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It's possible to imagine something, for example a table, we see one everyday and can bring it in front of our minds eye (although it's a moot point whether we can see it - I certainly don't). But of course this is a real object so we have a referent. But we need not have a referent: to imagine a unicorn means we are hybridising our referents. But to imagine nothing in its proper sense (ie not the lack of something or just space) seems impossible to me, we cannot avoid our sense of ourselves. |
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Based on your last paragraph, you might be interested in Thomas Nagel's The View From Nowhere. In that, he argues that it is impossible to achieve a completely objective perspective--- what he calls the View From Nowhere. This isn't directly related to your first paragraph, but something you might enjoy. As to your first paragraph, you might find this book interesting. Locke had some interesting ideas about the limits of imagination. For him, what is imagined is always some manipulation of things actually experienced. So, for example, you can only imagine a Centaur (half-man, half-horse) because you have experience of both a man and a horse--- or at least things relevantly similar. A similar sentiment is echoed in Descartes's First Meditation. Check out section 6 and the discussion of painters. As to imagining "Nothing", I'm inclined, along with you, to think that this is impossible. It seems to be no different than thinking about nothing. But then it seems like there is something you are thinking about, namely, nothing! UPDATE: It occurred to me that given the Ontology tag in your question, and given that my last paragraph is mostly based on my own idiosyncratic views about existence and reference, I should bring in some considerations from the seminal article on ontology, Quine's "On What There Is". Your questions about nothing, and my own reasons for thinking that imagining nothing is impossible, bear a striking resemblance to the problem of negative existentials. Some philosophers, notably the Meinongians, have thought that there are some things that have the property of "not existing". So, they would analyze negative existentials like "There are no unicorns" as expressing the sentence "There is something such that it is a unicorn and it doesn't exist". They could do this because they distinguished between two senses of "there is". One, the one familiar to us from Quine, is to read "there is" as expressing the existential quantifier. Anything that "there is", in this sense, exists. Now, the other sense of "there is" is subsistence. They thought that there are some things (like unicorns, for example) that subsist but do not exist. Quine thought that this talk of there being things that don't exist was a bunch of nonsense. He held that "there is" only expresses the existential quantifier and that anything there is must exist (as an aside, he famously, but uninformatively, answers the question "What is there?" with "Everything"). But then how did he analyze our earlier sentence about unicorns? He would analyze is thusly: "It is not the case that there exists something such that it is a unicorn" (sorry for the quasi-logic speak, I really want to regiment this in first-order logic a la Quine, but can't seem to get MathJax to work on this SE). For Quine, this sentence carries no presupposition of anything's existence, much less of a unicorn which subsists but does not exist. Bringing this back to the original question about "Nothing". If I put on my Quine Hat, I might say that to imagine nothing is simply for it to not be the case that you are imagining something. But that isn't very helpful, is it? Well, let's suppose (as we seem to be supposing in this example) that imagination is object oriented, so that whenever we imagine, there is some object of our imagination. What this pseudo-Quinean view would hold, then, is that to imagine nothing is simply to not be imagining any particular thing or collection of things. So, for example, a dead person is imagining nothing. I imagine (chuckle) that this view would deny any "objecthood" to "Nothing". |
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What, precisely, do you mean by 'to imagine'? The word itself by it's etymology suggests picturing nothing. This of course is absurd: there is nothing to picture, and we don't have ready experience picturing nothing, not even space. (Or do we?) More generally, we often use 'imagine' to mean to think about what something would "be like". This brings us to the brink of productive inquiry. Obviously, nothingness would almost certainly not "be like" anything we would ever perceive; and as you remark, hiding in the background is your continuing sense of self. To imagine nothing, you must then as a necessary condition negate those two things: you must imagine not perceiving anything, and in particular not being conscious. And while you may have limited experiences with such mental states, it is certainly possible to lose consciousness to such an extent that you are beyond dreaming, and so that as you start to regain consciousness you regain notions of space and of identity, which you come to realise afterwards that you had momentarily lost. And of course, while so deeply unconscious you aren't perceiving anything, or at least your ignorance of perceiving anything is so complete that if you did perceive anything, you're completely ignorant of having done so later. So: if nothingness is — subjectively — like anything at all, it is like unconsciousness. This is no more or less than the negation of Descartes' cogito. Of course, with nothingness there can be no subjective position; but unconsciousness is a negation of the subjective position anyway. We can only experience it imperfectly and in degrees, because to the extent that we can experience something, we are conscious, if (again) only imperfectly. But we can get a sense of unconsciousness from our various transitions in and out of consciousness. And that is the closest one can come to imagining nothing: to imagine a state of no perception or awareness — because of course there is nothing to be aware, and nothing to be perceived. |
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You have tagged this question with "Buddhism," so I'm going to offer an answer that is aware of some Buddhist doctrines concerning the issue. First, recognize that we're dealing with the edge of that which is semantically meaningful at this point. Immediately, in the true sense we cannot "conceive" of nothing because the act or behavior of conception binds the referent concept. As you say, you cannot escape the self. So, by virtue of sheer semantics, it is impossible to conceive of nothing. On the other hand, if you consider everything that you are conceiving of at any given moment, I can ask you: what else do you conceive? And the answer is nothing. Now this may at first seem to be a simply trick of semantics (i.e., we have here the same word-symbol used in two different ways), but if you consider that thinking of nothing would require that you think of something without a referent, then it is in fact fair to say that all of that which are you not thinking about is thinking about nothing. In this very real way, it is impossible to NOT conceive of nothing, because you cannot get the lack of a thing out of your mind. You can see here that the semantics of the problem are inherently weak. You can argue it one way or the other if you so choose, but from the Buddhist perspective, one of the key points of "emptiness" is that it begins to shatter the normal mode of ego-conceptual thought. This is, in fact, analogous to one of the key 'points' (insofar as there are any) to Zen koans. |
