Why is there something rather than nothing? (Humans)

by dhw, Thursday, March 31, 2011, 13:34 (4782 days ago) @ xeno6696

dhw: I could accept the argument that nothing IS absence and non-existence, but would you then say that presence and absence, existence and non-existence, are the same thing? -MATT: You understand it; something and nothing only exist due to some object. The object is reality, something and nothing are only words; conventions used to describe it. [...] Language necessarily abstracts reality and makes it possible to reason... but the true nature of reality is utterly unthinkable. [...] Our brains operate to filter AWAY most of the world from us. Think about that... reduction isn't just science, it is exactly the way we as humans solve problems [--how we experience the world.]-The fact that words are symbols and not the objects themselves does not mean that what they symbolize is not real. Nor does the unreliability and incompleteness of our various faculties mean that what we perceive does not correspond to reality. How do you KNOW that our brains filter the world away from us? Since you can't KNOW exactly what is and isn't real, you can only judge the validity of language and perception by testing them ... which is what we do every minute of our lives. You seem unwilling to acknowledge the reality of the approaching bus I keep warning you about.-MATT: All words describe the one reality. Thus, something and nothing are the same thing. (I don't ask that you buy it, but I couldn't arrive at a better way to describe it.)-I certainly don't buy it. What does it mean? You and the bus are the same thing? My daughter is my father? Death is life? All words describe individual facets of what we believe to be reality. We can never perceive or symbolize the whole. On a philosophical level we can't KNOW how far our perceptions and symbols do and don't correspond to reality, but on a commonsense level, we go by general consensus (see our long-lost thread on the epistemological framework). As far as anything can be KNOWN, the words presence and absence, existence and non-existence, something and nothing do not describe the same thing; they describe different aspects of an ungraspable whole.
 
You seem to associate your argument with mysticism: "For all of my pretensions of science and materialism, I think my nature is really that of a conflicted mystic..."-You know a great deal more about mysticism than I do, but I always thought it involved such phenomena as loss of self, merging subject and object, panenhenio (feeling at one with Nature), shamanism (contact with a spiritual world), communion with the Divine, awareness of the oneness of all things. Inevitably this also entails awareness of the limitations of our knowledge, perceptions, language. But for me limitations is just what they are ... not total invalidations. And by oneness, I understand the interconnectedness of all things (which I accept), but that does not mean that all things are THE SAME! To believe that, you would not only have to jettison completely your science and your materialism, but also your human relations and every single piece of information provided to you by your senses, reason, emotions, intellect, imagination. That may be a desirable way of life for some (though with my western scepticism I see it as closer to a way of death), but it still won't invalidate the distinctions we symbolize with our language.