Sometimes I think about the reason of our existence... but then I come back to point 0 because there are so many things that don't have an answer or are too hard to understand
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well, I can argue that our existence is purely accidental. Its a bunch of chemical reaction that last for billion of years or more that created a bunch of shit, one of those shit is a type of shit that evolve into another shit, and eventually evolved into us... but that's going off topic. I wanna talk about nothing.
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I like to think that we exist just like any other animal on this planet - for the pure function of reproduction. That is the one true goal for any living thing - to create offsprings for species not to die off.
Yes, we have become intelligent and created totally different point of view and understanding of life. And I like that we set out our own dreams and ambitions (and try to figure out meaning of life) but essentially we are here only to reproduce. I mean think about it as something grander - we spend years finding mate, getting pregnant, raising children, teaching them our point of view, survival in this world and eventually how to find their own mate and have children.
Yes, there are people who deliberately choose not to have kids. Those who can't due to their sexual orientation. But that is a small part of species that is human. The general flow is just like any other living being.
Even if we consider to colonize space and travel to another galaxies, invent whatever mind can fathom. But where does all that lead if we don't create offsprings ? So I don't think we can call these "reasons of existence". And those reasons definitely are not concepts we have made up - feeling good, having experiences, being rich. Those are just things that humans have made to make them feel good and mean nothing out of the context.
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Dude, it's puff puff PASS. Quit holding that shit.
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True, then again - nbdy expected the Spanish Inquisition ..
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ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι.
... I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either.
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Have you been listening to a lot of Alan Watts lately? I can easily tell
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I'm mildly confused about the part where you say that nothing can't exist.
It can exist in the same way that you can count to zero.
I have here a number of apples. The number of apples I have is zero. I can count them. Zero. Done. Zero apples. Not zero oranges, not nothing at all, but specifically zero apples.
Nothing at all is when you try to count literally everything. And there are zero of them. You expect to find things, and they are all not there.
If you're checking stock on the shelves of a store, and you expect to find at least one something, finding zero of anything may come as a poor surprise. Perhaps someone stole the last thing. But in any case, it's definitely not there. It could be somewhere else. Or it could be gone forever. In any case, there is nothing there on that shelf, and it exists as zero of that thing you expected to find.
Nothing can, and does, exist. (...unless it doesn't, which I'm willing to concede in certain arguments)
Now let's talk about infinity! (a concept, not a number)
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The concept of 'the point of origin' for all matter, space and energy is something beyond us right now, though whether or not that origin has any correlation to conceptual 'nothingness' remains to be established. The abstract of 'true nothingness' as you seem to mean it, is something of a construct that we invented as a placeholder for our lack of understanding. Kind of like how 'time' does not exist beyond being a constructed metric by which we chart event progression.
All this said, I'm gonna segue into some TL;DR now all due to that run-on line you wrote. Mostly because it's the kind of thing I hear repeated by people, but when they aren't more specific. Consider everything after this sentence to be less directed at you personally, and more like a hypothetical for another reader who is bulldozing into complex stuff with their admirable curiosity, and is probably gonna run long and sound preachy and full of itself but eh, I don't expect you to reply to it at all given its not really directed at you.
Why do you assume that it is impossible for anything to originate from nothing? Be careful to pecify the context of your 'nothing', because if the 'nothing' is simply a limited physical absense, then 'nothing' does not need to be an origin when it can be a vessel to something else. A patch of dirt that contains no life may not reasonably spontaneously generate life, however should a seed fall upon it by chance, then that 'nothing' becomes 'something' as it facilitates by allowing something to occupy it.
