Mid-morningish.
You are awaiting Larry and crew: Joe and Jason. – Amorella
1021
hours. Larry called about an hour and a half ago saying that Jason’s son was
ill so he won’t be in and that Joe is finishing up another job. They will be
out after ten-thirty or later. They have about three and a half hours of work
they must get done today because the plumber will be out tomorrow to set the
plumbing for the new tub which will go in today. Such is the life of a general
contractor. Things get done when they have to. Larry is going to work for
Jason. I don’t think I would like such a life but I’m sure some people thrive
on it – always deadlines, always one problem or another. I suppose Larry wouldn’t
enjoy teaching English literature to seniors five or six classes a day five
days a week for nine to ten months of the year. Same thing every day, class
after class. I loved it. What made the difference in each class was the time of
day and the students when encountered.
**
You would
like me to help you here, as an imaginary-or-not writing persona, in
distinguishing between Timelessness and Time from the Amorella’s perspective.
This is where you were going whether you realized it or not. Later, dude.
(yesterday’s posting)
**
1417
hours. I really think you talked about this once but not necessarily in this concept
framework.
We leave G---D out of it. Doug mentioned how
sleep might be construed as an alternate reality, and death also as an
alternate reality. Hypnosis is also considered an alternate reality. We can
work with this without your concern for stepping into the deep end, so to
speak. – Amorella
1425
hours. I don’t feel comfortable getting too close (for me psychologically). I
have learned that no one can get that close to G---D accidently or otherwise. I do like the focus on sleep, death and hypnosis trance as alternate realities.
In here, boy, accidents are sometimes a
misnomer. This is from my perspective not yours. - Amorella
1447
hours. I just looked up ‘misnomer’ which original meant ‘wrongly named’ in Old
French. It is strange that sometimes after you have used a word I have to look
it up because, in the moment, I become unsure the more I think about it. What
would you use in place of ‘accident’?
Look up the synonyms. – Amorella
1457
hours. If I were worth my salt I’d come up with the list myself. Such irony.
** **
accident – noun
1
an accident at work: mishap, misadventure,
unfortunate incident, mischance, misfortune, disaster, tragedy, catastrophe,
calamity; technical casualty.
2
she was injured in a highway accident: crash, collision,
smash, bump, car crash; wreck; informal smash-up, pileup, fender bender.
3 it is no accident
that there is a similarity between them: (mere)
chance, coincidence, twist of fate, freak; fluke, bit of luck,
serendipity; fate, fortuity, fortune, providence, happenstance.
Selected and edited
from the Oxford/American
** **
You do not see a proper word. – Amorella
(1521 hours) I don’t.
Think of this, the tiny hole in a floorboard
causes a nail to enter and close it. – Amorella
(1616
hours) Larry and Joe left about forty minutes ago. The new tub is in the
upstairs hallway. Tomorrow, Greg, their plumber will install the plumbing and
tub. Larry has a commercial building in the Deerfield Shopping area he is
working on. It is a high-end spa for pregnant ladies. The man who owns it had
Larry do new construction on his home a couple of years ago and chose him for
this project. This adds us confidence in Larry’s work.
1644
hours. We are at Natorp’s and Carol is looking for a particular flower and ground
cover for the front yard. I am pondering: ‘a tiny hole in a floorboard causing
a nail to enter and close it’. Why would the hole exist before the nail?
Nothing
exists then gravity, that’s the analogy. - Amorella
1621
hours. This doesn’t make sense. How can gravity come from nothing?
Distortion. – Amorella
1652
hours. Nothingness has distortions near its edge? First, a definition:
** **
Nothing
is a pronoun denoting the absence of anything. Nothing is a pronoun associated
with nothingness.
In nontechnical uses, nothing denotes things lacking
importance, interest, value, relevance, or significance. Nothingness is
the state of being nothing, the state of nonexistence of anything, or the
property of having nothing.
Philosophy
Western philosophy
Some would consider the study of "nothing" to be
foolish, a typical response of this type is voiced by Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798)
in conversation with his landlord, one Dr. Gozzi, who also happens to be a
priest,
However, "nothingness" has been treated as a serious
subject worthy of research for a very long time. In philosophy, to avoid linguistic
traps over the meaning of "nothing", a phrase such as not-being
is often employed to unambiguously make clear what is being discussed.
Parmenides
One of the earliest western philosophers to consider nothing as
a concept was Parmenides (5th century BC) who was a Greek philosopher of the
monist school. He argued that "nothing" cannot exist by the following
line of reasoning: To speak of a thing, one has to speak of a thing that
exists. Since we can speak of a thing in the past, it must still exist (in some
sense) now and from this concludes that there is no such thing as change. As a
corollary, there can be no such things as coming-into-being, passing-out-of-being,
or not-being.
Parmenides was taken seriously by other philosophers,
influencing, for instance, Socrates and Plato. Aristotle gives Parmenides
serious consideration but concludes; "Although these opinions seem to
follow logically in a dialectical discussion, yet to believe them seems next
door to madness when one considers the facts."
