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Contrasting Pair: Matter and Nothingness



 
 
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  #31  
Old February 27th 08 posted to alt.messianic,alt.philosophy,sci.physics.relativity
saint7peter@hotmail.com
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Posts: 12
Default Contrasting Pair: Matter and Nothingness

On Feb 27, 12:50*am, Roy Jose Lorr wrote:

Philosophy, religion, science, logic or imagination can not accurately
describe Nothingness in the same way they are unable to systematically
describe Singularity. *What I'm looking for is the cause that effects
the ongoing disappearance of matter/energy. *In my mind, Nothingness
interacting with its opposite Somethingness seems to fit the bill. *How
to accurately describe this activity is beyond human conceptual ability
yet activity between what is and what is not perceived is evident. *It
doesn't matter whether or not I can affix the phenomena on a temporal
stake made of linguistic rigmarole. *It is enough for me to know that
everything that is has a beginning and an end, with beginning and end
necessarily performing according to design. *Else I'd do the
existentialist dreamy thing and go bye bye without hesitation.


Sounds like the old alchemical sublimation versus precipitation.
Freud of course used the term in a psychological context. We don't
have balanced opposites in physics right now, like gravity and
levity. It is probably a defect of the physics - the old categories
seem pretty solid and likely to be a better basis for the
establishment of truth. The divorce of science from philosophy was
painful for both, although materialists are in so much pain they can't
admit it.

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  #32  
Old February 27th 08 posted to alt.messianic,alt.philosophy,sci.physics.relativity
N:dlzc D:aol T:com \(dlzc\)[_867_]
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Posts: 1
Default Contrasting Pair: Matter and Nothingness

Dear Roy Jose Lorr:

"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
. ..
N:dlzc D:aol T:com (dlzc) wrote:

Dear Roy Jose Lorr:

"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
...

N:dlzc D:aol T:com (dlzc) wrote:


Dear Roy Jose Lorr:

"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
news:xrKdnWzblYwdWFnanZ2dnUVZ_gidnZ2d@comcast. com...
...


Mary Hogan wrote:


"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
...



"Matter exists on the motion created by
Nothingness drawing Matter back into
the Nothingness from whence it came."

I am not qualified for any debate about
physics, and so I'm just thinking out loud.

Time is missing from this.

Time is a human construct.


You used the word "motion". Please define this
word, without using either "space" or "time".

The universe does not need human definitions in
order to run.



You post to a newsgroup, as if this was news.
This requires communication, an effort on the
part of two parties. You challeged "Mary Hogan"
to give reason to invoke "time", as if that was
some mysterious error on the part of Mankind.

Now define "motion", and "run" without invoking
"time" or "space". Please don't hide under
Buddhist mysticism this early.


Rub two sticks together, the motion involved is
not time dependent. Maybe you'd care to
explain how it is.


We can see "two sticks rubbing together", or at least physical
processes we recognize, and they appear to be moving more slowly
in the past. And their daughter products (such as radiant heat
from rubbing sticks together) are similarly reduced / slowed.

More to the point of my question, what is it about motion that
does not *require* a change in relationship between objects over
a period of time (whether or not you apply a metric to time
passage)?

Perhaps you'd care to define time between past
and present then between present and future without reverting
to mysticism.


This was your assignment. When I care to "broad brush" cover all
of language, so that I can denigrate anything anyone might reply,
I'll be you. If you know you won't like the answer, why do you
ask?

David A. Smith


  #33  
Old February 27th 08 posted to alt.messianic,alt.philosophy,sci.physics.relativity
Mary Hogan
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Posts: 13
Default Contrasting Pair: Matter and Nothingness


"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
. ..
Mary Hogan wrote:

I haven't studied this Ramban since 2004, Roy. There is so little time
in this life, and so much beauty to tap into.

Rabbi Nechunia ben Hakaneh, Sefer HaBahir.


Isn't it high time you stopped studying gnostic idolatry?



