A Theory of Nothingness (page 3)

Sad emo

Thank you for the replies everyone including FunkyDerek who I replied to in a seperate, long post!

AO - Must check out Akasha some time (between the essays and myriad of reading I already have!). I haven't heard of it before. I think I slipped into one of those 'meditations' going home from work tonight - like I was just seeing - nothing else - my eyes and brain could have been detatched from the rest of me. Weird! (No, I really haven't been using mind-altering substances lol!)

tall penguin - beautiful description! Yes sublime but frustrating!!

Satanus - Yes, it's all this space that I don't understand. It seems to me that when everything is broken down to its lowest 'denominator' - there's nothing really there - apart from space/nothingness.

hillbilly - I had to look that one up lol! Apparently some do say that it is the basis.

BurntheShips - I've put the spaceandmotion site in my favourites. At a quick look, they seem to be thinking along the same lines as me. I have absolutely no idea what the other site is about - looks like the rantings of a madman to me.

VoidEater - Something else for me to think about, thanks. Who knows, differentiating space from void may be the next step in my 'crazy' musings

H_S - I think I understand what you were saying!

Awakened07 - Does there need to be an alternative to the universe we have? But as you say, it's better than just having the ready-made answers. I believe the possibilities of intellect are much more. Why should we think we've 'arrived' just because we have some equation or explanation? We wouldn't have gotten this far without somebody stretching, just a little further into the absurdities of existence.

blueviceroy - Indeed possible - I think therefore I am... would the opposite be true too? If our thoughts are what make us exist, are they also what makes everything else exist?

R.Crusoe - nice thoughts from you At the moment I guess I'm not sure about whether the somethingness is a greater part than the nothingness or whether it IS a part of the nothingness!

Have any of you ever been to a completely dark place, where there isn't the slightest hint of light? I visited the caves at Valkenburg in Holland once and went deep inside, beyond the market areas, to where there are facilities for living underground during war. Then the guide told us all to be quiet and not hold on to each other - then he turned out the lights. Now that is mind-numbing - in the absence of all sensory stimulants you really don't know whether you're really there yourself any more! The only thing that exists are your thoughts...

That's sort of what I'm experiencing now - except I'm not in complete blackness!

Time to sleep now - visiting my alternative reality!

Awakened07

Awakened07 - Does there need to be an alternative to the universe we have?

No - I think what I tried to get at was that the universe is what it is; had it been different, it would have been different, and so would we and our descriptions of it. That sounded very 'Duh!', but it's not, really. More importantly, I think I tried to say that matter has to be built up from something. I think that thinking about matter and energy on an atomic scale doesn't necessarily make us anything other than what we are; I don't think we can call ourselves some kind of energy beings simply because it is possible to detect and describe our smallest building blocks. Then again, I may be wrong.

Merry Magdalene

Like the docs used to tell me when I was a sick child and they couldn't figure out why I didn't have the energy to rise from the couch for weeks on end:

"It's all in your mind."

Is it? Isn't it?

Everything we see, touch, hear, and perceive as “matter,” “the world” or “the universe” is only electrical signals occurring in our brain.

"Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?"

And our brain and its electrical signals are only perceptions as well. Whose perception? By what means?

Since each object is only a collection of perceptions and those perceptions exist only in the mind, it is more accurate to say that the only world that really exists is the world of perceptions. The only world we know of is the world that exists in our mind: the one that is designed, recorded, and made vivid there; the one, in short, that is created within our mind. This is the only world of which we can be sure.
We can never prove that the perceptions we observe in our brain have material correlates. Those perceptions could conceivably be coming from an “artificial” source.

Karl Pribram also focused on this important question, about who the perceiver is, in the world of science and philosophy:

Philosophers since the Greeks have speculated about the "ghost" in the machine, the "little man inside the little man" and so on. Where is the I -- the entity that uses the brain? Who does the actual knowing? Or, as Saint Francis of Assisi once put it, "What we are looking for is what is looking". 17
http://www.harunyahya.com/eternity02a.php

I have loved contemplating these things since childhood....what else was I going to do while lying on the couch? lol

~Merry

cultswatter

They only have mass because of the gravitational pull of earth's core -

Mass is independant of gravity.

Satanus

I see material and the universe as high pressure and low pressure/empty and solid. While space isn't really nothing, it comparatively, it is empty. The universe is mostly empty. The solids are planets, asteroids, nebulae and stars.
<br><br>The atomic and subatomic is similarly mostly empty, w high pressure points being called such things as protons, electrons, etc, and electromagnetism being the empty. Light is also similar. It has low and high pressure, commonly called waves/wave lengths.
<br><br>If all the highs and lows/solids and vacuums were evened out, there would be,,,, what? A mush, perhaps? Perhaps it would revert back to potential from which it came. Back to a flat line, a flat syne wave. And so, the universe resulted from an outbreak of differentiation within a potential, a vast sea of nuetral, passive, resting state.

You said: 'Now that is mind-numbing - in the absence of all sensory stimulants you really don't know whether you're really there yourself any more! The only thing that exists are your thoughts...'

Now, if you can just stop your thoughts, you can experience the layer below thought, that passive resting state from which we also came.

S

Twitch

Mass is independant of gravity.

Umm, not exactly. They're not mutually exclusive and are directly proportional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation

Caedes

Umm, not exactly. They're not mutually exclusive and are directly proportional.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation

Perhaps you could explain this further, I can't see how mass is proportional to gravity. Your mass is the same if you are standing on earth or on the moon. Or are you talking about equivalence? In which case cultswatter's comment is still entirely correct for all practical purposes.

R.Crusoe

This mass and gravity argument is a slightly ambiguous one.

Your mass stays the same whether you are on the moon or the Earth although your weight would change because the gravity of one is greater than the other. That is , the force of one pull would be greater than that of the other.

However, everything that has mass has gravity and so we each have a minute pull on each other which is insignificant in relation to the Earths pull which is why we stay put and don't go colliding with each other at random.

However the proximity of one object to another can offset the motion of that object. For example the Earth goes around the sun in its orbit in a seemingly elliptical path. But the moon pulls it slightly towards or away from the sun depending on where it is as it circles the Earth. And since the mood circles 13 times whilst Earth does the sun once, there will be 13 undulations along the elliptical orbit of the Earth around the sun.

In fact there will be other less obvious fluctuations due to the position of planets such as Jupiter and Saturn in relation to the Earth and its position on its orbit around the sun. So in this sense, although mass is independent and constant, the gravity it exerts on other bodies is not, and is inversely proportional to its distance from them ( gets less as distance gets greater).

Also we have the notion that whilst two objects are behaving as one i.e. in the case of each of us standing on Earth, the mass of the Earth is slightly greater than if say all mankind went to live on the moon, in which case the Earths mass would be reduced slightly whilst the moons would increase slightly. I am not sure if this would make for higher tides, but you get the picture?

jgnat

The little I've read about Quantum theory is freaky-deaky. Instead of absolutes, we're held together by probability. When we get to the smallest elements it's like you say, it's not even matter. It's energy. And it might just as easily zig than zag and we all fall down.

Makes you wonder how we all hold together, doesn't it?

Caedes

Ahh I think I see what Twitch was alluding to, The gravitational force that we (as people) exert on the earth is proportional to our mass in exactly the same way that the gravitational force exerted by the earth is proportional to it's mass. I'm not sure it's helpful to refer to the gravitational force we exert as gravity though, at least not in a public forum.

I am still of the opinion that cultswatter's comment is technically correct from the viewpoint of a person on earth referring to their own mass and the gravitational pull of the earth.

A Theory of Nothingness

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