well probalby not technically science, but the question i am more or less posing would be scientific in nature.

higher beings, such that at the 'top', you usually get 'god'. Now alot of religions/ideals/fantasies/sci-fi seems to have placed 'god' as the creation side, and on a few occassions, they place 'god' as 'god of All and Nothing'.

comming to my question, if basing reality off part of this scenerio, which would probably fall in the 'all' category, could we more or less define 'Nothing'? if so, what would be a general consensus of 'Nothing' be then? (thinking that general circular argument still precides)

Nothing would be the absence of something.

Lear: Speak.
Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.
Lear: Nothing?
Cordelia: Nothing.
Lear: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.

~э(x)

pretty simple

nothing

no thing

duh

Does such a thing exist? Is space a thing?

You cannot observe nothing. We can say it cannot be proven to exist.

One could say a vacuum is nothing-- but then again, a vacuum is a thing.

A vacuum is a thing, as it can be observed. In addition, it is never completely empty, so even then it is not really a vacuum. Thus a vacuum is not nothing. If there is nothing outside the universe, then that means that the universe is everything, and thus nothing exists. What the hell is going on here? I can imagine oblivion in two parts, but never one, and it is apparently impossible to describe.

Nothing in common terms would be the lack of everything percieved as important and/or expected at a given location at a given time. Not too hard.

No; nothing is the lack of anything. Screw perception.

The problem with defining nothing is the word itself, there is no 'nothing' there is always something, but because humans define things which are tangible, hence the word.

I'd say if there even IS a nothing, humans just couldn't grasp it. But a lack of time, space and matter, yes.

There are tow parts of "nothing" which can be examined; however, when I was trying to do this, I was unable to do both at the same time.

1, you don't exist.

2, there are no dimensions, spatial or temporal.

The second one is the easiest of the two to imagine.

IMO this is the kind of stuff people talk about when they are stoned.

"Like, if NOTHING exists, then its SOMETHING, so its not NOTHING maaaaaan"

Yes, but nothing doesn't exist, that's the point. What's Parmenides' quote again? (Edit: What is is, what is not, is not.)

It's a pretty easy concept most of the time. Nothing doesn't exist, because everything exists. The sentence "Nothing exists out of time" can be interpreted in two grammatically distinct ways: Either there isn't anything that exists out of time, or that which exists out of time is nothing -- which doesn't exist.

There is no such thing as "a vacuum" unless you're talking about the household cleaning appliance. Saying "that is a vacuum" is a shorthand and poorly worded way of describing a location.

The correct (and anal-retentive) way of saying "that is a vacuum" is to say, "the pressure at that location in space is a vacuum of xxx PSI/Pa/Torr/whatever units". "Vacuum" when referring to pressure is an adjective, not a noun.

Speaking scientifically, perhaps.

However, in laymen's terms...

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=vacuum&db;=%2A

Ve beleeve in nufing Labaoooski

JAA

That very important comment aside, what is the significance of this question? Nothing is the lack of that which we speak. "There is nothing which could survive that" or "There is nothing which would indicate that our intelligence is flawed", ect.

Nothing is merely a word which can be applied to a variety of concepts.

'nothing' is what Western Science learned from the "sand-bunnies".

You DO realize that that doesn't reall ymatter, right?

what?

"'nothing' is what Western Science learned from the "sand-bunnies"."

What was the point of saying that?

just as a matter of interest, what do you *think* i meant by it? i'm not trying to be funny, there IS a specific meaning i intend here, and i will explain it, but i'm just interested in what *you* think i mean by it.


obviously, if it was satan, ryan lame, or spice/BM then the meaning would require as much time as any of their posts, ie, ironically, nothing. What you are probably wondering is why *i* would say such a thing... go on, guess

Obviously you're simply trolling (and doing a shit-poor job of it). Otherwise you would have said that "the 'zero' was first defined by Muslim scholars".


...and you're wrong, in that the concept of a 'zero' is not the same as the concept of a null set or a vacuum.

heh, notice someone's been catching up with reading...

"trolling" - no, more of a honeyed trap, although i must admit i am surprised that it was you and jeffers who got caught out.





however 'zero' and 'nothingness' have a fair bit in common, no...?

Zero is the number quantifying the nothing. /empiricist

And QWOT essentially got it right; you said it solely for the purposes of trolling. For future reference, the term is not sand bunnies, but sand niggers.

The Zero was created first by Indian scholars anyway.

presumably youre telling qwot that? i only said we had "learned it from them", not that they had discovered it.



says who? if i want to be racist, i'll use whatever term i want. Especially if i'm mocking racists.


....and who's put a gerbil up *your* asse jeffers old boy?

heh heh



Researchers explore whether parrot has concept of zero

A bird may have hit on a concept that eluded mathematicians for centuries—possibly during a temper tantrum.

July 2, 2005
Special to World Science

Researchers are exploring whether a parrot has developed a numerical concept that mathematicians failed to grasp for centuries: zero.


Alex, a Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus). (Courtesy Jenny Pegg)

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Oddly, it seems he may have achieved the feat during a temper tantrum, the scientists say.

Although zero is an obvious notion to most of us, it wasn’t to people long ago. Scholars say it came into widespread use in the West only in the 1600s; India had it about a millennium earlier.

Yet Alex, a 28-year-old Grey parrot, recently began—unprompted—using the word “none” to describe an absence of quantity, according to researchers at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

Alex thus possesses a “zero-like concept,” wrote the scientists.

Years earlier, Alex had been taught another meaning of “none,” as a lack of information, they added. But his feat was to extend the concept to a context involving numbers, during a test of his counting skills.

The researchers, Irene Pepperberg and Jesse Gordon, described the findings in the May issue of The Journal of Comparative Psychology, a research journal.

