Hi Michael [Platt mentioned] --
As one who has taken positive things from what you both say, following your baseball game has been an interesting experience! Keep it up!
Glad you found it interesting, but I'm not a sportsman and the baseball metaphor was a losing game for me. Platt is decent fellow with a perceptive mind, a love of esthetic beauty, a geat sense of humor, and a flair for journalistic writing that is unmatched in this forum. He just can't seem to get a handle around metaphysical concepts (mine anyway).
I wonder, and this is not directly at you Ham... how do we define nothingness? [Here I am, the eternal linguist!] The very word contains "thing" which in itself is obviously not a universally accepted concept.
How true, Michael, and your question has been tossed around here once or twice. Is nothingness simply empty space with things floating in it, or is it an absolute void with no content? I see nothingness as relative to "thingness", as a contingency of what exists. A hypothetical "state" of no universe and no cognitive agency is inconceivable, and we certainly wouldn't be around to talk about it! Yet, it's the starting point for all metaphyical theory. Could such a non-existent state "be", or would its "being" consist of a primary source or Creator? I think I know how you would answer, but it is not the answer you would get from 99% of the folks here. Even Pirsig's Quality is meaningless in the absence of experience.
I struggled with this paradox at the outset of developing my philosophy of Essence. My conclusion was that whatever is REAL is not what we experience, but that without a fundamental Reality there could be no existence or experience. The Being and Nothingness of Sartre and the existentialists, which I was heavily into at the time, did not address the issue of an ultimate reality. They were talking about 'existents' -- things or phenomena that couldn't exist or appear without a supra-natural source that transcended them and made possible their actualization. Because "thingness" and "beingness" are not the nature of the ultimate source, I decided that the terms "being" and "existing" were not only philosophically ambiguous but totally inadequate for metaphysical conceptualization.
The downside of this decision was that when I'm asked if Essence "exists", I have to say no. It's the same answer if one chooses to regard Essence as a deity. Now, you may say I'm only postulating that God or Essence is "not a thing," but there's more to my argument than that. Essence is absolute, unconditional and immutable. And the nihilists here will call me hypocritical for defining Nothingness and "passibng it off under a disguised name". But I'm sure you can appreciate my position, Michael.
I have no problem conceiving that the Big Bang came from "nothingness"; if one can accept that "everything" as we know it was contained in an infinite point [the implications on time seem to be ignored in this scenario; eg how can you have a "before" if there is no "now" or "after"?] why is it any more difficult to accept it all came from nothing? Until we can conceive every"thing", we will have no choice but to accept that some"thing" can come from no"thing".
I beg to differ. An infinite [perhaps you mean "infinitesimal"] point is an existent, so is still a "thing". Nothingness divides or separates entities (beings) but it can't create them. But you've caught another astute point that I can't seem to get across to others: the space/time dimensions by which we intellectualize our reality. They're "built into" human experience, not indigenous to an external reality. Thus, time is a human precept only because we experience events serially; space becomes real only because the things experienced are relative to our unique locus in the universe. Incidentally, I've noted a trend by astro-physicists to consider the Big Bang as just one event in a universe with no beginning.
Thanks for your thoughts, Michael, and for the critical insights you've brought to this forum.
Essentially yours, Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
