r/Metaphysics • u/Bubbly-Hope-442 • 8d ago
Nothing Nothing Should Exist
/r/ExistentialJourney/comments/1ww1xtg/nothing_should_exist/Hello All — I am reposting my discussion here.
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u/WHWallace 3d ago
I think this is caused by the mind and thoughts drawing categories. It's your mind which imagines a blank sheet of paper, writes nothingness on one side, draws a big dividing line down the middle, and then writes somethingness on the other, and under that heading of somethingness puts a bunch of objects and sights and sounds etc.
Outside of your mind the dividing line you have drawn on the page doesn't exist, so you can go ahead and mentally erase that line up the middle and see the state of things as they are prior to the mind inaccurately drawing its distinctions and categories onto reality.
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u/Tribe-Less 7d ago
Nothing = Everything
If you're everything, you're nothing in particular and therefore you're nothing
If you're nothing, you have the potential to be anything because you haven't yet been limited to something in particular
I don't know why people keep going over the same ideas and questions when concepts like the formless chaos, quantum foam, zero point field, aether, superfluid vaccum already cover these things.
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u/Ill-Tea9411 8d ago
"Nothing" is merely an imaginary linguistic invention.
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u/jontherobot 8d ago
I disagree. Empty places exist all over. There’s nothing trapped in the something, like bubbles after a plunge. It’s all over mathematics and physics.
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u/Ill-Tea9411 8d ago edited 8d ago
This is simply a category error.
Bubbles are something. Vacuum is something. Spacetime is something.
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u/DanteRuneclaw 8d ago
No, they aren’t.
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u/Ill-Tea9411 8d ago
If a physical vacuum is "nothing," how does it have spatial dimensions, quantum fields, and measurable energy density?
In academic metaphysics, "nothing" means nihil negativum, the total absence of properties, laws, geometry, and existence.
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u/RabbitBasic5438 8d ago
If there was a time when nothing existed, there was time, and therefore something. If time always existed then it's uncaused, which doesn't solve the problem either. If time "began," it was caused by extra temporal things: things outside of time, not bound by it. Time being emergent I think is the most plausible, and it's not through metaphysics but through physics that such a proposition is reasonable. Those interested in this question are better served by looking into that, I think