What I study is not Gnostic idolatry.

And you will never convince me that your path leads to anything but hidden
pomposity.

Sorry, Roy.

  #34  
Old February 27th 08 posted to alt.messianic,alt.philosophy,sci.physics.relativity
Mary Hogan
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 13
Default Contrasting Pair: Matter and Nothingness


"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
. ..
N:dlzc D:aol T:com (dlzc) wrote:

Dear Roy Jose Lorr:

"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
...

N:dlzc D:aol T:com (dlzc) wrote:


Dear Roy Jose Lorr:

"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
news:xrKdnWzblYwdWFnanZ2dnUVZ_gidnZ2d@comcast. com...
...


Mary Hogan wrote:


"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
...



"Matter exists on the motion created by
Nothingness drawing Matter back into
the Nothingness from whence it came."

I am not qualified for any debate about
physics, and so I'm just thinking out loud.

Time is missing from this.

Time is a human construct.


You used the word "motion". Please define this
word, without using either "space" or "time".

The universe does not need human definitions in
order to run.



You post to a newsgroup, as if this was news. This requires
communication, an effort on the part of two parties. You challeged "Mary
Hogan" to give reason to invoke "time", as if that was some mysterious
error on the part of Mankind.

Now define "motion", and "run" without invoking "time" or "space".
Please don't hide under Buddhist mysticism this early.


Rub two sticks together, the motion involved is not time dependent.


Why can't you see this? It take time to rub.


Maybe you'd care to explain how it is. Perhaps you'd care to define time
between past and present then between present and future without reverting
to mysticism.


Try simultaneous. Boy you have really disappointed me, Roy.

You call it mysticism because you cannot wrap your mind around it.



  #35  
Old February 27th 08 posted to alt.messianic,alt.philosophy,sci.physics.relativity
Mary Hogan
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 13
Default Contrasting Pair: Matter and Nothingness


"Simple Simon" wrote in message
...

"N:dlzc D:aol T:com (dlzc)" wrote in message
...
Dear Roy Jose Lorr:

"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
...
N:dlzc D:aol T:com (dlzc) wrote:

Dear Roy Jose Lorr:

"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
. ..
...

Mary Hogan wrote:

"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
...


"Matter exists on the motion created by
Nothingness drawing Matter back into
the Nothingness from whence it came."

I am not qualified for any debate about
physics, and so I'm just thinking out loud.

Time is missing from this.

Time is a human construct.


You used the word "motion". Please define this
word, without using either "space" or "time".

The universe does not need human definitions in
order to run.


You post to a newsgroup, as if this was news. This requires
communication, an effort on the part of two parties. You
challeged "Mary Hogan" to give reason to invoke "time", as if
that was some mysterious error on the part of Mankind.

Now define "motion", and "run" without invoking "time" or
"space". Please don't hide under Buddhist mysticism this early.

David A. Smith



My tuppence:
"Motion is a pretty flower that smells bad." (from Star Trek? Something
about logic...)
"Time is what keeps everything from happening at once." (unknown)
"Space is what keeps everything from happening to you." (unknown)
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one". (A.E.)


I love "Reality is merely and illusion....albeit a very persistent on. It
is as demanding for attention as ego.



Thank is all.




  #36  
Old February 27th 08 posted to alt.messianic,alt.philosophy,sci.physics.relativity
Mary Hogan
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 13
Default Contrasting Pair: Matter and Nothingness


"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in message
. ..
Immortalist wrote:

On Feb 26, 12:30 pm, Roy Jose Lorr wrote:

"Matter exists on the motion created by Nothingness drawing Matter back
into the Nothingness from whence it came."

Constructive comments in simple terms, pro and con will be appreciated.



We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing
of negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym
of the ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the
present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is
the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But
this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no
individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the
germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or
foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited
possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no
law. It is boundless freedom.

