Is Nothingness the ultimate truth?

[benhur]

All objects can be divided into smaller and smaller parts. That being the case, why do we have to stop at the subatomic level, why can't we accept that a thing can be divided over and over, until there's nothing to divide? Which means, logically, we ought to admit nothing as the real nature of any object.

A chair is made of parts, and therefore, it can be split into those parts. And those parts can split into parts, and this process can go on, until 'splitting' becomes impossible. And it becomes impossible, only when it's down to nothing. Because anything else other than nothing is subject to division (even if we may not have the instruments to actually accomplish that).

Just wondering...

[Wild_Fire]

Personally, you can think yourself stupid about this 'Nothingness' idea.:confused:

I like the old analogy for Philosophy of flipping a coin.

On one side of the coin you have an answer, and on the other side yet another answer, but which is right?:confused:

You keep flipping the coin but every time you want to know what the other side says about an issue. In the end you flip it so often it becomes a blur, and you realise you've wasted all your time thinking about something that actually doesn't make a shred of difference to the world, and you are an old, bitter man.:thumbdown:

Better to spend your time, I think, working on changing the world.:D

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

I am sorry, but how do you get to nothing from such splitting?

What exactly are you splitting if ultimately everything is nothing?

Indeed, if you are splitting nothing, have you actually split anything?

The solution is not to think of nothing as an object, like an atom, only much smaller, but as a quantifier, that is as a linguistic device we use to make sense of quantities and numbers.

The ancients made this mistake, and it lies at the heart of much traditional philosophy, including Hegel's and Heidegger's. [Which is why their work is largely hot air.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantification

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

All objects can be divided into smaller and smaller parts. That being the case, why do we have to stop at the subatomic level, why can't we accept that a thing can be divided over and over, until there's nothing to divide? Which means, logically, we ought to admit nothing as the real nature of any object.

Because objects cannot be divided "over and over, until there's nothing to divide". There is a physical limit to how much one can divide something. Take for instance a gold bar. You can keep cutting it half until you're left with a single atom of gold. Any further division, and gold will not be the result.


A chair is made of parts, and therefore, it can be split into those parts. And those parts can split into parts, and this process can go on, until 'splitting' becomes impossible. And it becomes impossible, only when it's down to nothing.No. Further splitting becomes impossible when the chair is reduced to it's elementary particles, which could be protons, neutrons & electrons or quarks depending on available energy levels (Free quarks can only exist in temperatures of ~3x10e15 K if I remember correctly)


Because anything else other than nothing is subject to division (even if we may not have the instruments to actually accomplish that).How do you propose to split the electron?

[benhur]

Because objects cannot be divided "over and over, until there's nothing to divide". There is a physical limit to how much one can divide something. Take for instance a gold bar. You can keep cutting it half until you're left with a single atom of gold. Any further division, and gold will not be the result.

No. Further splitting becomes impossible when the chair is reduced to it's elementary particles, which could be protons, neutrons & electrons or quarks depending on available energy levels (Free quarks can only exist in temperatures of ~3x10e15 K if I remember correctly)

How do you propose to split the electron?

If a person can't split a table, does that mean the table is indivisible? If a particle occupies space, however tiny, it's subject to division, at least theoretically. Whether or not we can accomplish the splitting is another matter. That it's subject to division is the only thing that counts.

[Hit The North]

I guess we need to discover what you mean by the "real nature" of a thing.

Even if a thing could be divided until there was nothing, it doesn't follow that "nothing" is its real nature. I think it is more compelling to argue that we understand the nature of a thing when we understand the sum total of its being, what emerges when a thing is manifest in its full complexity, not when it is stripped away to its basic constituent.

So, we can't understand the nature of a human being by stripping it down to its dna, for instance. Neither can we understand how a society works by stripping our explanation back to its basic element: the individual.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

If a person can't split a table, does that mean the table is indivisible?

No. Because indivisibility is a property of elementary particles, not tables. Split a table enough times and it is no longer recognisably a table.


If a particle occupies space, however tiny, it's subject to division, at least theoretically. Whether or not we can accomplish the splitting is another matter. That it's subject to division is the only thing that counts.

If we can't divide it, how is it divisible, even "in theory"?

[Decolonize The Left]

All objects can be divided into smaller and smaller parts. That being the case, why do we have to stop at the subatomic level, why can't we accept that a thing can be divided over and over, until there's nothing to divide? Which means, logically, we ought to admit nothing as the real nature of any object.