Leucippus
Leucippus (early 5th century BC), one of the atomists, along
with other philosophers of his time, made attempts to reconcile this with the
everyday observation of motion and change. He accepted the monist position that
there could be no motion without a void. The void is the opposite of being, it
is not-being. On the other hand, a thing that exists is an absolute and
there can be no motion in a plenum because it is completely full. But there is
not one monolithic plenum, existence consists of a multiplicity of plenums.
These are the invisibly small atoms of the atomists theory, later expanded more
fully by Democritus (circa 460 BC – 370 BC). They are a necessary part of the
theory to allow the void to exist between them. In this scenario macroscopic
objects can come-into-being move through space and pass into not-being
by means of the coming together and moving apart of their constituent atoms.
The void must exist to allow this to happen or else the frozen world of
Parmenides must be accepted.
Bertrand Russell points out that this does not exactly defeat
the argument of Parmenides, but rather ignores it by taking the rather modern
scientific position of starting with the observed data (motion etc.) and
constructing a theory based on the data as opposed to Parmenides attempts to
work from pure logic. Russell also observes that both sides were mistaken in
believing that there can be no motion in a plenum, but arguably motion cannot start
in a plenum. Cyril Bailey notes that Leucippus is the first to say that a thing
(the void) might be real without being a body and points out the irony that
this comes from a materialistic atomist. Leucippus is therefore the first to
say that "nothing" has a reality attached to it.
Aristotle
Aristotle (384–322
BC) provided the classic escape from the logical problem posed by Parmenides by
distinguishing things that are matter and things that are space.
In this scenario, space is not "nothing", but a receptacle in which
objects of matter can be placed. The void (as "nothing") is different
from space and is removed from consideration.
This characterisation of space reached its pinnacle with Isaac
Newton who asserted the existence of absolute space. Interestingly, modern
quantum theory agrees that space is not the void, there is the concept of
quantum foam which still exists in the absence of all else, although Albert
Einstein’s general relativity no longer agrees with Newton's concept of an
absolute space. Rene Descartes, on the other hand, returned to a
Parmenides-like argument of denying the existence of space. For Descartes,
there was matter, and there was extension of matter leaving no room for the
existence of "nothing".
The idea that space can actually be empty was generally still
not accepted by philosophers who invoked arguments similar to the plenum
reasoning. Although Descartes views on this were challenged by Blaise Pascal,
he declined to overturn the traditional belief, commonly stated in the form
"Nature abhors a vacuum". This remained so until Evangelista
Torricelli invented the barometer in 1643 and showed that an empty space appeared
if the mercury tube was turned upside down. This phenomenon being known as the
Torricelli vacuum and the unit of vacuum pressure, the, being named after him.
Even Torricelli's teacher, the torr famous Galileo Galilei had previously been
unable to adequately explain the sucking action of a pump.
John the Scot
John the Scot, or Johannes Scotus Eriugena (c. 815–877) held
many surprisingly heretical beliefs for the time he lived in for which no
action appears ever to have been taken against him. His ideas mostly stem from,
or are based on his work of translating pseudo-Dionysius. His beliefs are
essentially pantheist and he classifies evil, amongst many other things, into not-being.
This is done on the grounds that evil is the opposite of good, a quality of God,
but God can have no opposite, since God is everything in the pantheist view of
the world. Similarly, the idea that God created the world out of
"nothing" is to be interpreted as the "nothing" here is
synonymous with God.
G. W. F. Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) is the philosopher who
brought the dialectical method to its pinnacle of development. According to
Hegel in Science of Logic the
dialectical methods consists of three steps. First, a thesis is given, which
can be any postulate in logic. Second, the antithesis of the thesis is formed
and finally a synthesis incorporating both thesis and antithesis. Hegel
believed that no postulate taken by itself can be completely true. Only the
whole can be true and the dialectical synthesis was the means by which the
whole could be examined in relation to a specific postulate. Truth consists of
the whole process, separating out thesis, antithesis or synthesis as a
stand-alone statement results in something that is in some way or other untrue.
The concept of "nothing" arises in Hegel right at the beginning of
his Logic. The whole is called by Hegel the "Absolute" and is
to be viewed as something spiritual.
Hegel then has:
•
Thesis:
The Absolute is Pure Being
•
Antithesis:
The Absolute is Nothing
•
Synthesis:
The Absolute is Becoming
•
Existentialists
The most prominent figure among the existentialists is Jean-Paul
Sartre whose ideas in his book Being and
Nothingness (L'être et le néant) are heavily influenced by Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) of
Martin Heidegger, although Heidegger later stated that he was misunderstood by
Sartre. Sartre defines two kinds of "being" (être). One kind is être-en-soi,
the brute existence of things such as a tree. The other kind is être-pour-soi
which is consciousness. Sartre claims that this second kind of being is
"nothing" since consciousness cannot be an object of consciousness
and can possess no essence. Sartre, and even more so, Jaques Lacan, use this conception
of nothing as the foundation of their atheist philosophy. Equating nothingness
with being leads to creation from nothing and hence God is no longer needed for
there to be existence.
