Editor:
Welcoming Mitch Trachtenberg’s entry (Mailbox, Oct. 31) into the Barry Evans inspired (“Plenty o’ Nuttin,” Oct. 10) philosophical debate regarding “nothing,” I begin with a quote from Mr. Trachtenberg’s entry:
“The computer representations consist of ones and zeros, but the things being represented (50, 0, pi, null) don’t depend on being represented in order to be possibilities in reality. [Correct] Just unplug the computer, and you have (a computer version of) nothing. It is perfectly reasonable for there to have been nothing.”
Oh, no, no, no, Mr. Trachtenberg. Unplug the computer and you still have the computer and its ideated “version of nothing.” Your digital age metaphor simply transposes the preeminence of life in the living cosmos into your man-made realm of computer technology.
Then, as per convention in human affairs, the ideation of the absence of computer representations is mistaken as something named nothing and, thereby, tumbles into the same trap as made Barry Evans sigh. It is a sophist trap that is dependent on humanity’s hubris conceit that its individuated manifestations of self-awareness are privy to the secrets of existence.
Death, as the absence of life, appears eternal to humans who all will die. This endless nothingness at the end of individuated life leads humans to believe “nothing” exists as a material reality. But in material reality and ideated “reality” nothing can only be nothing. Otherwise, it will be something, as the sophist trap proves.
Yes, of course, nothing partakes in material existence as death and in ideated existence as speculations. But death and “nothing” require prior existing realities, material and ideated respectively, before they can partake in human affairs.
Thus, as I wrote in my prior letter, life’s material preeminence proves how and why “life is” is the axiomatic maxim of existence.
Alex Ricca, Blue Lake
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This article appears in ‘Powerful’.