Nothing is an awe-inspiring yet essentially undigested concept, highly
esteemed by writers of an existentialist tendency, but by most others
regarded with axiety, nausea, or panic. Nobody seems to know how to
deal with it (he would, of course), and plain persons generally are
reported to have little difficulty in saying, seeing, hearing, and
doing nothing. Philosophers, however, have never felt easy on the
matter. Ever since Parmenides laid it down that it is impossible to
speak of what is not, broke his own rule in the act of stating it, and
deduced himself into a world where all that ever happened was nothing,
the impression has persisted that the narrow path between sense and
nonsense on this subject is a difficult one to tread and that
altogether the less said of it the better.

This escape, however, is not so easy as it looks. Plato, in pursuing
it, reversed the Parmenidean dictum by insisting, in effect, that
anything a philosopher can find to talk about must somehow be there to
be discussed, and so let loose upon the world that unseemly rable of
centaurs and unicorns, carnivorous cows, republican monarchs and wife-
burdened bachelors, which has plagued ontology from that day to this.
Nothing (of which they are all aliases) can apparently get rid of
these absurdities, but for fairly obvious reasons has not been invited
to do so. Logic has attempted the task, but with sadly limited
success. Of some, though not all, nonentities, even a logician knows
that they do not exist, since their properties defy the law of
contradiction; the remainder, however, are not so readily dismissed.
Whatever Lord Russell may have said of it, the harmless if unnecessary
unicorn cannot be driven out of logic as it can out of zoology, unless
by desperate measures which exclude all manner of reputable entities
as well. Such remedies have been attempted, and their effects are
worse than the disease. Russell himself, in eliminating the present
King of France, inadvertently deposed the present Queen of England.
Quine, the sorcerer's apprentice, has contrived to liquidate both
Pegasus and President Truman in the same fell swoop. The old
logicians, who allowed all entities subsitence while conceding
existence, as wanted, to an accredited selection of them, at least
brought a certain tolerable inefficiency to their task. Of the new it
can only be said that solitudinem faciunt et pacem appellant--they
make a desert and call it peace. Whole realms of being have been
abolished without warning, at the mere nonquantifying of a variable.
The poetry of Earth has been parsed out of existence--and what has
become of its prose? There is little need for an answer. Writers to
whom nothing is sacred, and who accordingly stop thereat, have no
occasion for surprise on finding, at the end of their operations, that
nothing is all they have left.

The logicians, of course, will have nothing of all this. Nothing, they
say, is not a thing, nor is it the name of anything, being merely a
short way of saying of anything that it is not something else.
"Nothing" means "not-anything"; appearances to the contrary are due
merely to the error of supposing that a grammatical subject must
necessarily be a name. Asked, however, to prove that nothing is not
the name of anything, they fall back on the claim that nothing is the
name of anything (since according to them there are no names anyway).
Those who can make nothing of such an argument are welcome to the
attempt. When logic falls out with itself, honest men come into their
own, and it will take more than this to persuade them that there are
not better cures for this particular headache than the old and now
discredited method of cutting off the patient's head.

The friends of nothing may be divided into two distinct though not
exclusive classes: the know-nothings, who claim a phenomenological
acquaintance with nothing in particular, and the fear-nothings, who,
believing, with Macbeth, that "nothing is but what is not," are
thereby launched into dialectical encounter with nullity in general.
For the first, nothing, so far from being a mere grammatical illusion,
is a genuine, even positive, feature of experience. We are all
familiar with, and have a vocabulary for, holes and gaps, lacks and
losses, absenses, silences, impalpabilities, insipidities, and the
like. Voids and vacancies of one sort or another are sought after,
dealt in and advertised in the newspapers. And what are these, it is
asked, but perceived fragments of nothingness, experiential blanks,
which command, nonetheless, their share of attention and therefore
deserve recognition? Sartre, for one, has given currency to such
arguments, and so, in effect, have the upholders of "negative facts"--
an improvident sect, whose refrigerators are full of nonexistent
butter and cheese, absentee elephants and so on, which they claim to
detect therein. If existence indeed precedes essence, there is
certainly reason of a sort for maintaining that nonexistence is also
anterior to, and not a mere product of, the essentially parasitic
activity of negation; that the nothing precedes the not. But, verbal
refutations apart, the short answer to this view, as given, for
instance, by Bergson, is that these are but petty and partial
nothings, themselves parasitic on what already exists. Absence is a
mere privation, and a privation of something at that. A hole is always
a hole in something: take away the thing, and the hole goes too; more
precisely, it is replaced by a bigger if not better hole, itself
relative to its surroundings, and so tributary to something else.
Nothing, in short, is given only in relation to what is, and even the
idea of nothing requires a thinker to sustain it. If we want to
encounter it an sich, we have to try harder that that.

