im sure theres like some material in that wallet of yours at least?? that should be worth a penny hey?
Nothing Ventured A bold leap into the ontological voidJim HoltHarper's Magazine, November 1994 Most people spend a good deal of time thinking about nothing. Few, though, take the next obvious step and wonder: why is there something rather than nothing? Perhaps that is not such a bad thing. Since the question was first posed by the philosopher G. W. Leibniz some three centuries ago, it has occasioned a good deal of existential anxiety. William James called it "the darkest question in all philosophy." The British astrophysicist A.C.B. Lovell observed that it raised problems that could "tear the individual's mind asunder." And, indeed, vexing over it is often a prelude to dementia. Or, in the case of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, to Nazism. In 1935, around the time he began proclaiming that Hitler would rescue the German people from their forgetfulness of Being, Heidegger declared "Why is there something rather than nothing?" to be the deepest and most far-reaching of all questions. Each of us, he claimed, is "grazed...by its hidden power" at least once in our lives, whether we realize it or not: The question looms in moments of great despair, when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured....It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time, as if it might be easier to think they are not than to understand that they are and are as are. The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not... It can even be argued that we are impotent to answer any question of why there is something rather than nothing. For, as the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick has written, "how can we know why something is (or should be) a certain way if we don't know why there is anything at all?" But why should one bother with a question of such generality that it appears impossible to answer? Although it is certainly reasonable to inquire why each particular thing in the world exists--our solar system, life on earth, the clock in the Grand Central station--it makes no sense to demand the same of the tout ensemble. Any factor introduced to explain why there is something rather than nothing--a cosmic egg, a fluctuation in a vacuum, a transcendent purpose, an omnipotent deity will itself be part of the something to be explained. Besides, if the world is by definition all that exists, it would seem foolish to inquire why the world itself exists. That is like asking why a triangle has three sides. Existing is just what the world does. To ask, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is, to this way of thinking, not to pose a real question. It is to rhapsodize--to express awe, astonishment, bewilderment before the cosmos. Wittgenstein himself suggested as much when he remarked: "If I say, 'I wonder at the existence of the world,' I am misusing language." Whether the existence of the world is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans or a mere tautology, it continues to exercise the imagination of philosophers and theologians, not to mention stoned undergraduates and insomniac yuppies having a Dark Night of the Soul. And it is becoming the special province of a small group of physicists known as the "nothing theorists." With some metaphysical chutzpah, these physicists are seeking to resolve the "how" question that corresponds to "Why is there something rather than nothing?": to wit, how could something have spontaneously arisen from nothing? For we now know that, contrary to what Aristotle believed, the cosmos is not eternal. Rather, it sprang into being some 15 billion years ago with the explosion of an infinitesimal speck of infinitely concentrated energy. This truth, broached early in the century and recently put beyond doubt by the data from the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite, has not been unanimously welcomed by physicists. Einstein, for one, found the idea that the universe had a beginning in time nutty and downright repugnant, although the evidence finally compelled him to accept it shortly before his death. The great cosmologist Fred Hoyle thought that an explosion was an undignified way for the world to commence, rather like a party girl jumping out of a cake; once, during a BBC broadcast, he derisively referred to the hypothesized origin as the "Big Bang," and the term stuck. Churchmen, by contrast, had finally seen a scientific discovery that was cause for cheer rather than gloom. Pope Pius XII, opening a scientific conference at the Vatican in 1951, declared that the Big Bang theory bore witness "to that primordial fiat lux uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation....Hence, creation took place in time; therefore there is a creator, therefore God exists! Whether or not the Big Bang truly implies that the universe was created out of nothing by an omnipotent deity in a wholly gratuitous act of love, it does demonstrate that the universe is, as philosophers say, contingent--that is, it need not have existed. Anything that exists by its own nature, that is the cause and ground of its own being, must be eternal and imperishable. The universe is neither of these things. Just as space, time, and matter winked into existence with the Big Bang, expanding to form the present universe, so too will they likely begin contracting one day when gravity arrests the expansion, eventually winking out of existence altogether in a great cosmic implosion--The Big Crunch. The cosmos is thus a mere interlude between two nothings. It cannot contain the reason for its own existence, the ground of its own being. But, then, what could? Only God, say the theologians. Remember the words that the Supreme Being called out to Moses from the burning bush? "I am what I am." What He was trying to put across was that His existence was contained in His very essence. (Indeed, the Israelite name for God, Yahweh, is a form of the Hebrew verb "to be.") Being the cause of his own existence , He doesn't have the occasion to ask Himself, "Whence, then, am I?" In