The Human Heart Weighs Nothing In Empty Space

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Millennia ago, we embarked on a quest for knowledge of the wonderful structure of man. The organ that puzzled earlier observers most was the human brain. Despite our many explorations, we remained in awe of this organ. We are now aware of nerve cells, their connections and their modes of communication amongst themselves and with a variety of other structures.

Injury to, and disease in, the brain often provides crucial insights on the role of its different parts. A dramatic example is the injury suffered by American railway foreman, Phineas Gage in Before his accident, Gage was liked by friends and acquaintances who considered him to be honest, trustworthy, hard working and dependable.

A freak accident caused a metal tamping rod to enter under his left zygomatic arch and exit through the top of his skull Barker, The accident left him with little if any intellectual impairment but after the accident, Gage became vulgar, irresponsible, capricious and prone to profanity. The company that had previously regarded him as the most efficient and capable of their employees dismissed him from his job. His change in character after the accident made this the index case for personality change due to frontal lobe damage.

Subsequent studies See, for example, Blumer and Benson, have shown a wide spectrum of abnormal behaviour compulsive and explosive actions, lack of inhibition, unwarranted maniacal suspicion and alcohol and drug abuse after injuries to and disease in the frontal or temporal lobes and their pathways to the deeper regions of the brain. Modern marvels such as computerised tomography and magnetic resonance imaging of the nervous system have provided significant additional data.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging now allows us to further localise function within the structure of the brain and correlate abnormalities of its structure and function. Even so, two entities remain enigmatic: Where are they located? Do they lie within the brain? Since neurophysicians treat patients with a wide variety of abnormalities of the brain and neurosurgeons lay bare the brain and often work in its interior, can they provide insights?

Neurologists and neurosurgeons rank high among scientists participating in philosophical debates about what might extend beyond the physical world. They are constantly dealing with patients who have fallen into the deep hole of unconsciousness. In their attempts at restoring normalcy to bodies and minds, they also grapple with life and death. Inevitably, they ponder spirituality and the dominion of the soul.

We are embodied spirits and inspirited bodies, or, if you will, embodied minds and minded bodies. The term is often used to refer, by implication, to the thought processes of reason. Prioreschi concluded that by the end of the 5 th century B. This changed with the works of Hippocrates ca. On the sacred disease.

Quoted by Prioreschi []. In his book De anima On the soul , Aristotle BC— BC felt that man is born with a blank slate tabula rasa on which experiences and perceptions are written to form the mind. Although tabula rasa is a concept traditionally attributed to Locke, Aristotle first referred to it. What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written: Over the centuries that followed Avicenna — , Ibn Tufail c.

Jean Fernel — treated mind and brain together in his Physiology. He felt that the brain refined the animal spirits. Purged of all corporeal dross, they became concepts, finally even universal concepts and the ideas of the moral values Sherrington, He acknowledged the problems encountered in attempting to restrict the mind to the brain.

Pinker has recently discussed the role of nature vs nurture in the development of the mind. Dismissing the concept of the blank slate, Pinker wrote: Locke recognized this problem and alluded to something called the understanding , which looked at the inscriptions on the white paper and carried out the recognizing, reflecting, and associating.

Neurologists and neurosurgeons see patients with injured or diseased brains. Neurosurgeons attempt restoration of the internal structure of the brain to normalcy or correct disordered function in select areas by such modes as deep brain stimulation or ablation. Some operations are performed on patients who are awake. Observations on patients provided clues to the functions of the mind in relation to the structure of the brain.

When a patch of brain tissue dies, a part of the mind can disappear: Neuroscientists can knock a gene out of a mouse a gene also found in humans and prevent the mouse from learning, or insert extra copies and make the mouse learn faster. Studies on patients who have suffered brain injury such as Phineas Gage have also provided interesting clues on the mind in relationship to the brain. We now know that damaged frontal lobes can no longer exert inhibitory influences on the limbic system with consequent aggressive acts. The relation between the amount of grey matter in the frontal lobes and intelligence; the inferior parietal lobules and spatial reasoning and intuitions on numbers as in Albert Einstein and the third interstitial nucleus in the anterior thalamus and homosexuality Pinker, are a few more examples of specific areas of the brain linked to characteristics attributed to the mind.

Paul Broca showed that damage to the area subsequently named after him in the dominant cerebrum results in an inability to talk. Subsequent studies showed several other areas within the cerebrum that govern other aspects of speech. Bilateral frontal lobotomy and subsequent more sophisticated variants such as stereotaxic amygdalotomies or cingulotomies reduce an aggressive, maniacal individual to docility Heller et al.

Wilder Penfield — , Canadian neurosurgeon, was known for his groundbreaking work on epilepsy. He operated on patients with intractable epilepsy using local anaesthesia, ensuring that they remained awake throughout the operation. He stimulated areas of the brain surface in these patients in order to demarcate the part producing epilepsy.