If you instead meant the context of your 'nothing' to be the abstract concept of nothingness itself, then you have already presupposed all possible contemplance of that 'nothing' by restricting it entirely to just being a concept, and not a thing. It cannot be anything other than 'nothing' simply because it has no dimensions, no substance, no anything beyond the thought that percieves the notion of it. Expecting such an abstract nothingness to ever be 'something', would be like first defining that water is wet, and then wondering why water is never dry. However if that conceptual nothingness is percieved to have a location of any kind, no matter how vague ("There is nothing there" or "There is an absense of anything here"), then it is no longer just an abstract, because it is by its very core nature a state with a parallel. If it has an alternate state, then it is concievable that under the correct circumstances, no matter how remote, that state may be changed. The very occurrance of life itself is an example of that. No matter the vastness of all of physical existence, no matter how random and specific the material proximities of our conception, and the infinitesimal chances of the required events and chemical interaction that caused our most distant primal ancestors to form, it still happened. Eventually. It was the binary "1" that came from the binary "0" by sheer overwhelming scope of random happenstance of forces and material both gigantic and miniscule. If the definition of your 'nothing' is not entirely and purely a mental construct, then it can at least become a something simply by being extant beyond the confines of a mind, or perhaps even generate something via elements within its bounds that we simply lack the means or knowledge to comprehend.
Sorry for the tangent, heh. Though now that we understand the importance of whether what we speak of is the mental abstract or nothingness or a severe physical absense, we have to be careful not to switch between the two accidentally during discussion or else we begin to confuse the tangible with the conceptual. Physicality is an important thing that drastically alters the conversation.
"If there was ever nothing then nothing could have ever come from that nothing so therefore there must of always been something because nothing can come from nothing"
Yow, that's one hell of a run-on sentence.
I mean, not to criticise your writing, because looking at my own mess of words above this sentence there's no way in hell I'd look down on you while I'm spitting tangled word spaghetti myself, but we need to be careful of phrasing. Rushing through things that have a lot of implied detail can certainly make them seem to be consistent in the moment, but if you try to build a model that stands only because it isn't properly scrutinised, then anything you build on top of that will be wobbly at best! Try to reiterate this but slower, more sequentially, and try to articulate the steps clearer to make sure the two 'types' aren't being mixed together. By unfolding it into longer-form explanation its easier to see if there are any holes or hiccups in the chain of thought.
While you may understand your own train of thought, try to remember you're trying to convey a complex idea to others not privy to your headspace, so it has to track closely beyond the written communication gap. And uh, yeah, I know that's a super difficult task. I've been trying to find the proper words to condense one of my most (personally) profound feeling / thoughts since I was a kid, but never quite managed to do so without the words completely whiffing what I'm trying to uh... solidify? Goddamnit now is not the time for my wordage to crap out. Ugh.
(Sweet jesus this got long. Caffeine, a week of wonky sleep, then sleep procrastinating and getting into a fun subject? That escalated quickly. Here's hoping someone slides in here and deposits some counterpoint that'll blow my mind, that's always a fun wake-up.)
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Haha, yeaaaah. It's tricky to write out my thoughts because without my verbal tone to help temper it, I can totally see how it can come across as patronising or worse. I think a lot of those aspects come from having dealt with a certain thing that pushes my buttons a bit too much. I love thinking on these kinds of things, but I had this run of bad luck where I'd keep meeting people who would insist their thinking was bulletproof, but whenever I'd try to get them to explain it, they'd absolutely refuse to talk about it properly, and would only do the 'speedrun' version so that it couldn't be given a real shakedown. Like : "Hey if you think about it good can't exist without evil therefore evil is actually good because without it good couldn't exist so there would only be evil so its good to be evil". And any attempt to say "Slow down a sec, that doesn't hold up" would be met with "You just don't GET it, you think you know everything!" and a subsequent "SEE!?" if I tried to explain myself. It feels kinda like those badly designed brainteasers where the questions are horribly worded and then it acts like you're an idiot for not magically making leaps of logic not even touched upon in the context (especially where other less nebulous leaps of logic were possible, but you didn't use them because you were playing by the apparent established rules). I dunno. Maybe I just get grumpy when something seems cool but it gets tripped up by things that seem a bit silly to me. Maybe I'm just judgemental, idk.
So yeah, run-on steamroller-sounding sentences can convert my face all putty-like into a genuine >:U, with me assuming the worst.
My bad. ;P
Though funnily enough I picked up on the online handle of Uroboros only partially due to thinking about weird subjects, it had more significance because of how I type / babble. It never ends. TL;DR is a way of life once your WPM gets to a certain point! Thankfully it makes me appreciate word spaghetti, so your post was totally fine, haha.
