The Opposite of Nothing Is/Isn't Everything

[BaalChatzaf]

5 hours ago, Peter said:

Draw me a negative one without using the representing number and minus sign.

Positive and negative refer to directions.   If one is standing on the number line,  a move to the right is positive and a move to the left is negative (this is the standard convention). A move of one length unit to the right adds 1 to the position at which you stood.  Where you end up is the original position + 1.  A move of one unit to the left  subtracts 1 from the position at which you stood.  Where you end up is the original position - 1.  We do that measuring temperatures with a mercury thermometer.   A mark is made when the thermometer is immersed in frozen brine.  That mark is 0 degrees celsius.  Now if you use the marked thermometer to measure the temperature of (say) warm soup you will find the mercury above the merk.  If you use the thermometer to measure the temperature of dry ice  you will find the mercury below the mark.  That indicate negative temperatures on the Celsius or Centigrade scale.

[Brant Gaede]

8 hours ago, Peter said:

Draw me a negative one without using the representing number and minus sign.

Why?

--Brant

trade secret

[Roger Bissell]

11 hours ago, Peter said:

Draw me a negative one without using the representing number and minus sign.

[Brant Gaede]

On 5/11/2009 at 1:29 PM, BaalChatzaf said:

Do you mean the contrary or do you mean the negation. The negation of Nothing is Something. Any particular in the world is something. In set theory we talk about sets and their complements. Let A be a set. Then A-comp is the set of elements not in A. If A is empty then any element is a member of A-comp. The general practice when using sets is to identify some non-empty set as the universal set. Let is call it U. Then the complements are taken relative to U. Let A be a subset of U. The A-comp relative to U is usually written U - A which is the set of elements in U not in A. The (relative) complement of 0 is U. The relative complement of U ( U - U) is 0. So when we are dealing sets of real numbers, the universal set is taken to be the set of all real numbers. That pins the meanings of the sets down better.

Have a look here for some background:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/...9/universal-set

Not all set theories have universal sets. For example Zormelo-Frankel set theory does not, but set theory based on Quine's New Foundations does.

You also might want to look at this:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Discrete_mathematics/Set_theory

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_theory

Ba'al Chatzaf

If you negate something then "something" was always nothing.

If you negated nothing then nothing was always nothing--there was nothing to negate, only a false proposition. Negation is epistemological. Non negation is metaphysical.

These are semanticals.

You can't negate something and you can't negate nothing. You can try. You can only negate propositions.

--Brant

 

 

[BaalChatzaf]

6 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

If you negate something then "something" was always nothing.

If you negated nothing then nothing was always nothing--there was nothing to negate, only a false proposition. Negation is epistemological. Non negation is metaphysical.

These are semanticals.

You can't negate something and you can't negate nothing. You can try. You can only negate propositions.

--Brant

 

 

You are ignoring the mathematical details.  Obviously these notions of complementarity apply to mathematical objects,  not physical objects.  The mathematical objects are patterns of neural activity, not hard free standing  material objects.  Abstract entities live and multiply in our heads. 

You are misapplying your philosophical notions.  Which is no surprise.  Philosophical notions are notoriously easy to misapply.  Aristotle and Plato made careers out of misapplying ideas.  Which is unfortunate because they held up the development of real physical science between 1000 and 2000 years. 

[Roger Bissell]

On 7/20/2017 at 0:19 AM, Brant Gaede said:

If you negate something then "something" was always nothing.

If you negated nothing then nothing was always nothing--there was nothing to negate, only a false proposition. Negation is epistemological. Non negation is metaphysical.

These are semanticals.

You can't negate something and you can't negate nothing. You can try. You can only negate propositions.

Hmmm, this sounds like a (proposed?) Law of Conservation of Existence!

REB

[Roger Bissell]

On 7/20/2017 at 7:19 AM, BaalChatzaf said:

Aristotle and Plato made careers out of misapplying ideas.  Which is unfortunate because they held up the development of real physical science between 1000 and 2000 years. 

 

Three comments - take your pick over which to distort or misrepresent:

1. Aristotle and Plato held up the development of real physical science between 1000 and 2000 years. Isn't that an awfully wide range of values? Is Heisenberg screwing with us again?  

