| What does 'nothing' mean? And for that matter, what does 'forever' mean? These are two specific words which we use on a regular basis, but really have no understanding of, if they both even do exist. How does it come to the point that humans feel the need to describe things which they have never known, and can never understand? It is utterly baffling to try to imagine in what context someone was thinking/discussing something that lead them to the idea of ....'nothing'....'forever'...when our human condition does not allow us to experience these things. To come to the understanding of 'nothing' someone must have thought....what if this object (random object) wasn't here? What would be in place of it? Now, this is an interesting point. Did they suspect a base element to take its place...like air? If so then they would suspect that would take its place. But what if the air was removed? What would be left. A space devoid of things. So is that nothing? No...the space has dimensions, a position within space, a length of time that it endures. So, thats not the definition of nothing. But maybe originally nothing was defined as that....a space devoid of things, not including air. If that is the original definition, we can understand nothing, but not as a useful notion. Well, what about a null set? There are no numbers/memebers of the set, but it is a set, nonetheless. I think this rather mathematically describes how we experience 'nothing'. What about 'forever'. As far as we can conceive, nothing is forever. If we never had the notion of death, it is possible that we would appreciate our lives as forever, at least until we experience our death or someone elses. But even if someone left us, we would begin to realize the notion of time, and periods of time. This puts some restrictions on time, that may cause us to become cynical about forever. If day ends, friendships end, and cycling of seasons occur, what is to say that there will not come an end to our lives? However, all of this is not a true/ideal notion of forever. We know nothing that is forever, nor can we prove that anything we suspect of being forever, is. So really, the human conception of 'nothing' and 'forever' are really a misconcption. |