Others have already noted that it is impossible to 'divide' something so many times that you get nothing. A similar analogy would be:
You are standing 10 feet from a wall. You walk half the distance (5 ft). Then you walk half that distance (2.5 ft). Then you walk half that distance, etc... you will never actually reach the wall...

But none-the-less, consider this question:
If I draw a picture, say of rainbows and ponies and flowers, and I put it on my wall, and you walk in and say "hey, that picture is just a cloud of atoms - that's it's real nature" are you correct? Who are you to declare what is nature or 'real' nature? And why is the smallest division of something it's real nature?

- August

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

The solution is to look at the language BenHur uses -- since there is no scientific solution to this pseudo-problem (and sorry for saying this Noxion, but scientists had been telling us on and off for 2000 years that atoms are indivisible, until they decided they weren't -- perhaps the same is true of other 'elementary' particles, too).


All objects can be divided into smaller and smaller parts. That being the case, why do we have to stop at the subatomic level, why can't we accept that a thing can be divided over and over, until there's nothing to divide? Which means, logically, we ought to admit nothing as the real nature of any object.

A chair is made of parts, and therefore, it can be split into those parts. And those parts can split into parts, and this process can go on, until 'splitting' becomes impossible. And it becomes impossible, only when it's down to nothing. Because anything else other than nothing is subject to division (even if we may not have the instruments to actually accomplish that).

What does it mean to say that in the end there is 'nothing to divide'?

Let us call the step just before this the nth stage of the division.

The next stage, the n+1th, is composed, according to this hypothesis, of nothing at all.

Let us assume that we can divide things, even if only in theory, into two equal halves.

This must mean that there are two equal nothings at the n+1th stage, created by dividing whatever was left of one half at the nth stage (recall that the nth stage will have been created by dividing whatever was left in one half of the n-1th stage, into two halves, and so on).

So, the n+1th stage produces two nothings (whatever that means!).

But, this implies that the nth stage was made of four nothings, and the n-1th stage of 8, and so on.

In other words, everything around you is made of nothing!

In that case, wtf are we dividing?

Is it possible to divide nothing? Well, anything divided produces at least two parts which are smaller than the thing divided. If we exclude numbers, can anything be smaller than nothing? I think not.

[However, this side-steps the equation of nothing with zero, discussed in an earlier thread:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/does-zero-have-t97253/index.html]

Anyway, this must mean all of us are made of nothing. So who the hell is doing the dividing, and what with?

Well, surely nobody is doing the dividing, since we do not exist if we are nothing. And, we would have no instruments with which to do this -- since they are made of nothing, too.

[We can't just be disembodied minds, since minds are not nothing.]

So, as soon as we run through the language used to set it up, we see this 'problem' vanishes before our eyes.

It was indeed a pseudo-problem, as I alleged.

[apathy maybe]

Actually Rosa, I would suggest that the "scientists" that have been "telling us on and off for 2000 years" that atoms can not be divided are mostly not scientists.

There were philosophisers a few thousand years ago who suggest that matter was indivisible, but they weren't scientists.

Then there were chemists who said that that using chemical means there were materials that couldn't be further purified (broken down by chemical methods. I am unsure if they ever said that therefore "atoms are indivisible" though (I would suggest that they wouldn't have had much to say on the matter in a scientific capacity, as it would be beyond what they could experimentally verify). (Newton was a scientist, however, he was also an alchemist. Depending on which of his works you are examining would determine the label. I would suggest the same would be true for the chemists I mention.)

Physicists later experimentally verified that atoms could be broken down into component parts.

But to say that "scientists" have been telling us "on and off" would be just incorrect (at most it would be "on then off"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_theory have some interesting material on the subject.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

AM:


Actually Rosa, I would suggest that the "scientists" that have been "telling us on and off for 2000 years" that atoms can not be divided are mostly not scientists.

To some extent I agree, but you may recall that Dalton, the founder of atomic theory, certainly believed this, and so did most scientists who believed in atoms until the work of Jean Perrin finally showed they existed.

But, before Rutherford, can you name any physicists who believed atoms could be split?

Perhaps a handful, at best.

Moreover, the distinction between chemists and physicists is quite recent. Was Faraday, for example, a chemist or a physicist? What about Priestly? Or Boerhaave? Or Carnot?

Anyway, this just goes to show that philosophers and scientists should never say never.

By the way, the 'on and then off' comment was in reference to the fact that scientists could not make their minds up (and still cannot) whether nature is continuous or discrete, and that for at least two thousand years they thought there were four forms of (subluminal) matter (as I am sure you know), and these were not made of indivisible atoms. In that case, for them matter was indefinitely divisible. Now it isn't -- or is it?

