 Occasionally, language and logic blend together in such a way where the results are kind of funny. That's rare, but this is one of those occasions. We've already discovered a rock solid foundation for our worldview. Logic applies to everything. This sentence can be rephrased into, quote, logic does not apply to nothing. But that might bring up the question, well what is nothing? It's a wonderful question and trying to answer it creates a bunch of humorous sentences that you'd never encounter anywhere else. Like any other topic, we have to be extremely careful. If our concepts about nothing are inaccurate, it can result in logical contradictions and absurd conclusions. I can only think of one sensible answer to the question, what is nothing? The answer is this. Nothing is nothing. And the following syllogism demonstrates why. If something is something, then it is certainly not nothing. Premise two, everything is something. Conclusion. Therefore, nothing is nothing. In other words, there is no such thing as nothing in existence by definition. Nothing can't exist because there's nothing to exist. Now here's where crystal clear language becomes important. From the beginning, we have to distinguish between the concept of nothing and nothing. If we don't, we'll end up in absurdities and many people get tripped up by this distinction. Now the concept of nothing certainly exists, as I'll explain in a minute, but actual nothing, if you can say such a thing, does not exist. Imagine somebody were to ask you, hmm, what are you referencing by the term nothing? The only appropriate response is to say, nothing at all. But this is problematic. How can we keep using a term that doesn't reference anything? I mean, the term has meaning, doesn't it? Nothing means something. So we have to distinguish here between concepts and their reference. Consider the sentence, my dog named Goose. Now certainly, the concept of my dog is not the same thing as my dog. I mean, he exists separate of my conception, but I can reference him using everyday language. Now consider a more difficult case, Harry Potter. What does Harry Potter reference? Well, certainly something, but not something separate of our conception. I mean, Harry Potter doesn't exist in the physical world, he's a concept. Okay, so what about the term nothing? If we were to conclude, well, nothing is only a concept, then we run into the following contradiction. Proposition one, all concepts are something. Proposition two, nothing is a concept. Conclusion. Therefore, nothing is something. But nothing can't be something, where have we gone wrong? Now the only way to preserve sensibility is to draw the distinction between the concept of nothing and actual nothing. The concept of nothing certainly exists, that's what we're talking about. But actual nothing by its nature does not exist. And crucially, actual nothing as a term is not a reference to anything. It's merely two words that we put together to spark a concept in your mind. The term actual nothing is something like a formula for the idea of universal negation, not anything. Think about it, we have kind of an intuitive idea about what the word not means, if you place not in front of a sentence, you've negated whatever follows. So when I say I am not a woman, that has a very clear meaning. And the word nothing simply takes this idea and applies it universally. It's a universal negation, it's saying not anything whatsoever. All right, so that's not ridiculous enough. In order to avoid contradictions, we have to dive even further into the weeds. We must relentlessly refuse to turn nothing into something. Consider the difference between two sentences. Sentence one, I am not a woman. Sentence two, I am a not woman. Now the first sentence is essentially a negation. It's saying I am not that. The second sentence by contrast is a positive claim. It's saying I am a not that. Thus the second sentence actually contains an error in its language. A not that is not something you can be. A man, for example, isn't a not woman. A man is simply not a woman, or we could rephrase it more clearly by saying, it would be false to claim that a man is a woman. Now the same is true with the term nothing. It must always remain a negation and never become a positive claim. So now consider this very tricky question. Eliminate everything in existence and what are you left with? If we answer, well, you're left with nothing, that implies nothing is something that in some possible world you can have nothing left over. But nothing is not something to be had by logical necessity. Nothing can't be left over because it can't be in the first place. So we can avoid this confusion by concluding, if you eliminate everything in existence, you would not have anything remaining. This is only a negation, and it doesn't imply that nothing could somehow exist. I'll illustrate this distinction one more way. Consider the universally true abstraction that A is A. Now this means that for anything that exists, it is whatever it is, it is itself. Another way to phrase this is to say that everything has identity with itself. Things are what they are. This truth applies to literally everything, which means it doesn't apply to nothing. Nothing does not have identity. Nothing is not itself, because to be itself requires to be, which nothing isn't. We might be tempted to transform the sentence that nothing is nothing into the abstraction A is A, but in fact this is also an error. Nothing is not A because A implies identity. Strictly speaking, nothing is quote, not A. So if we want to create a formal abstraction about nothing, the most we can possibly say is not A is not A. And that ensures that nothing remains negation and not a positive thing. This may seem like a bunch of unnecessary linguistic nonsense, but it has very big implications. For example, Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking have become popular for claiming that they have answered the age old question, how did the universe come into existence? And can you ever get something from nothing? And they claim that something can create itself out of nothing, because nothing is actually something, and you can weigh and measure nothing. The problem is that the nothing they're talking about is empty three-dimensional space, which is certainly not nothing. So this is a clear logical contradiction. Actual nothing is not empty three-dimensional space. The latter has both existence and identity. So Krauss and Hawking make a self-evident and elementary error, which is revealed just by a simple examination of our concepts. Even take something like an image that's pure black. It's certainly not nothing. If you're looking at it at a screen, it's a bunch of black pixels. You might call it, it's an empty background, but an empty background is still something. And you can know this simply by recognizing that we're talking about it. Pushed to its extremes, language is a pretty funny thing. When we're talking about nothing, we better make sure we're not talking about anything. Otherwise, we'd be talking about something, which is certainly not nothing. I have tried to ensure that by the end of this article, the listeners will have a clearer understanding of how to talk about absolutely nothing. If you like these ideas, make sure to subscribe. And if you want to help create a more rational worldview, then please head over to my Patreon page and you can support content like this for $1. To read this article or to learn about my books, check out stevedashpatterson.com.