Better things, or rather nothings, are promised on the alternative
theory, whereby it is argued, so to speak, not that holes are in
things, but that things are in holes or, more generally, that
everything (and everybody) is in a hole. To be anything (or anybody)
is to be bounded, hemmed in, defined, and separated by a circumambient
fram of vacuity, and what is true of the individual is equally true of
the collective. The universe at large is fringed with nothingness,
from which indeed (how else?) it must have been created, if created it
was; and its beginning and end, like that of all change within it,
must similarly be viewed as a passage from one nothing to another,
with an interlude of being in between. Such thoughts, or others like
them, have haunted the speculations of nullophile metaphysicians from
Pythagoras to Pascal and from Hegel and his followers to Heidegger,
Tillich and Sartre. Being and non being, as they see it, are
complementary notions, dialectically entwined, and of equal status and
importance; although Heidegger alone has extended their symmetry to
the point of equipping Das Nichts with a correlative (if nugatory)
activity of noth-ing, or nihilating, whereby it produces Angst in its
votaries and untimely hilarity in those, such as Carnap and Ayer, who
have difficulty in parsing "nothing" as a present participle of the
verb "to noth."

Nothing, whether it noths or not, and whether or not the being of
anything entails it, clearly does not entail that anything should be.
Like Spinoza's substance, it is causa sui; nothing (except more of the
same) can come of it; ex nihilo, nihil fit. That conceded, it remains
a question to some why anything, rather than nothing, should exist.
This is either the deepest conunddrum in metaphysics or the most
childish, and though many must have felt the force of it at one time
or another, it is equally common to conclude, on reflection, that it
is no question at all. The hypothesis of theism may be said to take it
seriously and to offer a provisional answer. The alternative is to
argue that the dilemma is self-resolved in the mere possibility of
stating it. If nothing whatsoever existed, there would be no problem
and no answer, and the anxieties even of existential philosophers
would be permanently laid to rest. Since they are not, there is
evidently nothing to worry about. But that itself should be enough to
keep an existentialist happy. Unless the solution be, as some have
suspected, that it is not nothing that has been worrying them, but
they who have been worrying it.


Philosophy, religion, science, logic or imagination can not accurately
describe Nothingness in the same way they are unable to systematically
describe Singularity. What I'm looking for is the cause that effects the
ongoing disappearance of matter/energy. In my mind, Nothingness
interacting with its opposite Somethingness seems to fit the bill. How to
accurately describe this activity is beyond human conceptual ability yet
activity between what is and what is not perceived is evident. It doesn't
matter whether or not I can affix the phenomena on a temporal stake made
of linguistic rigmarole. It is enough for me to know that everything that
is has a beginning and an end, with beginning and end necessarily
performing according to design. Else I'd do the existentialist dreamy
thing and go bye bye without hesitation.


Maybe you should just wake up and see that you want to be a god and get over
the fact that you never will be, except in your own mind.


