which is rolling.

Apparently that is not an absolute requirement. But maybe I'm wrong. If it's an absolute requirement, and you know that, surely you can demonstrate it. Because there certainly SEEMS to be a phenomenon that doesn't require there to be something for something to happen.

"The uncertainty principle says that you cannot simultaneously know the position and momentum of a particle. The position and momentum of a particle that doesn't exist is 0,0. Since we can't know that, it might exist, and therefore it does, at least sometimes. Quantum vacuum fluctuations aren't coming from something, they are causeless."

The uncertainty principle is an epistemic barrier, I don't think it has anything to do with ontology.

It's an observable effect (NOT the observer effect...) in quantum mechanics, not epistemology. I know it sounds like epistemology because it concerns what we can know, but it's physics.

Even if there were no space and time, these fluctuations would still happen, they are essentially temporary bits of energy and space flashing into and out of existence. That's how the hypothesis goes, anyway.

Which means they exist, and hence are a referent, a thing.

No kidding. But where do they come from? Evidence says nowhere.

Clearly it has the property of not having properties. It seems superficially to involve a contradiction to say nothingness has no properties.

[quote='MindForgedManacle' pid='670947' dateline='1400172744']
I already dealt with this above, but for a quick recap: that is absurd.

Making an unsupported assertion is not what I consider dealing with something. YMMV.

Not having a property is not itself a property. Otherwise I could, under that paradigm, say all non-existent things have the property of non-existence.

Can't you even come up with two examples that don't make your point?

But having properties denotes existing, hence demonstrating a contradiction in your account.

Adding more unsupported assertions to your claims doesn't make them more supported.

Maybe you're right, but the reasons you're giving for being right don't support that hypothesis.

I... thought... that... quantum foam and quantum fluctuations were pretty much the same thing...

Quantum foam is made of quantum fluctuations. Hypothetically, they would occur even with no universe/space-time for them to 'happen in'. Sorry if I was being unclear.