Now we are told everything is just energy, but what is that? A capacity to do work? Can everything be made of a 'capacity'?

Of course, energy is quantised these days, but that does not tell us whether it is descrete or continuous, even if we knew what energy actually was.

[benhur]

No. Because indivisibility is a property of elementary particles, not tables. Split a table enough times and it is no longer recognisably a table.



If we can't divide it, how is it divisible, even "in theory"?

Is there any number that cannot be divided? Can zero be divided? Maybe, that could be the answer.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

There can be no answer to a pseudo-problem. Check out my reply above.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1313099&postcount=9

Anyway, we dealt with this option in that other thread.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/does-zero-have-t97253/index.html

If you have zero apples to divide among ten people, they all get zero apples each.

So zero can be divided in that sense.

[Woland]

I'd rather say that concerning an ultimate truth, it would be everything, and not nothing.

[Pogue]

I am sorry, but how do you get to nothing from such splitting?

What exactly are you splitting if ultimately everything is nothing?

Indeed, if you are splitting nothing, have you actually split anything?

The solution is not to think of nothing as an object, like an atom, only much smaller, but as a quantifier, that is as a linguistic device we use to make sense of quantities and numbers.

The ancients made this mistake, and it lies at the heart of much traditional philosophy, including Hegel's and Heidegger's. [Which is why their work is largely hot air.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantification

Lol @ dialetics bashing again, you're so consistent :D

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

I'll take that as a compliment.:)

[black magick hustla]

Never say never, but elementary 'particles do seem elementary. They are point like, they do not have any shape. Some of them have mass, but mass is defined as the ability of something to resist force. So an electron has mass but it doesnt mean it has some sort of shape. I dont think earlier scientists thought of the atom like that.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Well, the point-like nature of 'elementary particles' is not an established fact.

On that, see the Essays in Castellani, E. (1998) (ed.), Interpreting Bodies. Classical And Quantum Objects In Modern Physics (Princeton University Press).

[casper]

objects are our own creation. categorization is simplification. divide and divide, in till you find the question of a fundamental. out of the box lays the ideas of abstract fields and the averages of chaos. what is the substance of form: energy, god, Tao, spirit, or another general abstraction missing details for direct conceptualization would require impossible visualization. is there such a thing as substance? if so, what is the default form? in our day to day experience we deal on a relatively macro-level when compared with the size of apparent fundamentals. our logic is based off of our experience of being able to divide something in till the dust is picked up and carried away before our eyes. dividing forever seems contradictory, for we are not use to dealing with forever in our actual physical personal experience. fundamentals seems contradictory, for we are not use to not being able to divide... the very small requires different logic, it wouldn't be logical for fundamentals to follow our typical logic of everyday happenings, or else we wouldn't have fundamentals, but then, could we really have infinite division either? fundamentals bring about alot of questions, very intresting ones.

also, if you forever divide something in half, over and over again, mathematically, you'll never get zero, only smaller and smaller numbers forever approaching but never reaching zero. if i'm not mistaken, (1/2)^N = 1/(2^n)
this means that it does not = zero, ever. which is interesting.

i'm more fore there being some abstraction, perhaps connecting to time and space. i kinda like the idea of space being something, it may contain nothing, but it IS volume itself. there is nothing there, nothing but volume and time.i believe mass is connected to volume and time somehow,time, volume, mass, its intresting to think of the possibility that they all may be different forms of the same thing. i need to study quantum and general/special relativity theorys. they are intresting.

[Lynx]

Does this mean infinite regression (universes within universes) is not viable?

[mikelepore]

According to the standard model, protons and neutrons have volume and internal structure, but electrons don't.

[Decolonize The Left]

i'm more fore there being some abstraction, perhaps connecting to time and space. i kinda like the idea of space being something, it may contain nothing, but it IS volume itself. there is nothing there, nothing but volume and time.i believe mass is connected to volume and time somehow,time, volume, mass, its intresting to think of the possibility that they all may be different forms of the same thing. i need to study quantum and general/special relativity theorys. they are intresting.

Perhaps you should look into Einstein's theory of general relativity? Wikipedia's article can be found here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity). Basically, the notion that time and space are "connected" was established in Einstein's theory of general relativity. This doesn't mean that they are separate 'entities,' rather that they are frameworks which are one and the same: spacetime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime).

Time cannot be "the same thing" as mass, or matter, for we know that matter exists through time - change (a universal constant?). What you may be proposing is a unified theory of physics, if so, you may wish to consult this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_field_theory) page.