  #37  
Old February 27th 08 posted to alt.messianic,alt.philosophy,sci.physics.relativity
saint7peter@hotmail.com
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 12
Default Contrasting Pair: Matter and Nothingness

On Feb 27, 5:50*am, "Mary Hogan" wrote:
"Roy Jose Lorr" wrote in messagenews:E_qdneQwHO7PRFnanZ2dnUVZ_rCtnZ2d@comca st.com...

Mary Hogan wrote:


I haven't studied this Ramban since 2004, Roy. *There is so little time
in this life, and so much beauty to tap into.


Rabbi Nechunia ben Hakaneh, Sefer HaBahir.


Isn't it high time you stopped studying gnostic idolatry?


What I study is not Gnostic idolatry.

And you will never convince me that your path leads to anything but hidden
pomposity.

Sorry, Roy.


Oh look, Mary, on another thread I have begun the analysis of the
Schema:

SMA JSRAL JHVH ALHJNV JHVH AHD

The essential formula contains three words: ALHJNV, AHD, and JHVH.

JHVH is distributed over ALHJNV and AHD, which provide the contextual
orientation, the where in you that G-d is. ALHJNV and AHD therefore
represent certain levels of the adept or seeker. I know what those
levels are. Do you? If not, get down on your knees and beg me, and I
just might tell you.


  #38  
Old February 27th 08 posted to alt.messianic,alt.philosophy,sci.physics.relativity
Mary Hogan
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 13
Default Contrasting Pair: Matter and Nothingness


"Immortalist" wrote in message
...
On Feb 26, 12:30 pm, Roy Jose Lorr wrote:
"Matter exists on the motion created by Nothingness drawing Matter back
into the Nothingness from whence it came."

Constructive comments in simple terms, pro and con will be appreciated.


We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing
of negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym
of the ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the
present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is
the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But
this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no
individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the
germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or
foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited
possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no
law. It is boundless freedom.

Nothing is an awe-inspiring yet essentially undigested concept,

MH: you cannot digest nothing.

highly
esteemed by writers of an existentialist tendency, but by most others
regarded with axiety, nausea, or panic.

MH: only if what they go by is intellect when in truth they know that
something larger is operating in the solar plexus.



Nobody seems to know how to
deal with it (he would, of course), and plain persons generally are
reported to have little difficulty in saying, seeing, hearing, and
doing nothing.


MH: I find this state erroneous. No one, not one human being can do
absolutely nothing. They rub their nose, they blink their eyes, they feel
hunger.


Philosophers, however, have never felt easy on the
matter.


MH: Philosophers can't even prove to themselves that they exist. They
cannot understand the dream state although they can use a lot of words, like
this pedantic whirlpool that that does make one nauseous because they
clearly see the writer trying to prove to the world that he or she is
"special" in their ability to connect meaningless words.


Ever since Parmenides laid it down that it is impossible to
speak of what is not, broke his own rule in the act of stating it, and
deduced himself into a world where all that ever happened was nothing,
the impression has persisted that the narrow path between sense and
nonsense on this subject is a difficult one to tread and that
altogether the less said of it the better.

MH: No offense, why would you even spend a second of your life studying such
lack of clarity?


This escape, however, is not so easy as it looks. Plato, in pursuing
it, reversed the Parmenidean dictum by insisting, in effect, that
anything a philosopher can find to talk about must somehow be there to
be discussed, and so let loose upon the world that unseemly rable of
centaurs and unicorns, carnivorous cows, republican monarchs and wife-
burdened bachelors, which has plagued ontology from that day to this.


MH: pure fantasy like the nuttiest people on this ng. Like st.

Nothing (of which they are all aliases) can apparently get rid of
these absurdities,

MH: because they are absurd.

but for fairly obvious reasons has not been invited
to do so. Logic has attempted the task, but with sadly limited
success.

MH: Because logic cannot even fathom "love, hate, unfounded hatred,
jealousy." Why? Because these are character flaws which must be worked on,
and philosophy can't get over its sense of superiority and greatness to even
proceed to the next step. It reminds me of a vain person, who can't keep
his eyes off himself.


