Nothingness (2017)
plato.stanford.edu
plato.stanford.edu
The fifth element is synonymous with "void" or "sky", ie "空".
For a slightly abstract and colorful philosophy of martial arts, you may enjoy Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Void. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Five_Rings
It is more related to Aether in its Sanskrit origins. "आकाश"
If you're willing to make a linguistic leap, you could argue that "nothingness" or "無" constitutes the essential foundation of modern Japanese philosophy or philosophical Buddhism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/
TIL Shamil[1] was a نقشبندية Sufi, probably one of the few to have his own ניגון tune[2].
[1] of whom I am always reminded when people in the US write about being "caucasian". Here are actual caucasians:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTdXQabTTRg
Consider:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmLfnWwP0g0&t=280 (4:40 to 7:00)
IIUC (and with apologies to Grothendieck), Ishida succeeded at 3-dan with a fire spirit, overpowering his opponents. At 8-dan, however, the examiners are looking for the void spirit.
A fire spirit cracks a nut by using a hammer and chisel, striking as needed until the shell cracks.
A void spirit gets the meat by immersing the nut in a softening agent until hand pressure suffices to decorticate, like a perfectly ripened avocado.
An operational definition of nothingness is that you apply a sensing operation to something, and if the sensing operation does not succeed, the thing being sensed is a nothingness. Nothingness is defined by the sensing operation. This resolves some, but not all, of the problems.
The other side of this is "what is a something"? That's what led Democritus to invent atoms as a philosophical primitive. Everything bigger than an atom is a grouping of atoms and is defined by some abstraction over the primitives. Straightforward. Then came subatomic physics.
The article contains a theological discussion which is just the first cause argument for God. The answer to "who created God" is usually "shut up, kid". That argument hasn't had much traction in recent centuries.
(I once took "Epistemological problems in artificial intelligence" from John McCarthy. People were serious about this stuff when the logicians ruled AI. Today, not so much.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayin_and_Yesh
Tzimtzum, "contraction", proposes that the physical world is infinite somethingness/nothingness (essentially equal representations of one thing) made manifest in the realm of light/waves and distinctions.
I had thought that the nature of the void (i.e. nothingness), or rather, its lack of a nature is what allowed stuff to freely appear into existence (as many times as it wants).
the void imposes no restrictions because it is not really there to impose them.
stuff pops freely into being without requiring any reasoning; requiring a reason would be a restriction which would need to be somehow imposed.
in contrast, they say that, in fact, there wasn't a void, there was only a God entity filling up everything until this entity withdrew from a part of itself (from another part of itself I suppose) so form a space (or a void?) into which creation subsequently appeared
Of course, this puts conventional causality on its head and at this point is ultimately unfalsifiable.
Also the inhabitant of the empty set is omnipotent, so the first assumption is actually that there is no God.
Maybe it was covered in the article, which I didn't read yet (either?). I might have to though, because it touches on a subject which interests me more and more; that of language, perception and meaning vs reality. For example, in the case of "nothing" I would propose that it has a meaning in everyday language that doesn't make it into the dictionaries or thesauri: that it partly means (or can mean) that which has not been discovered yet.
This type of definition differs from a strict logical definition (in which nothing would mean absolutely nothing, void, emptiness, non-existence). Much confusion can be had from mixing the logic of language (terms that are logical/mathematical in nature if you will), with meaning, which is has to be the essence of language.
The author TOTALLY misses the point of the question "why is there something rather than nothing". Of course there is something, hence why we are here talking about this at all.
The main problem people grapple with in the question of "why is there something instead of nothing" is how if there was at one point nothing, how is there now something? What caused it?
Further, if there WASN'T at one point nothing, where the hell did all of this something come from?
Is nothing really qualitatively different from something? Some greeks held that numbering started at 2, because 1 of something is not a "number of things". It took much longer after 1 was generally accepted as a whole number for 0 to be. These days we often look askance at formal systems which don't have an identity.
(going further back, many old languages have a plural that applies to 3 or more, because 2 of something gets the dual, with its own marking)
That's easy. "All of this" came from what came before it, and all of that came from what before it, and so on, and so on. Your first question, "If there was at one point nothing, how is there now something?" is far more vexing.
That's absolutely not true. Science is not certain at all about the origins of the universe. We don't understand the big bang, we don't understand how time and space can seemingly spring from nothing, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find a physicist who would claim to know very much at all about the big bang.
>That's absolutely not true.
