Nature of reality - Part II: Nothing

 Well sorry for the long wait. Finally I decided to suck it up and finish this. It’s not that I did not want to, but merely that my mind wanders and I find it difficult to keep it in one place for a long time.

Today I shall follow my post on Infinity, and explore a similar yet very different creature, nothing. Most people would imagine that the concept of nothing is not that new, in fact even to me it seems rather ridiculous that the number 0, was not something people used until the Indians thought it up. However much like infinity, there is a vast difference between 0 the number and the philosophical concept of nothingness. If we were to truly understand reality, I think this is a very important concept, so here is shall explore it.

Nature of reality - Part I: The Infinite

For a while now the concept of infinity has been bothering me. Not because I have encountered it in my studies and unable to get rid of it, as is sometimes the case with physicist/meta-physicists (c.f. the history of Quantum Electro Dynamics for example). But, rather, specifically because others have, and decided to circumvent the issue. In this first in a series post, I shall try to explore the nature of that which is seldom explored out of fear and uneasiness...

Profiles and Appearences

In proposing his transcendental idealism philosophy Immanuel Kant, had come to face with a small little realisation: Our minds do not in fact simply present us with what it receives through the senses, but rather places it in a neat framework so we better understand. Many philosophers before and after Kant have agreed with this, perhaps our mind is ill equipped to deal with reality without this framework, perhaps we can never see reality without this censor in the way, some still believe that with reason and thought we can however, experience reality for what it is, and see beyond the frameworks of our minds.

The truth of the matter is, anyone who has thought about this even a little bit will start to realise that our minds DO tend to put things into a framework, the most obvious one is categories. Leibniz and Kant themselves dealt with this, and so did many others, "categories". It simplifies things, and helps us go about our daily routine without so much as an extra thought for the discrepancies in these categories. We all do it; "all chinese are bad drivers", "all fat people are unhealthy", I've even heard "all teenagers do drugs" and "all boys are sex addicts". The greatest minds of our age have struggled with the fact that all our minds tends to work categorically, divide things into generic categories and deal with the categories, whenever there are large number of things to deal with.

A little story

In the tradition of all the eastern philosophers and guru's, here is a nice story to explain the concept of God, and reality.

A little cell was floating by on a river. It was very young, and like anything that is young, it was full of wonder. Now this wonder caused it to explore the entire place and it found there were things just like it in shape and manner, it called treated them as fellow travellers. There were also things that were greater than it, and it recognised the greatness and worshiped and idolised it, like all other little cells, it wished to be bigger and greater, but it also feared those who were greater and thus worshiped it. These it called God.

It felt after a while a presence, in the universe, a sort of uniting force, an intelligence of a sort, that makes everything the way it is, and makes things run, this force is what caused its friend to die, it is what caused him to become alive.

Suddenly the whole universe shook, as if protesting to protect its very existance...and then nothing.

A fish is eaten...