Of some, though not all, nonentities, even a logician knows
that they do not exist, since their properties defy the law of
contradiction;

MH: no comment


the remainder, however, are not so readily dismissed.
Whatever Lord Russell may have said of it, the harmless if unnecessary
unicorn cannot be driven out of logic as it can out of zoology, unless
by desperate measures which exclude all manner of reputable entities
as well. Such remedies have been attempted, and their effects are
worse than the disease.

MH: it is madness, the remedy is Torah.

Russell himself, in eliminating the present
King of France, inadvertently deposed the present Queen of England.
Quine, the sorcerer's apprentice, has contrived to liquidate both
Pegasus and President Truman in the same fell swoop.

MH: this is what I call storybook mentality. So in love with creatures.


The old
logicians, who allowed all entities subsitence while conceding
existence, as wanted, to an accredited selection of them, at least
brought a certain tolerable inefficiency to their task. Of the new it
can only be said that solitudinem faciunt et pacem appellant--

MH: Why am I not surprised at the Latin. This is the arrogance of the
"Chesterton." people who chase their tales all their lives and don't bother
to realize why they are truly here.


they
make a desert and call it peace. Whole realms of being have been
abolished without warning, at the mere nonquantifying of a variable.


MH: Everyone who ever tried to erase the Jewish People is now gone. The
Babylonians, the Romans, the Greeks, Media and Persia. What you are using
too many words to say, is that you are wasting your life.


The poetry of Earth has been parsed out of existence--and what has
become of its prose? There is little need for an answer.

MH: Prose is just an arrogant people following like lemmings, the baton of a
tester, assigned to find out what we are all made of, and are willing to
fight to develop.


Writers to
whom nothing is sacred, and who accordingly stop thereat, have no
occasion for surprise on finding, at the end of their operations, that
nothing is all they have left.


MH: No, nothing is what you are going to get out of all this "study" you do.


The logicians, of course, will have nothing of all this. Nothing, they
say, is not a thing, nor is it the name of anything, being merely a
short way of saying of anything that it is not something else.


MH: and you wasted our time, why? Probably because you consider
yourself...smart.


"Nothing" means "not-anything"; appearances to the contrary are due
merely to the error of supposing that a grammatical subject must
necessarily be a name. Asked, however, to prove that nothing is not
the name of anything, they fall back on the claim that nothing is the
name of anything (since according to them there are no names anyway).
Those who can make nothing of such an argument are welcome to the
attempt. When logic falls out with itself, honest men come into their
own, and it will take more than this to persuade them that there are
not better cures for this particular headache than the old and now
discredited method of cutting off the patient's head.


MH: Wait a second, so there are two groups of people, you are of the "honest
people." amd then there are the rest? Pure arrogance. This is a symptom of
a life gone to seed.
MH: This is all I can take of this gas.



The friends of nothing may be divided into two distinct though not
exclusive classes: the know-nothings, who claim a phenomenological
acquaintance with nothing in particular, and the fear-nothings, who,
believing, with Macbeth, that "nothing is but what is not," are
thereby launched into dialectical encounter with nullity in general.
For the first, nothing, so far from being a mere grammatical illusion,
is a genuine, even positive, feature of experience. We are all
familiar with, and have a vocabulary for, holes and gaps, lacks and
losses, absenses, silences, impalpabilities, insipidities, and the
like. Voids and vacancies of one sort or another are sought after,
dealt in and advertised in the newspapers. And what are these, it is
asked, but perceived fragments of nothingness, experiential blanks,
which command, nonetheless, their share of attention and therefore
deserve recognition? Sartre, for one, has given currency to such
arguments, and so, in effect, have the upholders of "negative facts"--
an improvident sect, whose refrigerators are full of nonexistent
butter and cheese, absentee elephants and so on, which they claim to
detect therein. If existence indeed precedes essence, there is
certainly reason of a sort for maintaining that nonexistence is also
anterior to, and not a mere product of, the essentially parasitic
activity of negation; that the nothing precedes the not. But, verbal
refutations apart, the short answer to this view, as given, for
instance, by Bergson, is that these are but petty and partial
nothings, themselves parasitic on what already exists. Absence is a
mere privation, and a privation of something at that. A hole is always
a hole in something: take away the thing, and the hole goes too; more
precisely, it is replaced by a bigger if not better hole, itself
relative to its surroundings, and so tributary to something else.
Nothing, in short, is given only in relation to what is, and even the
idea of nothing requires a thinker to sustain it. If we want to
encounter it an sich, we have to try harder that that.