But yeah I think in this case the concept of an absolute nothingness is only conceptual, because unless I'm mistaken there is no such purity of absense in physical reality (thankfully!), or we simply haven't encountered or been able to detect it with our level of understanding and technology. Absolute vacuum, or areas of absolute void, are at least extant enough that they have a physical boundary or location, so while they may be nothing, that nothingness is a temporary state that can change under the right conditions (the most likely feels like it would just be proximity to something that isn't a 'nothing').
I guess maybe this just means I'm a bit of a spoilsport, but I consider the concept of 'absolute nothingness' to be so abstract that there isn't much to really think on when we define it in such an absolute and self-encapsuled way. Its kind of like when people define a god as omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, undetectable and non-communicating, at that point its very definition makes it so beyond our ability to measure or interact with, that it may as well be defined as 'unknowable' and considered a non-factor in our lives as it feels pointless to try even guess or conceptualise at, perhaps at least until our technology advances and then we can check again whether it is still undetectable and/or hasn't actually communicated (outside of just imagination). But when you nudge part of that definition, such as to confirm god as anthropomorphic, or flawed in some way, or assigned an actual pattern in will or behaviour, we are given a vague handle to begin playing the game of what-ifs with, y'know?
So I guess in this case, it's just me saying "Eh, I can't do anything with this subject", perhaps coupled with "This sucks, the rules of the game just says 'you can't play' ". Lets just go with me being a spoilsport with a stick up his ass ;P
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I'm liking your responses, for what it's worth. And I'm not up to par to replying to them all. But even so, I'm certainly not going to attempt to explain things about the pre-observable universe!
However, an example where the tree may not have made a sound (there are many many answers to the original contemplation) is actually quite appropriate to the site: video games. It may be important to render the realistic fall of a distant tree, in case it hits the player's house or something (an unlikely scenario, since it'll probably just be deferred until the player approaches the culling distance, but anyway...), as it's outside of the distance the player can hear things, the falling tree makes no sound. If any of those "we're living in a video game" theories ever actually pan out (doubtful), this could be an actual optimization. I don't personally believe that's likely, but it's still interesting to me to consider weird scenarios such as these.
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It's a matter of perspective: how do you define nothing?
So, the answer to your question is a question of your question. Philosophy is a fascinating thing.
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About your 2nd point:
If such pockets are common they could hide entire regions of space from us that we will never know about. Just like the human body consists mostly of "nothing", yet is dense enough to block most "things" from passing through without touching "something".
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Scale is an amazing thing, isn't it? It's simple to think of our house or our neighborhood, but when we change the scale to every single square inch/millimeter, it becomes almost like its own city. Change that to an even smaller scale, and it becomes its own galaxy. One could scan and measure the human body and find no empty space, but zoom in further and find quite a lot of it. Spaces between molecules, atoms, even subatomic particles.
Also interesting is that we measure the nothing as the anomaly, but what if we reverse the perspective; make special note of the something. An object flying through space has its own path that would not be altered if not for that weird anomaly of the human body in your example, altering its natural path.
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I love how articulate this is. Its like a kind of forbidden, unobtainable artistry to me, for I know only the way of the TL;DR.
I would have whitelisted you had you not already been tagged as such. Cuts straight through the mental static and gets to the core.
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Thank you! That's another philosophy of mine: framing a concept in a long, complicated way with a lot of complex words is good for making yourself sound smart, which is beneficial to yourself; cutting through all of that to make it accessible to others is sharing wisdom, which is beneficial to everyone, including yourself. Even when it's complete nonsense, philosophy is a wonderful way to get your brain going, and achieve who knows what revelations. We should all think for ourselves, but with an underdeveloped mind, that comes with its own set of problems.
I appreciate your appreciation of this subject, and since it's dangerous to think alone, take this! 💙
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In my case I just feel compelled to explain every part of my reasoning. When I don't elaborate at length, it feels like I am cheating my way through discourse by not laying my process bare for others to spot inconsistencies or errors. A kind of assumption that what I'm articulating is correct enough that it can be a tidy easily read package, and not a sprawling mess of "show your workings".