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It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. Your question is if a concept without image ("Nothing") is "imaginable". Abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images. For example the concept of causality. |
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As I hear the question and terms used, "imagining" is an intentional mental action, a conjuring of images. Our sense of self is entirely conditioned upon our intentional thought creation (Skt sanskara, Pali saṅkhāra or sankhaara). So no, one can not intentionally imagine anything (nor nothing) without a sense of self. One who actively imagines anything (whether the concept of nothing or dancing rabbits) does have a sense of self. There are pleasurable mental states known as jhana in which one is highly concentrated but not imagining (neither nothing nor something). The lower jhana could not be described as nothingness as pleasure is certainly experienced. I think you are asking "Can one stop the intentional thinking processes?" or "Can one maintain a mental state of nothing?" Yes. The abandonment of intentional thinking is achieved in the second jhana. In fact the first jhana maintains a very subtle form of thinking (Pali vitakka) that is firm and directed but not discursive. The Buddha (MN 19) gives the simile of a cowherd in the shade of a tree mindfully aware of his cows after the crops have been harvested. In the second jhana even this subtle vitakka is abandoned (there remains awareness but not 'imagining'). In MN 19, Thanissaro Bikkhu translates: "rapture & pleasure born of composure, unification of awareness free from directed thought & evaluation — internal assurance". The higher non-material jhanas beyond the fourth (santa vimokkha atikammarupe aruppa) are described by the Buddha with words like 'boundless space', 'boundless consciousness', 'nothingness', 'neither-perception-nor-non-perception'. But again these are not 'imagined' but experienced with liberation from self-creations (including the abandonment of a sense of self) as a goal. |
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The stuff in our imagination is in domain X the stuff not in our imaginations, is in domain Y. There is a relationship between X and Y - there is a mapping, but to claim that there is something in Y that is not possible to be mapped to X - is impossible. The act of claiming it puts in X - the mapping has to exist in order to make the claim. If the claim is that something in Y is mapped to X, but that the mapping lacks a certain quality - say "can be pictured", then sure, we can make that claim. But then you are claiming "One cannot picture nothing", or "One cannot visualize nothing" - and such a claim is like saying "You can't see invisible things" |
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1) Is Nothing some sort of concept, a concrete object, or a class of objects? Nothing is definitively not a concrete object. Also, if it were a class of objects, it would have to be the empty class. There might be certain contexts in which the empty class actually represents Nothing. (It is more the content of the empty class than the empty class itself, which represents Nothing.) The best guess seems to be that Nothing is some sort of concept, which can be represented by different things in different contexts (empty space, empty set, empty list, empty string). 2) Is Nothing an abstract concept, a class of concepts, or a scientific concept? It should be fine to assume that Nothing is an abstract concept, which doesn't necessarily exclude that it may also be a class of concepts and a scientific concept. How can we imagine or visualize an abstract concept? A typical way is to look at some representative concrete instances of the abstract concept. What are the properties of the concrete instance of Nothing? For the empty set, the union of any set X with the empty set is again X. For the empty list, the left or right concatenation with any list L is again L. In both cases, there can be at most one object with these properties, but this doesn't mean that an object with these properties (for a given universe of sets or lists) is necessarily the empty set or the empty list. My conclusion from that is that Nothing can exist in many contexts. There are some context where it is quite possible to imagine or visualize Nothing. However, even so Nothing is unique in each given context, the different Nothings from different contexts are neither identical nor isomorphic to each other. This also means that to imagine Nothing in a specific context is not to enough for being able to imagine Nothing in any context or even imagine "Nothing itself". If we go back to the empty set again and look at intersection instead of union, then the intersection of the empty set with any set X is the empty set. However, this property is not a good way to characterize or imagine Nothing, because it gives the wrong impression that Nothing and Everything would somehow be the same thing. But Nothing exists naturally in many different contexts, whereas the existence of Everything would lead to inconsistencies in many different contexts (and hence often doesn't exist). |
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Everything you think of is something (something that you think). In that sense, when thinking about nothing, we must admit that nothing is a kind of something. That's one of the fundamental paradoxes of thinking (and of being in general). So yes, you can think of nothing, just like you can think of anything else. But the question remains, "When I try to think of nothing, am I truly thinking of nothing, or just something that looks like nothing?" In other words, is the absence of something enough to manifest nothing, or do we need the absence of everything to express nothing? Well, you could argue that the same problem exists with "everything". Can we think of everything? How would we know if we were thinking of everything, or just something that looks like everything? What if we could think of everything, what would it look like? To have everything in your mind, all at once, complete in a singular whole? One could argue that the singular nature of everything makes it indistinguishable from nothing (which is also singular). This is another way of expressing the paradox, that nothing and everything are equally intangible, and in some meaningful sense indistinguishable. One way to resolve all this is to think of nothing and everything as properties of something, not complements to it. Every something is just a bit of nothing and a bit of everything combined. To put it another way, anything can look like nothing if there's none of it, or it can look like everything if you have all of it. Nothing and everything are properties of objects comprised of something. Now, If everything has some nothing to it, are there as many nothings as there are somethings? No, there is just one nothing (singular), and whether you think of it as the absence of one thing or another, it doesn't matter, you are always thinking of the same thing: nothing. |
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I think we can imagine nothing but it is always within the context of something. For example, I can imagine a block of outer space which is simply nothing. But I see that nothing within the context of the rest of the universe which is something. To actually image nothing would seem to require a lack of consciousness (which then becomes a blocking problem) If you imagine, you are creating something. You are creating whatever it is you are imagining and thus you have created something. |
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