Angst and the Empty Set (2014)

It does seem a bit crap: "Science, too, seems to suggest that there exist many “nothings” that have a positive existence: the vacuum, the number zero"

Pretty sure that's confusing the positive existence of a label eg. the word 'vacuum' with the thing itself.

He sort of addresses that: "But according to quantum mechanics, a vacuum contains quantum fluctuations and has non-zero energy."

But this sounds crap too - prior to discovering quantum fluctuations (QF), was space empty or not? No it wasn't in reality because QF must have existed already, but did we consider it empty? Yes because we didn't know about QF.

he goes on

"And in any case, if a vacuum is a region of space, it contains space"

And WTF is space? How can it contain it? It is space.

more

"And just like an empty plastic shopping bag is not nothing, an abstract empty shopping bag is not nothing, either."

Actually it may or may not be depending on what you want. It is a concept, purely a concept, so it can represent utter void if you wish.

This seems a sloppy, un-rigorous use of anything. I'm not impressed.

and he winds up with this

"All of this still leaves us with our original question: Are absences fundamental in perception?"

Always questions. Some 'philosophers' seem to be just engines to turn questions into more questions. I'd prefer answers if you don't mind, and if you can't provide them then at least frame the questions such that some testable hypotheses can be made.

>Take any number x, and do not multiply it by any number. Then you get the number x back. Now take x, and multiply it by one. The result is the same (x). Therefore one is nothing. No one would agree with the conclusion of that argument!

One is nothing under multiplication. You just got that “no one” here. JK, this entire argument has a false premise in it.

Take a number x and multiply it by zero. Then you get zero. Divide it back by zero... Therefore zero is anything including nothing, and anything is zero by the rule of identity commutativity. Now wrap your wounds and go on without math analogies.

One relevant philosopher not mentioned here is [Henri Bergson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Bergson), whose critique of the concept of nonbeing distinguished him from the existentialists he spawned. I believe his argument was that nonbeing is a complication of the idea of being (nonbeing = being + negation), rather than a truly distinct and opposed concept, and that philosophical questions having to do with nonbeing were just poorly stated problems.

>According to the scientific picture of the world, absences do not seem to be fundamental building blocks of either the concrete (physical) world or of the abstract (mathematical) realm.

Sorry for nitpicking again, but aren’t holes in concrete, along tear-tension lines and in pipes there for exactly physical reasons?

Surprised he didn't mention negative numbers which I always thought of as the mathematical concept of a "hole".

The more I read articles like this, the more I am convinced that philosophy, when it turns its eye towards mathematics and the sciences, is complete and utter nonsense, and a total waste of everyone's time.

Philosophical ramblings on scientific notions are akin to how GPT-2 models string together sensible sounding passages, but which upon closer inspection are actually devoid of any useful insight or meaning. Of course, in the act of stringing together esoteric words to make ourselves sound smart, by the rules of brownian motion, once in a blue moon, these ramblings accidentally cross over into formal logic proofs. That is, to put it plainly: we've blindly, or perhaps drunkenly, stumbled our way into the domain of mathematics and the sciences -- behold: Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The shining beacon in a sea of utter and complete nonsense.

What a delightful little article.