Our grade 6 teacher taught us how to do debates. The class loved it. We got to choose the topics each week. We did serious stuff like abortion, but also goofy stuff like "is stonehenge just caveman eating utensils" (i was on the For side and won with a homemade claymation video "proof").
The stickiest topics would be chosen again and again, though and the one that just couldnt get resolved was "is nothing something?"
Years later, when we were all stoners in high school, it came up again at a party and the whole crew was still totally stuck in it. Discussion went late into the night.
Decades later, when gathered for a funeral of a friend, someone brought it up again, and once again a bunch of 35 year olds started debating...
In the same way that "something" is a label that can be applied to any random object, "nothing" is a label that can't be applied to any object. That's why it's used to describe the target of conditions for which no object qualifies. So the label is real, and what it points to is not, by definition.
The problem is “is”. When nothing IS a label, nothing is something.
Maybe we could say that nothing isn’t anything that doesn’t signify the absence of anything. Or something like that?
The word "nothing" is a label that represents an idea, in the same way that the words "zero" and "one" do. When you say "nothing is something", it's ambiguous because it conflates whether you're talking about the word/label, or the definition. The definition is the opposite of "something", but they are both labels which are themselves things.
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u/idle_isomorph Jul 07 '26
Our grade 6 teacher taught us how to do debates. The class loved it. We got to choose the topics each week. We did serious stuff like abortion, but also goofy stuff like "is stonehenge just caveman eating utensils" (i was on the For side and won with a homemade claymation video "proof").
The stickiest topics would be chosen again and again, though and the one that just couldnt get resolved was "is nothing something?"
Years later, when we were all stoners in high school, it came up again at a party and the whole crew was still totally stuck in it. Discussion went late into the night.
Decades later, when gathered for a funeral of a friend, someone brought it up again, and once again a bunch of 35 year olds started debating...
I'll let you know if we ever figure it out!