Well, that, and I've been trained by a lifetime of people deliberately misinterpretting me to preempt them and cover everything on a first pass. It's kind of sad, but due to how people can work, I've come to realise that sometimes you need more than just being correct to convince someone, and if certain common points aren't somewhat synchronised between participants then its... kinda like having two people sat at the same board but playing two entirely different games. That desync is beyond frustrating for me, so I try to do all the work up front, rather than letting the communication / thinking gap get bridged from both sides (due to expecting most people aren't interested in bridging the gap, only launching their half across the divide).
Its strange how a lack of trust or patience can self-sabotage due to expecting the worst, heh.
Still, my babbling aside, getting to see such well-articulated posts is refreshing to say the least!
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It seems you and I have that in common, though mine was born not through intentional misrepresentation, but just being weird. I'd say something that didn't seem out of place to me, and all I'd get in return was a puzzled stare. Since my own mind works a lot better when I have all of the pieces, I decided that providing them would work just as well, and to those willing to hear, it did. I have to specify that, because there are those who, regardless of the evidence presented, refuse to let go of their perception of the truth. A good example is when I was asked for "one good reason that Pluto shouldn't be considered a planet." I provided 3, and the response was that condescending look that the ignorant like to give in the face of anything that challenges their beliefs, so that you look like the idiot. But I agree: it's your best shot at preempting that sort of reaction; you'll get through to the receptive. For those that you can reach, that kind of preparation born of expecting the worst is worthwhile, I think.
It also helps you find potential fallacies in your own knowledge and helps keep you on the right track; I train a lot of our new hires at work, and one thing I tell them when they feel like they're lacking confidence is, "Confidence is dangerous. How many times have you been 100% sure of something that blew up in your face?" We've all had that, and no amount of preparation will ever completely eliminate that from one's life, but the more you question yourself, the more likely you are to stay on the right path. Self-doubt is actually a wonderful thing to have, so long as you don't let it prevent you from living your life. The path to true wisdom is understanding that we understand nothing.
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Unless of course we are not a miracle and just one of a near infinite number of conscious beings out there that all think they are a miracle.
Does the Daddy Long Legs in my toilet think he is a miracle just because there are too many obstacles between him and the Daddy Long Legs in my Kitchen to find out he isn't?
Are there beings out there that have broken through this barrier? If 2 civilizations possess both the technological and biological means to register each other, and time and distance allow them to exist in the same instance to create this awareness...
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But if life is abundant in our universe, why would the existence of anything anywhere be a miracle? It could just as well mean there are lots of anythings anywhere... Or do you theorize that there is only one anything anywhere? A singular infinity as opposed to an infinite infinities?
As for DMT, no thanks. I personally see those experiences of proof that humans make shit up when they don't understand something. Until we discover we possess sensory organs that can register or pick up things we were unaware of I'll mark those near-death, afterlife and other-dimension experiences as our brains coming up with a coping mechanism to make sense of the nonsensical. It is what humans do, we make things up to bring order to chaos (or to gain power over others)
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I'm not going near DMT because psychosis runs in the family, I'm not keen to get paranoid or think I'm in a coffin for several weeks.
Your drivers license analogy doesn't really work, I can explain in detail how to fly an airplane, yet I've never flown one myself. I can even tell you how the experience feels without having experienced it myself. When you delve a little deeper you'll discover the truth, but most people don't. (Good Will Hunting much? :P)
I know I shouldn't dismiss things out of hand, but to me personally some things sound like "The winning lottery numbers could be exactly the same 3 times in a row, and 10 times, and 100 times, and 1000 times"
I for myself have to draw a line somewhere, my mind can only be so open.
So until I educate myself more or these theories reach the mainstream I'll go with my "The mind fills in the gaps and brings order to the chaos because of our fear of the unknown"
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Yeah, I meant I can learn how to explain to someone else what being drunk is like, without having ever been drunk myself. I won't actually know what I'm talking about, I'd just be parroting others, but would I get caught?
