--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> This seems to be a variation on the uninteresting
> question of "Why is
> there something rather than nothing." Carl Estabrook
> pointed out a
Uninteresting? I thought this question was a pretty meaningless connection of a noun "nothing" and the verb "is." "Nothing" be definion does not exists, so asking question about "existence of nothing" is really a semantic trick not a real question - something similar to "why is water wet rather than dry?" or "why is fire hot rather than cold?" If it was cold, it woud not be called fire? If it existed, it would not be called nothing.
Basically "nothing" is a word that does not correspond to eny empirical reality - merely an abstraction created by a mental process of negating the word "something" which itself is an abstraction of the highest level.
Therefore, questioning the "first cause" of everything rather than "nothing" is areally a semantic game, a metaphor, not a question subject to an emprical investigation.
I thought that stuff has been pretty much water under the bridge since Immanuel Kant so it puzzles me why some people are seemingly puzzled by it?
Wojtek
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