GENIUS FORUMS

Okay, this is my first attempt at expanding David Quinn's "reality is not nothing whatsoever" into something fancy.

I decided that, if I were to drop the word "is", I could pull an awesome definition of Being from that sentence.

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1.) Definition of Being: Not nothing.
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Panic gripped me. But what is nothing, if I want to describe it without recourse to the definition of being, and hence without using the word "is" to describe it? After five crossed out definitions, I settled on this beauty:

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2.) Definition of Nothing: Any concept in which the name does not indicate other than the concept's name.
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Does this work, I ask myself? I decided to try an easy example.

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3.) Example "Jim is mad": Jim's name indicates other than his name. In this case, his name indicates mad.

4.) Or, in caveman speak: "Jim not nothing; Jim: mad."
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Howzat? Horribly pomo? Porribly homo? Convincing at all? Edited by: mookestink at: 6/17/05 0:11

Quote:Quote:<hr>Definition of Nothing: Any concept <hr>

Breaking the sentance this way more clearly shows that this definition is invalid, because a concept is something.

That is an interesting point to ponder, could we call a void nothing, since it is the absence of all things? I'm not so sure because the connotation of nothing is more of an indication of a continuity of what surrounds nothing.

We can't really say "nothing" is a continuity for the same reason we can't call it a concept. I suppose we could say that the word "nothing" connotates the continuity of that which surrounds the nothingness.
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Quote:Quote:<hr>3.) Example "Jim is mad": Jim's name indicates other than his name. In this case, his name indicates mad.<hr> That's a semantics thing, a quirk of the English language. Other languages say "Jim has anger." This is a more accurate way of putting it; it's just that most people don't say it that way. I don't see any reason why we can't say it that way though - unless there is a grammar test involved. Even then, if enough people say something differently than before but in the same way as each other, the English language evolves.
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to bring up a three-year-old thread

Nothing doesn't exist.