Eastern philosophy
The understanding of 'nothing' varies widely between cultures,
especially between Western and Eastern and philosophical traditions. For
instance, Sunyata (emptiness), unlike
"nothingness", is considered to be a state of mind in some forms of
Buddhism (see Nirvana, mu and Bodhi). Achieving 'nothing' as a state of mind in
this tradition allows one to be totally focused on a thought or activity at a
level of intensity that they would not be able to achieve if they were
consciously thinking. A classic example of this is an archer attempting to
erase the mind and clear the thoughts to better focus on the shot. Some authors
have pointed to similarities between the Buddhist conception of nothingness and
the ideas of Martin Heidegger and existentialists like Sartre, although this
connection has not been explicitly made by the philosophers themselves.
In some Eastern philosophies, the concept of
"nothingness" is characterized by an egoless state of being in which
one fully realizes one's own small part in the cosmos.
The Kyoto school handles the concept of nothingness as well.
Language and logic
Grammatically, the word "nothing" is an indefinite
pronoun, which means that it refers to something. One might argue that
"nothing" is a concept, and since concepts are things, the concept of
"nothing" itself is a thing. This logical fallacy is neatly
demonstrated by the joke syllogism that contains a fallacy of four terms:
1
The
Devil is greater than nothing
2
Nothing
is greater than God
3
Therefore,
the Devil is greater than God
The four terms in this example are God, the Devil,
nothing-as-a-thing that the Devil is greater than, and nothing as no-thing
or not-some-thing (there does not exist something that is greater than
God). The error in the conclusion stems from equating nothing-as-a-thing
with no-thing, which are not the same thing.
Clauses can often be restated to avoid the appearance that
"nothing" possesses an attribute. For example, the sentence
"There is nothing in the basement" can be restated as "There is
not one thing in the basement". "Nothing is missing" can be
restated as "everything is present".
Conversely, many fallacious conclusions follow from treating
"nothing" as a noun.
Logician Alonzo Church describes this as all names having both a
concept or sense, and a denotation. Church did not consider the name
"nothingness", and its denotation.
Modern logic made it possible to articulate these points
coherently as intended, and many philosophers hold that the word
"nothing" does not function as a noun, as there is no object to which
it refers. There remain various opposing views, however—for example, that our
understanding of the world rests essentially on noticing absences and lacks as
well as presences, and that "nothing" and related words serve to indicate
these.
Computing
In computing, "nothing" can be a keyword (in VB.Net)
used in place of something unassigned, a data abstraction. Although a
computer's storage hardware always contains numbers, "nothing"
symbolizes a number skipped by the system when the programmer desires. Many
systems have similar capabilities but different keywords, such as “null”, “NUL”,
“nil” and None”.
To instruct a computer processor to do nothing, a keyword such
as “NOP” may be available. This is a control abstraction; a processor that
executes NOP will behave identically to a processor that does not process this
directive.
Physics
In
physics, the word nothing is not used in any technical sense. A region
of space is called a vacuum if it does not contain any matter, though it can
contain physical fields. In fact, it is practically impossible to construct a
region of space that contains no matter or fields since gravity cannot be
blocked and all objects at a non-zero temperature radiate electromagnetically.
However, even if such a region existed, it could still not be referred to as
"nothing", since it has properties and a measurable existence as part
of the quantum-mechanical vacuum. Where there is supposedly empty space there
are constant quantum fluctuations with virtual particles continually popping
into and out of existence.
In the
context of the multiverse, nothingness can be conceived of as that within which
no space, time, energy, matter, or any other type of information could exist
(such as tears or holes in the structure of the manifold of the multiverse
itself). It had long been theorized that space is distinct from a void of
nothingness in that space consists of some kind of aether, with luminiferous aether
postulated as the transmission medium for propagating light waves (whose
existence has been disproven in the now famous Michelson-Morley experiment).
Selected
and edited from Wikipedia Offline
** **
2149
hours. I love Wikipedia Offline. The summaries are much better than I could put
them but I have read these much more fully in their authored texts (translated).
This is good stuff. This is the kind of thing I used to share in discussions
with Fritz when I was at Otterbein and he was at Ohio State.
You are not keeping to the point of the
exercise boy. - Amorella
[An Afterword: I will also keep in mind the underlined segments I have since created within.]
2158
hours. Okay then – the only thing that a vacuum can hold is consciousness, and
if a vacuum contains not-a-thing but rather consciousness (because it is
non-material as is the heart and soul) then consciousness [i.e. mind-like] may
indeed be timeless. This is what I have constructed from this material
presently.
Something to sleep on. Tomorrow morning the
plumber comes to work in the hall bathroom. Larry also intends to stop by. Post.
- Amorella
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