2. Aristotle and Plato defined the laws of logic, including the law of identity, which some claim to not be able to find in Aristotle or Plato. This held up the development of science? This sounds more like a Sophist argument.

3. Only 1/4 of Aristotle's works survived to the Renaissance and the Modern Era. Would "real physical science" be better off or worse off today if ALL of Aristotle's works had survived? If NONE of them had survived? Do you have candidates for "wish they hadn't survived"?

REB

P.S. - I suppose you have a point. I see a similar problem with how Rand herself held up the development of Objectivism, perhaps by 50 years or more by various of her practices and policies. (And I'm not talking about Closed Objectivism.)

[BaalChatzaf]

1 hour ago, Roger Bissell said:

Three comments - take your pick over which to distort or misrepresent:

1. Aristotle and Plato held up the development of real physical science between 1000 and 2000 years. Isn't that an awfully wide range of values? Is Heisenberg screwing with us again?  

2. Aristotle and Plato defined the laws of logic, including the law of identity, which some claim to not be able to find in Aristotle or Plato. This held up the development of science? This sounds more like a Sophist argument.

3. Only 1/4 of Aristotle's works survived to the Renaissance and the Modern Era. Would "real physical science" be better off or worse off today if ALL of Aristotle's works had survived? If NONE of them had survived? Do you have candidates for "wish they hadn't survived"?

REB

P.S. - I suppose you have a point. I see a similar problem with how Rand herself held up the development of Objectivism, perhaps by 50 years or more by various of her practices and policies. (And I'm not talking about Closed Objectivism.)

Purging Aristotle's errors  was a gradual process.  Around 650 C.E.  Philliponus  falsified Aristotle idea that the motion of a body requires a force.  He took the first step to identifying momentum. Other scholars  picked apart Aristotle's  work in The Physics.  The big breaks came with Copernicus who postulated a moving earth and about 100 years later Galileo.  But even Galileo did not get rid of circular motion entirely  Kepler and Newton completed the "de-Aristotlization"  of celestial mechanics.   

Even today we still retain some of Aristotle's thinking.  For example in biology part of our understanding of organisms in the context of a natural environment is stated in terms of function  which is an instantiation of Aristotle's Final Cause.   We cannot think of how a heart is constructed or functions apart from the idea that the heart -is for- pumping blood.  It is not merely that the heart moves blood through the blood vessels  but that is -why- and -what for-  we have hearts.  So even today  Aristotle is not totally purged from our thinking about nature.  Mostly we have (1) got rid of his worst mistake, the failure to identify inertia  and (2) Aristotle's bad habit of not checking his conclusions empirically in a thorough manner. 

But we still use, for some purposes,  his categorical logic (the logic of syllogisms)  which is a correct system of logic in a restricted domain of application. Also Aristotle's  view of ethics is still with us. We still recognize virtue and excellence.  And Aristotle's view of politics still is applicable.  Aristotle worked in so many fields  that it is not surprising that he was right as often as he was.  But he did not check thoroughly  so it is not surprising that he was as wrong as often as he was.   Aristotle's  view of motion and matter (which was erroneous)  took a long time  to purge, because they are intuitively plausible and appealing. 

[Brant Gaede]

One thing I learned about science when I was a young teenager was how it often contradicted common sensical notions.

--Brant

[Peter]

On ‎7‎/‎19‎/‎2017 at 11:18 PM, Roger Bissell said:

It took me a while to get it, plus I needed to enlarge my screen to 250 percent to read it. Very good! The number one is a negative personality. Brilliant!

Peter  

[BaalChatzaf]

The opposite of nothing is something. 

[Brant Gaede]

4 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

The opposite of nothing is something. 

Nothing can't have an opposite. Something can--and only something: nothing. This is semantical. It only makes metaphysical axiomatical sense.

--Brant

maybe the opposite of something is everything?

[BaalChatzaf]

9 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Nothing can't have an opposite. Something can--and only something: nothing. This is semantical. It only makes metaphysical axiomatical sense.

--Brant

maybe the opposite of something is everything?

any thing that exists is something.   It has a what, where and how.