Devil's advocate for why ontology is meaningless and vacuous.

[robvalue]

@ Rob

I see what you mean by it all being labelling... as you said here:

If nothing is "real" at all, that is fine.

Replace this sentence with "If everything is "real", that is fine" or "if nothing is "imaginary" at all, that is fine" or "if everything is "imaginary", that is fine" and nothing changes... indeed... all labels.

It's also why I said this in the OP:

In summary I'd conclude that ontology is meaningless. 'Being' is indefinable and therefore no different to 'nothingness' because nothingness can't be anything anyway because it's nothing. There is no nothing.

Let's say I replaced that with the following:

In summary I'd conclude that nothingness is meaningless. 'Nothingness' is indefinable and therefore no different to 'Being' because 'Being' itself has to be everything which is indistinguiable from it being nothing. All there is is 'Being'.

What's the difference between the two? I'd say in reality it makes no difference and is labels. The first one is bascially saying "Existence is indefinable  and there is no such thing as nothing" and the second one is saying "Nothingness is in definable and every thing is a thing".

It's rather like how "everything is equally different to everything else" and "everything is equally similar to everything else" is saying the same thing regardless of "different" and "similar" having opposite meanings.

What do you reckon?

Yes, I think that makes sense to me! If you can't define what "existence" is, you can't define what the lack of it is, either. You can just say whether a label applies, or not. We're just trying to make sense of our surroundings as best we can.