- August

[samsara15]

I suggest this question be raised on a Physics Forum

Try physicsforums.com

[Post-Something]

I suggest this question be raised on a Physics Forum

Try physicsforums.com

How ironic that a person with a name such as yours would comment in this thread :p

If I'm not mistaken, this is a fundamental idea in Buddhist thought?


But basically, yeah, you can't divide everything down to nothing.

[casper]

thanks west, some links on the unified field theory was intriguing, as was the deeper info on space-time(AHHH, advancered :blink: math).
i'm actually in a advance physics course in my high school. we're currently studying some simple/basic things in quantum theory/mechanics.

i'm overloaded right now on things i want to do with my free time.
Lorentzian manifold just got added to the list of things to look into deeper

[DesertShark]

I guess I'd like a definition of what you mean by ultimate truth. Once you break a chair down into its parts (ie physically separate the parts from one another), it is no longer a chair.

Also, division is a math problem, not a philosophical one. AW's wall example is better described as a doorway. You're 10 ft from a doorway, you continually walk half the distance to the doorway (5ft, 2.5ft, 1.25ft, etc). According to this you will never walk through the doorway because you will never reach it, but I'm sure everyone here has in fact walked (or moved) through a doorway at least once in their life. Which would make this problem not logical (not rational? I'm not sure what the proper term would be in this case).

EDIT: Interestingly (and not really relevant), any number (x) raised to the power of zero is 1: x^0 = 1

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

DS:


Interestingly, if you divide 0 by any other number you get 1.

Eh?

Surely some mistake there!

0/k = 0. [k not equal to zero.]

And the paradox you describe is philosophical (having been invented by Zeno), and the solution is to point out that it can only gain its grip on us if we use language in the same crass way that Zeno did.

Of course, when walking from A to B, none of us walks half the distance, and then half that, and so on.

And that is why we all manage to get from A to B.

[DesertShark]

DS:



Eh?

Surely some mistake there!

0/k = 0. [k not equal to zero.]

And the paradox you describe is philosophical (having been invented by Zeno), and the solution is to point out that it can only gain its grip on us if we use language in the same crass way that Zeno did.

Of course, when walking from A to B, none of us walks half the distance, and then half that, and so on.

And that is why we all manage to get from A to B.
My apologies, it was anything raised to the power of 0 is 1 (that's what I was thinking of) and anything divided by 0 is undefined.

When walking from A to B (let say its 100ft), at some point in that walk you will walk the first 50ft (ie half the distance), following that you will walk another 25ft (half of the last distance and the remaining distance, 75ft total - 3/4 of the total distance has been walked). Ah language use, if only it were more efficient. I wasn't making a claim on whether the paradox was philosophical or not (I know the paradox is a philosophical thought experiment); I was making the claim that the division problem appeared to be more of a mathematical problem then a philosophical one.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

DS:


it was anything raised to the power of 0 is 1

Minor quibble, 0^0 is also undefined.


When walking from A to B (let say its 100ft), at some point in that walk you will walk the first 50ft (ie half the distance), following that you will walk another 25ft (half of the last distance and the remaining distance, 75ft total - 3/4 of the total distance has been walked). Ah language use, if only it were more efficient. I wasn't making a claim on whether the paradox was philosophical or not (I know the paradox is a philosophical thought experiment); I was making the claim that the division problem appeared to be more of a mathematical problem then a philosophical one.

But this is manifestly not what happens. No one walks in fractional distances (unless the interrupt their journey). It is a mathematical (and metaphysical) fancy that we do, but then even that is based on the re-interpretation of physical space as an interval of real numbers (or as made up of those intervals) -- which it can't be.

Only if we force these inappropriate metaphors on language and the world can this 'paradox' be made to work, but this is no more legitimate than imposing the language of theology on reality is.

It is no wonder that such 'paradoxes' were invented by Idealists, and are sustained only now by those who wish to interpret the world and mathematics Platonistically.

[Plagueround]

It doesn't really take an in depth analysis to blow this one out of the water, but it does tell loads about people's perceptions:

If I divide everything in the universe into the smallest possible form until it cannot be divided and come to the conclusion that nothingness is the true essence...I'm probably focusing much too narrowly and ignoring all the little pieces all around me that I just took apart. :laugh:

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Well, this is not the real problem -- viewing the universe and space in this way makes it look like a mathematical object, which it isn't (unless one is a Christian Platonist).

[Wtf]

I fail to see how splitting any matter of any form would result in pure nothingness. I suppose division would be stopped at some point given the limited amount of technology, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's indivisible.