I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else that I am right, just airing my opinions :)
You seem very knowledgeable, which is great, while I'm just throwing random oneliners around :P
I have a very unadventurous view of how things are or should be, I don't believe in higher beings, the supernatural, most alternative healing/therapies, etc. Which doesn't mean I don't like hearing about them, I just have to control my eyerolling sometimes when in company :P
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Sorry if it seemed like I was painting you with the woo-woo brush, I didn't mean it like that. I was just explaining how boring and matter-of-fact I am, not how woo-woo anyone else is :P
I was reading a politics thread on another forum and came across an interesting video series by Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky about how involuntary our free-will really is, and how society puts too much weight on nurture instead of nature (thinking in categories and boxes) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&feature=emb_logo
I'm only on episode 2 so I might be getting a lot wrong, but it's interesting so far.
(I'm also watching The Alt-Right Playbook, darn humans are strange animals)
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That's where some of my scepsis came from when you said "one of the most common reported experiences was interactions with strange, otherworldly entities that appeared to have knowledge beyond that of the subject."
The subconscious is so full of things we did not even know we picked up on, neurogenesis says those things are overwritten as the brain develops, but what if the memories are there but the pathing is lost or inactive? If DMT breaks down inhibitions and removes barriers, doesn't it also reactivate those pathways and/or establish a new route to the memories? So now suddenly we get hit with knowledge and imagery we thought was lost (or didn't think was lost, we never knew we saw/retained it to begin with)
Suddenly you see Thor from Stargate, or remember a random fact from grandpa's encyclopedia you read on a rainy afternoon in 1988, or experience something you saw in Episode 5 of Season 6 of The X-Files VHS boxset.
Our imagination is very limited because we have a limited bandwidth to get our inspiration from, until the limits fall away.
But what do we do? We try to explain it by looking outside ourselves (entities, dimensions), instead of inside.
Without any experience myself I am inclined to say a DMT experience is an unguided time travel tour into our own memories.
edit: I wouldn't be surprised if the classic seeing of a fair-skinned blue-eyed angel during a near-death-experience sporadically changes to a geometric shape with many eyes and wings due to the memes lately depicting them as described in the Bible instead of as in Renaissance art.
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I love this theory. Thanks for sharing the observation with us!
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I agree. The fact that there is something makes "nothing" practically impossible. "Nothing" exists as an abstract idea that can never be actualized.
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The universe doesn't expand "into nothing" as there is no center where it's expanding from. It doesn't expand into some surroundings, universe is everything there is, finite or infinite. The expansion is increase of distances between all objects (that are far away enough).
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can´t resist now ; )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqnVhCADFHY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhMuGPMzvS8
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This reminds me of my time at Uni, when I had to make a presentation for our informatics course. We've got to decide on the topic freely, so we had to come up with something. I literally had no idea, like my brain went blank whenever I thought about that dumb representation, which was required of us only to see if we can put together a decent Powerpoint (I studied Earth Sciences so it felt like an irrelevant bother).
And then it came to me! I will do the presentation about NOTHING! Like the definition and interpretation of what we mean when we think about nothing. Is it absolute void, or just a relative term, expressing the lack of something we otherwise would expect to be there?
So I did it. We had to present it IRL in front of the teacher, standing in a line that progressed one by one. The girl who stood behind me was kinda nervous and we chatted quietly which seemed to easen her tension.
When I arived at the front and had to start my pres, I said something like: "This is a presentation about nothing. As in literally about NOTHING." And I've held a little pause to strenghten the surprise-factor.
At that moment, I've heard the girl facepalm behind me. HARD. xDD My short break practically emphasized the slap-sound to which I almost burst out laughing.
On a more serious note, I used to think a lot about such philosophycal topics. Its not easy and there are some serious rabbit-holes you could dive into. Ultimately this is a great way to come up with some abstract ideas and keep your mind busy.
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the universe expands into nothing.. but nothing can't exist, in any reality or space; virtual space, hyperspace, dimensional and interdimensional space, infinite universe, etc... but also including our mind.. which is a void, but a space nonetheless. So if you think of nothing.. that nothing exist into your.. mind void space, therefor, that nothing, was actually something. In conclusion, nothing is impossible.. except nothing, because nothing is impossible.
I'm just a guy with a computer, let me know if im wrong, or what your opinion on this matter..
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