It absolutely is true, I was specifically talking about the steady state theory: "While the steady-state model enjoyed some minority support in the scientific mainstream until the mid-20th century, it is now rejected by the vast majority of cosmologists, astrophysicists and astronomers, as the observational evidence points to a hot Big Bang cosmology with a finite age of the universe, which the steady-state model does not predict" [0]
And the observational evidence is interpreted as pointing to a Big Bang. There are other interpretations which don't require a finite age or an initial singularity.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
it's the steady state model that science knows not to be true, but not the fact that the universe has no beginning and no end, and not the fact that there was no first cause. Science doesn't know anything of the sort.
Two downfalls of this approach that I see:
1. It increases the likelihood of believing things to be true, that are not actually known to be true
2. Since these things are not known to be true, it can increase societal polarization, because some others are able to see and elaborate that it is actually not known, and this can lead to "warring" tribes, who seem to often let isolated disagreements bleed into their behavior on unrelated matters, such as how they perceive others, or how they vote at the ballot box.
A lot of people seem concerned about the results of #2, but very few people seem to be interested (to put it nicely) in the underlying cause(s).
Conclusions like "It is not conclusively known one way or the other...but all things considered, <x> seems like the most reasonable estimate until we receive more data" are not only possible, but superior, in my opinion.
There are two possibilities -
1. There is something, and it has always existed. 2. There is something, and it once did not exist.
Either one is weird.
The author doesn't address this, and I feel, despite their sparkling credentials, that they should have.
Then there was 1 and -1, and within each was an entire universe. But the sum total of both of these universes was not more or less than that which came before.
And then the universes of 1 and -1 combined their power and reformed, as zero.
It's like the monthly accounts, all the T diagrams must end up balancing each other out or you've missed something. Accountants are black holes, bringing the universe back into the perfect balance of eventual, and inevitable, nothingness.
The most fundamental rule: There can not be nothing, but all the things that are not nothing cannot add up to more than nothing.
OTOH, you're failing to comprehend what the key word - nothing - means :-) Look here:
> how if there was at one point nothing, how is there now something?
See, you're imagining two points in time. Some stuff exists in the second moment, but not the first. However, since you're saying "one point" and "now" you are assuming that time exists in both instants. But if time exists then this is already something and not nothing. The true nothing excludes time, space and all the junk in it. Nothing is really just
We can think about the fact that while we look at a distant galaxy 2 million light years away, that galaxy is in fact at this current moment, doing its own thing and we won't know about it until that light arrives here.
Since we can't observe that galaxy's current state until another 2 million years, it's not very useful to think about it in those terms.
Similarly, we can imagine a time when there was absolutely nothing. It doesn't make sense, but we can imagine it.
We can then imagine what it would take to go from that state into a state where there is matter and other laws of physics and wonder how we went from one state to another.
Then you might suppose that there was never a state of nothingness, and then you might wonder how that could be.
I feel that the author fails to address these basic points of the question "why is there something rather than nothing", so it's hard to move on from that, personally.
Because our everyday experience and intuition dictates it?
Our everyday intuition cannot hold a candle to the quantum world. Hell, our everyday intuition cannot hold a candle to our macro world and to our human everyday affairs.
Why should I concern myself with an open question first asked thousands of years ago?
It is just a grim reminder about thought and knowledge and its limitations, our abstract thoughts helped us become the most successful species of our planets, but being too caught and too serious about our logic and thought is just so silly.
I mean, I get it, it is just an itch that we love to scratch because the thknking itch sensation helped us so much before, but there are just itches we cannot scratch away, by scratching we just make the itching worse.
So, I think I should just enjoy life, embrace and trust my functional humanity.
If some great insight comes from science, great, but I highly doutb it would ever come, and even if it did, how would that change human condition?
Perhaps some great computer in the future will be able to "answer", but I think the answer will most likely be so unspeakable and not a coherent answer, sort of like Alpha Go's way of playing GO, probably cannot be summed in a coherent GO strategy book.
On the other hand nothingness itself can be a cause. Is it different from any other cause?
What we know is that there is no "nothing" as we understand or define it.
At the end of the video he says "We can't prove that we came from nothing, But it's plausible." from our limited understanding of whats going on in empty space. I don't know why you think "Krauss is often mocked for" this - because this is not unique to Krauss personal interpretation but there is scientific consensus within the community.
We can't tell where quantum fields came from the same way we can't tell for sure what happened before the big bang - other than the fact that we know it happened.
how can you even imagine that there's nothing? what are you really imagining when you think of "nothing"?
clearly anything which you imagine is something being imagined by you, how is that "nothingness"?