the eleventh century, Saint Anselm of Canterbury elaborated this idea into an ingenious argument for the existence of God. Anselm's "ontological proof," which the monk cast in the form of prayer, began with the premise that God is the greatest and most perfect thing that can be conceived. It is clearly greater and more perfect to exist than not to exist, Anselm reasoned, for a real being is greater than a merely fictitious one. "So truly, therefore, dost thou exist, O Lord, My God, that thou canst not be conceived not to exist," concluded Inseam's invocation. Leibniz, too, counted Necessary Being among the Godhead's perfections. God exists as a matter of logical necessity; it is because He harbors the reason for His existence in His nature, that He, and He alone, can furnish the last link in the great explanatory chain, the ultimate answer to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" There is a world because God created it out of nothing, through His own free choice. This not only explains why a world exists, Leibniz contended, but also accounts for the selection of this particular world: since God's creative act was motivated by His infinite goodness, the world He brought into being must be the best of all possible worlds--and, adds the cynic, everything in it is a necessary evil. (A physicist I know claims that things make much more sense if you assume the world was created not by an all-good and all-powerful being but by one that is 100 percent malevolent but only 90 percent effective.) Was this putatively self-existent deity the cause of the Big Bang? Theologians and believing physicists alike tend to find this conception of God as a sort of pyrotechnical engineer a vulgar one. the Christina doctrine of Creation is, in the main, about the dependence of a contingent world upon a necessary being. God is not to be thought of as an entity who gets the cosmic ball rolling--the Unmoved Mover; this participation in the causal order would rob Him of His transcendence. Rather, He is to be seen as the only sustainer unsustained, without whose timeless purposing the world would altogether cease to be. Whether the universe happened to have a beginning in time is, in this view, irrelevant. The point was nicely put by the British physicist Russell Stannard a few years ago in an article he wrote for the London Times: "Just as an author does not write the first chapter, and then leaves the others to write themselves, so God's creativity is not to seem as uniquely confined to, or even especially invested in, the event of the Big Bang. Rather, his creativity has to be seen as permeating equally in all space and all time: his role as Creator and Sustainer merge." This was presumably what the Church of England prelate William Temple was trying to capture in the famous pair of equations he propounded earlier in the century: God minus the world equal God; the world minus God equals nothing. (But the archbishop's arithmetic was more treacherous than he knew, for a little manipulation of these equations yields "God minus God equals God"--which is, of course, equivalent to "God equals nothing.") The problem with this theistic resolution of the mystery of existence is that it hangs rather precariously close to the ontological argument. It was by that bit of scholastic jugglery, you will recall, that a self-existent divinity was conjured into being in the first place. Theologians were chary of Anselm's reasoning from the moment it was articulated. Could a being whose existence is grounded in pure logic really be the God of faith, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? The argument fared better with philosophers. Leibniz plumped for it; so did Descartes, so did Spinoza. It was not until the eighteenth century, after hundreds of years of muddled controversy, that Immanuel Kant nosed out the fallacy. Simply put, it is this: Existence is not a property of things, like size or color. It adds nothing to a concept. If it did, all kinds of entities could be defined into existence. Suppose, for instance, a unicorn were to be defined as the most perfect horse there could be; would it not follow then, by the very reasoning Anselm employed, that unicorns exist? No logical bridge can be built between a mere abstraction and concrete existence. True, there are some philosophers around today who defend the ontological argument on various eccentric grounds. I have even met one rabbi who swore that he based his belief in God on a version of Anselm's reasoning. Most, though, would agree.
The Nothing-Nothing international: Nothing - USA, England, New England, West Australia Nichts (or: "nix") - Oestereich, Deutscheland, Zentral Argentina Ingenting - Sweden, Sverige, Norway, Norge, Central Greenland Kabulumba - Kongo, Zaire, Bavaria Sans - Frankrike, France, Mauretanien, Eleven-Leg-Coast maybe... Neechewo - Russia, Russland, Sovjet Union, Kazachstan Nex - Northern Frankonia Nong Hai - somewhere in Asia To be continued This is a service of Rozi Rabito & The Nothing Company
Absolutely nothing Berlin ConnectioncuT - I'm talkin' about West-Berlin (British, French & American Sector) which is located in the west of East-Berlin (Sovjet Sector). Rozi Rabito Welcomes You To Cyper Punk West-Berlin!
from the french sector - eh, mec, tu là bas - le mur de Berlin est tombée ça fait des années............ from the american sector - dude, Berlin's wall has gone long time ago......... from the british sector - my name is Bond, James Bond............ from the soviet sector - balalaika nyet galina paparikova.... from the portuguese sector -
dude nothing is cool... You cant put words on tnothing.. whats with the long lists explaining nothing... Oneness of Meditation use that which is nothing to create.. I think kinda
Please stay on topic and say absolutely nothing in this thread. If you really want to say something what doesn't make sense you have the opportunity to do it at Rozi Rabito's forum for psychonautictictictic - in English, in Germ-an, in Zuaheli, in Bavarian Slang, in any language you want to, even in No Language Bless you guys PS: At night it is colder than outside!
