I can’t seem to trace it but there’s an interesting article on nothing on Wikipedia. The gist of the article is that people have deemed inquiring about nothing a fool’s errand, bound to fail!
By nothing I refer to that which the fundamental question of metaphysics, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, queries and that which baffled the Greeks who asked of 0, “How can something be nothing?”
That out of the way, I would like clarifications/answers/comments to a puzzle that’s become somewhat of a staple of jokes.
Imagine a world of 2 objects, viz.X and x. We can see that X is greaterthan x or that x is less than X (size-wise). In this world nothing is smaller than x and nothing is bigger than X. In mathematical terms: nothing<x<X<nothing. By the transitive property of greater/less than we have nothing<nothing. Isn’t this a paradox, that something is both greater than and less than itself?
Are there 2 types of nothing here? Is the nothing that’s less than x the same nothing as the nothing that’s greater than X? This would be my feeble attempt to resolve this paradox.
[Question] On Nothing
I can’t seem to trace it but there’s an interesting article on nothing on Wikipedia. The gist of the article is that people have deemed inquiring about nothing a fool’s errand, bound to fail!
By nothing I refer to that which the fundamental question of metaphysics, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, queries and that which baffled the Greeks who asked of 0, “How can something be nothing?”
That out of the way, I would like clarifications/answers/comments to a puzzle that’s become somewhat of a staple of jokes.
Imagine a world of 2 objects, viz.X and x. We can see that X is greater than x or that x is less than X (size-wise). In this world nothing is smaller than x and nothing is bigger than X. In mathematical terms: nothing<x<X<nothing. By the transitive property of greater/less than we have nothing<nothing. Isn’t this a paradox, that something is both greater than and less than itself?
Are there 2 types of nothing here? Is the nothing that’s less than x the same nothing as the nothing that’s greater than X? This would be my feeble attempt to resolve this paradox.