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'Nothing' or 'Nothingness' "has"
no properties - not even a definition, how
can it be said to "have" no attributes
- for to say of 'nothing' that it has no
attributes is to attribute the condition
of having no attributes to 'nothing.'
It is impossible to "define" nothing
as actually existing as an "empty set"
or as anything else.
We can usefully dream up the idea of an empty
set as a 'let's pretend' mental tool for
arriving at certain mathematical results,
but it is important to remember that whilst
it is OK in the office, or in the classroom,
or in ordinary conversation to speak in terms
of the existence of an empty set, when one
is involved in ontological discussions one
is very likely to be challenged as to its
actual existence as a real thing, rather
than it being a reificational idea in the
heads of mathematicians, which dissolves
the moment that mathematicians stop thinking
about it and finish utilising the theorem
for their calculations.
Mathematicians introduce sets into their
theories as arbitrary 'inventions' and with
them the empty set too merely because it
proves expedient for certain purposes.
I have no argument with their practices just
as long as they don't start claiming that
their useful and laudable fictions actually
exist. The pen in their pocket of course
doesn't dissolve the moment they stop using
it for recording notes about the their calculations.
The empty set and its empty "contents"
of "nothing" no more exists than
the definition of a full set and its imaginary
contents.
Mereologically speaking only the singleton
denotatum of that which is contained in the
set actually exists. [if what are placed
in the set are real entities] People who
believe that a crowd exists for example,
rather than realising that crowds don't really
exist and only the individuate men, women
and children.
Some people often believe that there is actually
something called "nothing" in an
empty cupboard, and that this non-existent
nothing is necessary and useful for us as
an offset for an existential nil mensuration,
in order that we may understand that the
items which are usually to be found in the
full cupboard are not there. This is Platonism
gone mad.
There is no such thing as: "all of existence"
either - the only things that exist are the
individual entities that exist, all else
is description of the WAY that things exist
- as entitic actions and reactions and interactions,
modes, existential states, human brain activity,
etc. All this is contrary to Heidegger's
so-called "Ontological Difference"
of course.
According to the Polish philosopher Lesniewski,
it would be correct to say, for example,
that the Black Forest is just the set of
trees now growing in a certain area, and
that this set becomes smaller as trees within
it die. Clearly, on this view, there can
be no empty set, and a set consisting of
just one object as member will be identical
with that object, and when that finally disappears
there will be no Black Forrest left.
Moreover, sets can change, not least in that
they can acquire and lose members over time.
Further, there can be no sets of higher type,
which means also that there is no way in
which the more usual antinomies may be generated.
Frege too, as Lesniewski points out, attacks
those mathematicians who introduce into their
theories such arbitrary 'inventions' as the
empty set merely because they prove expedient
for certain purposes. There are no general
objects, which result when the features common
to the particular objects, which are thought
of as falling under a given concept and are
unified into a whole primitive and old fashioned
Platonic template.
I prefer Thadeus Kotarbinski's position,
that the set doesn't exist in the first place,
to grow or to shrink.
And how do we determine the cause of the
impact of an asteroid impacting earth and
squashing little Billy Brown? Was it because
Billy's mother sent him to visit his grandmother
in the next town? Perhaps it was the fact
that the train was late when it was in the
position on platform 4 when the lump of cosmic
rock hit Billy's carriage? Some may say it
was Billy's grandmother's fault and she caused
it by allowing Billy's mother to go to that
High School Dance where she met Billy's Father?
Maybe it was caused by an exploding star
in the far reaches of space whose detonation
caused the asteroid to fly off into another
orbit? Maybe the cause was actually in the
Big Bang itself, when some of those elements
which later came to be the exploding star
we call the sun, and the earth, the asteroid,
the train, Billy's grandmother, Billy's Father
and mother and Billy himself? It must be
a queer kind of logic that has such pedestrian
and parochial notions about the nature of
"events?"
Mathematics - the language of science - encodes
logic into a device called an equation which
requires its elements to be equivalent on
opposite sides of the argument.
But these things - these theories of mathematics
do not exist in themselves - maths is a science
(or group of related sciences) dealing with
the logic of quantity and shape and arrangement,
neither mathematics exist or the arguments
of the logic of quantity and shape and arrangement
which constitute its theorems exist - only
the entities which are addressed by the activity
of the existing mathematicians exist. In
that way the language of math and natural
language are similar in that it is only the
denotata which the words denote that exist
- not the words or significations themselves,
which are no more than the existential activity
and manners of behaviour of the humans that
utter the words.
But what have these "laws" got
to do with the subject of my discussion,
which is "nothing," and how can
the "logical equivalent of "every
value in the Universe" include nothing
as an equivalent opposite, when nothing doesn't
exist to be the "equivalent opposite"
of anything? A "value" doesn't
exist either, being nothing more than a notional
numerical quantity measured or assigned or
computed by the embrained human holism..
This is no more than a transcendentalists
dreamworld - a reificational wonderland without
an Alice and a White Rabbit. The logical
equivalent of 'nothing' does not exist any
more than nothing exists. "The logical
equivalent of Nothing" is just the product
of someone's very rich imagination.
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