Hi Pete:
At 04:50 PM 11/14/2004, you wrote:
I am not quite sure how justification (5) is meant to hang on this structure. Where does the idea of asking questions come from? Why is the "Nothing" supposed to be the kind of thing that should asked questions in the first place? Why is the fact that Nothing can't answer a question any more important from the fact that, e.g., a rock can't answer a question?
It is the same idea as Godel's approach to showing the incompleteness of arithmetic. The structure of arithmetic was asked a question [the truth or falseness of a grammatically valid statement] it could not answer [resolve]. The Nothing can not escape being asked if it is stable or not and has no ability to resolve the question.
Do you mean something like: if you want to know some fact about the Nothing, you can't examine the Nothing to find your answer, since it's not there?
Yes but the "you" is unnecessary.
I also don't understand why the Nothing should be the kind of thing that penetrates boundaries, attempts to complete itself, etc. It seems that your Nothing gets up to quite a lot of action considering that it's Nothing. Are these actions metaphors for something else, and if so, what?
The Nothing can not escape answering the stability question so it must try to add "structure" [information] to itself until it has an answer. The only source of this structure is the ALL . Thus the Everything boundary must be breached.
Since the Nothing is however, essential, it is renewed, refreshed, reestablished, resurrected - however you want to look at it the Nothing can not vanish from the system.
Hal