Alex’s apparent insight into nothingness doesn’t necessarily extend to other arithmetical talents, the researchers noted: the researchers found these to lag in some respects behind those of young human children.

The scientists also said it will take further study to determine whether Alex—who has been the subject of intelligence and communication tests throughout his life—really understands zero.

Zero and none “are not identical,” Pepperberg wrote in a recent email. But since Alex never learned “zero,” the researchers said, it’s impressive that he started using a word he knew to denote something like it: an absence of a quantity.

Also unclear, though, was whether by “none” he meant no colors, no objects or something else.

“We just started yet another series of experiments to see if he can easily be trained to understand that ‘none’ can be used for true zero,” Pepperberg said via email. It looks like he can, she added, but it’s “far too early to make serious claims.”

Chimps and possibly squirrel monkeys show some understanding of zero, but only after training, the researchers said. So Alex’s feat is the first time this has been documented in a bird, “and the first time it occurred spontaneously,” Pepperberg said via email.

But the achievement didn’t come without a few bumps.

The story began when researchers started testing Alex to see whether he understood small numbers, between one and six. Zero wasn’t expected of him. The researchers would lay out an array of objects of different colors and sizes, and asked questions such as “what color four?”— meaning which color are the objects of which there are four.

Alex performed well on this, with no training, for dozens of trials, the researchers recounted. But then he balked. Alex started ignoring questions, or giving wrong answers, seemingly deliberately. He seemed to enjoy the experimenters’ frustrated reactions, they said.

There was evidence, they added, that his stubbornness stemmed from boredom with the rewards he had been getting for right answers. The researchers found some more interesting toys to give as rewards. After two weeks of obstructionism, Alex grudgingly returned to the game, though he occasionally seemed to lapse back.

One of these apparent lapses occurred one day when an experimenter asked Alex “what color three?” Laid out before Alex were sets of two, three and six objects, each set differently colored.

Alex insisted on responding: “five.” This made no sense given that the answer was supposed to be a color.

After several tries the experimenter gave up and said: “OK, Alex, tell me: what color five?”

“None,” the bird replied. This was correct, in that there was no color that graced exactly five of the objects. The researchers went on to incorporate “none” into future trials, and Alex consistently used the word correctly, they said.

“We cannot determine what cognitive process led to this behavior,” the researchers wrote. “We suggest only that his action, occurring soon after a period of noncompliance, resulted from a lack of interest in the given task and was a possible attempt to make the procedure more challenging.”

In the future, the researchers said they want to test Alex for his ability to add and subtract small quantities, including possibly zero.

As they investigate whether Alex really understands zero, they will also have to untangle the meanings of “none” and “zero.”

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines zero as follows: “the arithmetical symbol… denoting the absence of all magnitude or quantity,” or “the number between the set of all negative numbers and the set of all positive numbers.” The entry continues with several more definitions.

By contrast, the dictionary defines “none” as not any, not one, nobody, not any such thing or person, no part, or nothing.

Of course, these words may well mean different things to the authors of a dictionary, and to a parrot.

A related question is the history of both words. “None” seems to be older than “zero.”

Zero was common in the West only from the 1600s on, though similar concepts appeared earlier in fits and starts, according to J.J. O’Connor of the University of St. Andrews in St. Andrews, Scotland.

In pre-zero times, O’Connor wrote in an online essay, some mathematicians tied themselves in knots to solve problems that would have been much easier with a zero. But ancient peoples as a whole probably didn’t think of it because they didn’t need it: “If ancient peoples solved a problem about how many horses a farmer needed,” he wrote, “then the problem was not going to have 0 or –23 as an answer.”

“None” is considerably older than “zero” in Western cultures. It’s related to a neinn—an early medieval Viking word—and is similar to the still older Latin word noenum, meaning “not one,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Whatever the etymological roots of Alex’s utterances, his performance has its limitations, the researchers said. Several years ago, they tried to teach him to recite a number line by presenting written numerals on their own, without reference to groups of items. Alex performed rather poorly. Schoolchildren, by contrast, can usually learn this fairly easily.

Thus Alex’s apparent insight into zero doesn’t necessarily reflect across-the-board mathematical brilliance. Alex’s abilities might parallel those of children “who have trouble learning language and counting skills,” the researchers wrote.

* * *
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/05...rrotzerofrm.htm

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would put some witty and evil comment after this, but its nearly 06.00, and i'm too tired. Think up something nasty about yourself and post it please.

basing concepts of percepted relationships as having to have time, then perhaps us humans, having our 'makeup' in part being 'time', cannot comprehend that which isn't affected by time?

mmm... I do love the statement 'replying to nothing' at the top of my page though ^^ just slight amusments...

with the parrot thing, maybe the parrots definition of language and percecption allowed it to conceive the original learning as something more then was intended? in other words, possibly it is smarter/dumber in percepted views based from communication rules that state that words are only a poor way to transfer ideas and concepts from one being to another? in other words, we thought we gave it our definition of 'none' but instead, we communicated the definition of zero, which can be directly applied to be a definition of 'none'.

this is valid - yet it appears that many humans *can* and *do* manage to achieve states of consciousness where linear time is not fundamental - it is certainly an element of high level schizrophrenia.

one possible explanation is the 'dual hemisphere' model that is now pretty widely accepted, although the potentialities are still hotly debated - the notion that the left hemisphere is concerned with liner conceptualisms, whereas the right heisphere is concerned with holistic conceptualisms. (remember the left hemisphere connects to the right hand, and the right hemisphere to the left hand).

It has nothing to do with linear time. They are simply crazy.

from a linear perspective - philosphies that accept holistic thinking do not so label.

curiously, in india where the hindu religion accepts such conceptualisation as not only *one* of the normal states but even one of the most interesting, there are no asylums.

the forms you use colour your perceptions.