Prof. Graham Priest (CUNY) delivers the Robert Curtius Lecture of Excellence 2017 at the International Centre of Philosophy NRW at Bonn University with a talk about "Everything and Nothing"
I loved it when he was going over the overview of the lecture. It played out like a standup comedy routine when he said, “I’m going to talk about everything, but first I want to say more about nothing!”
This entire talk leads to Graham Priest's favourite subject - dialetheism. Yet he only uses that word once - right at the end. Yes, contradictions are real.
This could have absolutely been a Monty Python skit, I came here after his conversation on The Theory of Everything podcast, it would be a nightmare to have an argument with Graham, his definitive use of language to be descriptive could easily make the available person dizzy, peace
Also: the proof that the nothing isn't an object didn't convince me. In the first line, where Prof. Priest spells out the definition of overlap btw x and the nothing, I think it is illegaly assumed that the overlap must be by a proper part of n, whereas it can be by an improper part, namely n itself. So, every object contains n (the nothing adheres or sticks to objects as it were) and there is no problem.
Nothing is everything because ...it is about perceiving one's own body and the behavior of what it does, one's own mind and the thoughts and emotions which appear in it and the world/environment and the seemingly external events which happen in it SIMILAR to each other. So there is no differentiation between what happens outside or inside; what is culturally defined as the physical boundaries of a person. We normally say 'I think, I breathe and it rains'. if you look closer, some people say 'I think, it breathes and it rains'. but you do not control any of your thoughts; they appear like the rain; so better 'it thinks, it breathes, it rains'. But if you have a felt experience of this (classically called a mystical experience or in atheist terms an ecological experience); you understand that 'It is I'; because 'you are It'. So 'I think, I breathe AND I rain' is suitable real. If 'it rains' outside, YOU are raining, because thinking, breathing and raining are just a temporary CONTENT of who you are; the KNOWING REALITY in which all content happens. Content and context are the same; they are your reflected constructs. This does not mean that you have the personal volition to change them; but by the personal unconditionally accepting of what is; the continuous acceptance of change; you impersonally construct the whole of reality which will (as a consequence) benefit you personal. The felt moment this makes sense for you; aka the very moment just before you reflect on all of this with your thought, you experience what is called grace. And that HERENOW-experience of Self (outside spacetime) is the felt container in which the bodymindworld (or all phenomenal content) happens.
If nothingness is contradictory, how do we know whether NOT a nothingness, that is being an object is not contradictory also? If *n* is what it is and at the same time it is NOT what it is, then how can i dentify distinct "objects?" by saying they are NOT *n* ??? That is precisely what *n* itself IS and isn't at the same time. It seems that objects that are not nothingness, also are nothingness at the same time. WTF?
Your first question is how we can know that if "not a nothingness" or rather if "not nothing" (that is something) is a dialethia. Priest mentiones examples of dialethia in the third part of his course on dialetheism. One of the examples he gives is the law.
Even if he spoke for another 1,000 minutes instead of 54:20 minutes. It wouldn't make him any more credible. It is and remains an empty sleight of hand to try to bring Nothing into a relationship in some way. Or to want to conjure it up with other rabbits from the same hat with far-reaching conceptual efforts. I'd rather study Nichts und Zeit by Hartwig Schmidt, Metaphysica dialectica - Urtümliche Figuren. There we get closer to the matter.
How the hell did I end up here on this lecture? Well anyways, I don't find any of this convincing. Regards death, I die every night when I fall asleep - where do I go? Unless I have a vivid dream, then I am nowhere - wherever that is.
@@MontyCantsin5 What's so absurd about it? I fall asleep, then I wake up and I'm hours into the future. Where was I in the intervening hours? I certainly don't remember those hours.
@@VidaBlue317: That's because you've entered a different conscious state (REM would be an example of this), not that you've ''died'' when you fall asleep as you stated in your initial comment. You even contradicted yourself by claiming that vivid dreams can occur during sleep. There is absolutely zero evidence that someone who suffers from brain death and is pronounced medically dead can still have dreams, be conscious of the outside world, etc.
@@MontyCantsin5 I meant when "not dreaming." Tell me, if I am unconscious - that is, I have no awareness of my surroundings or my self as being conscious or alive- how much different is that than death?
@@VidaBlue317: If one is in a sleep state in which dreams do not occur, brain waves activity are still taking place. Breathing still happens, organs function, our brain tracks our body spatially, etc. Sleep can more accurately be described as reduced or altered consciousness. To conflate this with death (complete absence of consciousness) is entirely nonsensical for obvious reasons-one of these reasons being that you wake up in the morning. If you die this of course does not happen. Try reading about the subject-both from a medical science and philosophical point of view-rather than throwing out vague assertions (''I die every night when I fall asleep'') that are meaningless.