Better things, or rather nothings, are promised on the alternative
theory, whereby it is argued, so to speak, not that holes are in
things, but that things are in holes or, more generally, that
everything (and everybody) is in a hole. To be anything (or anybody)
is to be bounded, hemmed in, defined, and separated by a circumambient
fram of vacuity, and what is true of the individual is equally true of
the collective. The universe at large is fringed with nothingness,
from which indeed (how else?) it must have been created, if created it
was; and its beginning and end, like that of all change within it,
must similarly be viewed as a passage from one nothing to another,
with an interlude of being in between. Such thoughts, or others like
them, have haunted the speculations of nullophile metaphysicians from
Pythagoras to Pascal and from Hegel and his followers to Heidegger,
Tillich and Sartre. Being and non being, as they see it, are
complementary notions, dialectically entwined, and of equal status and
importance; although Heidegger alone has extended their symmetry to
the point of equipping Das Nichts with a correlative (if nugatory)
activity of noth-ing, or nihilating, whereby it produces Angst in its
votaries and untimely hilarity in those, such as Carnap and Ayer, who
have difficulty in parsing "nothing" as a present participle of the
verb "to noth."

Nothing, whether it noths or not, and whether or not the being of
anything entails it, clearly does not entail that anything should be.
Like Spinoza's substance, it is causa sui; nothing (except more of the
same) can come of it; ex nihilo, nihil fit. That conceded, it remains
a question to some why anything, rather than nothing, should exist.
This is either the deepest conunddrum in metaphysics or the most
childish, and though many must have felt the force of it at one time
or another, it is equally common to conclude, on reflection, that it
is no question at all. The hypothesis of theism may be said to take it
seriously and to offer a provisional answer. The alternative is to
argue that the dilemma is self-resolved in the mere possibility of
stating it. If nothing whatsoever existed, there would be no problem
and no answer, and the anxieties even of existential philosophers
would be permanently laid to rest. Since they are not, there is
evidently nothing to worry about. But that itself should be enough to
keep an existentialist happy. Unless the solution be, as some have
suspected, that it is not nothing that has been worrying them, but
they who have been worrying it.

http://www.nothing.com/

  #39  
Old February 27th 08 posted to alt.messianic,alt.philosophy,sci.physics.relativity
Mary Hogan
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 13
Default Contrasting Pair: Matter and Nothingness

Shema Yisrael Adonoi Elokenu Adonoi Echad
Baruch Shem Kvod Malhuto laolam vaed
vavta Adonoi Elocheca bchol, lvavcha uvchol mayodechal.


I say that prayer two times everyday. With great attention to detail, and
with a prayer that every day I will learn more. And you play it like a
game.

You are disgusting.

  #40  
Old February 27th 08 posted to alt.messianic,alt.philosophy,sci.physics.relativity
saint7peter@hotmail.com
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 12
Default Contrasting Pair: Matter and Nothingness

On Feb 27, 6:14*am, "Mary Hogan" wrote:

lies

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, you call me fanciful. You are nothing but
fluff on this newsgroup. You have never been coherent about anything
for two minutes. You are like a Moonie, with you newfound
conversion. Bogus. All of my statements are deep and profound, and,
most importantly, true. They are the true teaching of HaShem, whom
you hate. You fool me not, Mary contrary.

 




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