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old hand
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old hand
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One must be able to express nothing, in order to have a contrast when one expresses something. - AlexisI knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Alexis! You are a man! 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Let's try not to confuse ourselves in our discussion about nothing by neglecting the difference between "zero" and "null" - it's easy to mean either one when we use the unspecified word "nothing."
(All null sets are identical - almost the fundamental principle underlying all of number theory...)
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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Hamlet's words come to mind:"...A sound made by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Oops! This one's not Hamlet, but Macbeth, who, in his great "Tomorrow and tomorrow" speech, calls life "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." It's The Bard, so we gotta keep it straight.This whole soliloquy is IMHO a most powerful expression of nihilism.
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Joined: Sep 2001
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old hand
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old hand
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Slithy, cool one, no matter that the Bard's simpled-minded
pleasant-sounded construction might have have been nice when he was here, but now, you are here, you live, you love - forgive me, I think that you have a damn good mind, so stop your basting in the sun of your peers.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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Carpal Tunnel
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> Huh?
Don't go there, slithy, he said nix, it was the moonshine talking! ;)
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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> How else do we express nothing?
You can't teach a Yorkshireman nowt!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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well, this is certainly much ado about nothing! is nothing sacred?! here then are some others that are good-for-nothing:
naught and aught,
cipher,
nil,
goose-egg,
blank,
and last (and least) bugger-all
p.s. - you're right about milum, mav -- he's definitely a perpilocutionist.
()
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>How else do we express nothing?
"Nothingness in the Eastern languages is no-thingness. We in the West think of nothingness as a void, an emptiness, a nonexistence. In Eastern philosophy and modern physical science, nothingness - no thingness - is a form of process, ever moving....
When we work in therapy, we always come across no-thingness, and we see that this no-thingness is some very alive process. ... in order to bring things back to life, we have to change them back to process again."
F. S. Perls
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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Here's something from the Internet that touches on nothingness and defining it v. somethingness: "The problems considered in epistemology are: Is genuine knowledge attainable at all? Is the skeptic right? What are the limits of knowledge? From what faculties of the mind does knowledge originate? Which method should be used to obtain valid knowledge? How do you justify a priori statements? Where is the boundary between the subjective and objective factors? What is the nature of truth? SKEPTICISM This is the view that questions whether valid or reliable knowledge is ever attainable by a human being. Some skeptics stated that nothing can be known. Other skeptics stated that they did not know whether knowledge was possible; they suspended judgment on the issue. Some of the common examples used by skeptics are the illusions and deceptions of our senses. Others point to the complexity of any experience and ask how you can know what is the essence or real nature of the things you are experiencing." http://www.philosophyclass.com/epistemology.htm The question of the senses--how we come to reality through our senses when our senses receive limited and often misconstrued information--presents the problem of what you think you perceive may be a different thing altogether from what I perceive. Take different accounts of an automobile accident witnessed by different people, for example. Take any slice of life witnessed by different people... That gets into the idea of communication and scaffoding of ideas. Through the back and forth interchange of ideas, we may come closer to understanding each other. The most interesting part of scaffolding (and I've forgotten the philosopher's name who introduced the concept, but may be able to find it today unless someone else knows it) is that of the comprehension of the book an author has written for his/her conceived audience plus the audience of self. But in later times, the book read will be received in a different way because the understanding itself--with its culture, different history, different experiences--will be limited in some ways by not being of the time the work was written, but expanded in others because of new concepts, understandings, and information not known to the author. There were numerous "The Author in His Time" courses offered when I was in graduate school as an attempt to put students into the period of writing so we could make some sort of attempt to understand better the context of the writing. And another part of scaffolding was the interchange of information and ideas among people discussing and writing about the work. What you bring to my understanding affects my understanding, as mine could yours. But the idea of the work we separately hold in our heads is finally different from each other's, no matter how much we talk or write to each other. Still, there is something to be gained usually from these interchanges. And, yeah, nothing can come out of such exchanges, if I believe you're dead wrong or vice versa. Well, maybe not. You may gain the idea that I'm dead wrong, and that in itself is another idea and something beyond nothing. I've had the interesting experience of sharing my poetry with people who have seen things in the poem I never intended to be there, but I've been delighted to read the poems through their eyes. And I've gained something valuable in hearing what they saw--and even have wondered was "it" was there all the time--coming from a repressed or suppressed area in my brain. This experience is scaffolding at its best. Comment on aught: I never knew that meant nothing. Something new here. Best regards, WW
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