In many patients, electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain triggered vivid memories of past events. One patient, while on an operating table in Montreal, Canada, remembered laughing with cousins on a farm in South Africa. It brings psychical phenomena into the field of physiology. It should have profound significance also in the field of psychology provided we can interpret the facts properly. We have to explain how it comes about that when an electrode producing, for example, 60 electrical impulses per second is applied steadily to the cortex it can cause a ganglionic complex to recreate a steadily unfolding phenomenon, a psychical phenomenon.

But the mechanism seems to have recorded much more than the simple event. When activated, it may reproduce the emotions which attended the original experience. On 1 September , Dr. William Beecher Scoville performed bilateral mesial temporal lobe resections on a patient known as H. The inadvertent severe damage to the important limbic structures resulted in permanent loss of memory in this patient Scoville, But, he could remember almost nothing after that.

Damage to discrete areas within the brain can thus produce a variety of disorders of the mind. In his Nobel Lecture, Sperry described the implications on concepts of the mind of the observations made after splitting the corpus callosum Sperry, Myers, showed that the cat with divided corpus callosum now had two minds either of which was capable of learning on its own, and of responding intelligently to changes in the world around it on its own.

Subsequent experiments with rats, monkeys and later with human epileptic patients gave similar results. Psychological tests showed that both John Does had remarkably similar personalities. Except for language ability, they were about as much alike as identical twins. Their attitudes and opinions seemed to be the same; their perceptions of the world were the same; and they woke up and went to sleep at almost the same times. There were differences however.

John Doe Left could express himself in language and was somewhat more logical and better at [planning…].

John Doe Right tended to be somewhat more aggressive, impulsive, emotional - and frequently expressed frustration with what was going on. Such experiments led Sperry, Ornstein and others to conclude that each of the separated hemispheres has its own private sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings and memories, in short, that they constitute two separate minds, two separate spheres of consciousness Gross, In addition to structure, we must consider the chemical processes within the brain.

The effects of caffeine, alcohol, marihuana and opium on the brain and mind are common knowledge. Chemicals within the nervous system, such as adrenaline, serotonin, dopamine, the endorphins and encephalins, enable and modify the many functions of brain and mind and body we take for granted. Craig quotes the statement made by Steven Johnson: Carter described modern techniques for mapping the brain and mind.

Sounding a cautious note, Carter pointed out that whilst the optimist might wish for a complete understanding of human nature and experience from such studies, others may insist that a map of the brain can tell us no more about the mind than a terrestrial globe speak of Heaven and Hell. The brain is the organ of the mind just as the lungs are the organs for respiration. Krishnamoorthy uses an analogy based on computers to explain the workings of the mind: Consciousness, perception, behaviour, intelligence, language, motivation, drive, the urge to excel and reasoning of the most complex kind are the product of the extensive and complex linkages between the different parts of the brain.

Likewise, abnormalities attributed to the mind, such as the spectrum of disorders dealt with by psychiatrists and psychologists, are consequences of widespread abnormalities, often in the chemical processes within different parts of the brain. Jackson suggested that the evolutionary development of the prefrontal cortex is necessary to the emergence of self.

In this sense it could be called the organ of mind.

However, this is not to say that self resides in the prefrontal cortex. Rather, the new structure allows a more complex coordination of what is anatomically a sensori-motor machine. He used the terms lowest, middle, and highest centres…as proper names…to indicate evolutionary levels. Ascending levels show increasing integration and coordination of sensorimotor representations. The highest-level coordination, which allows the greatest voluntary control, depends on prefrontal activity. Self is a manifestation of this highest level of consciousness, which involves doubling.

This doubling is established by the reflective capacity that enables one to become aware of individual experience in a way that gives a sense of an inner life. Sherrington addressed function and emphasised the limitations of our means for analysis:. The physico-chemical produced a unified machine… the psychical, creates from psychical data a percipient, thinking and endeavouring mental individual… they are largely complemental and life brings them co-operatively together at innumerable points… The formal dichotomy of the individual … which our description practiced for the sake of analysis, results in artifacts such as are not in nature… the two schematic members of the puppet pair… require to be integrated… This integration can be thought of as the last and final integration.

The Bhagavad-Gita describes some of the qualities of the soul: Impenetrable, Unentered, unassailed, unharmed, untouched, Immortal, all-arriving, stable, sure, Invisible, ineffable, by word And thought uncompassed, ever all itself, Thus is the Soul declared! Socrates — Now do you think one can acquire any particular knowledge of the nature of the soul without knowing the nature of the whole man? Phaedrus — If Hippocrates the Asclepiad is to be trusted, one cannot know the nature of the body, either, except in that way.

I was being mischievous. The search for the location of the human soul probably dates back to the awareness of such an entity. Termed atman by ancient Indian philosophers, psyche by the Greek and anima by the Romans, it has been considered resident within, but distinct from the human body. Many consider it immortal, postulating death to be the consequence of the departure of the soul from the body. Several questions arise when considering the soul. Here are some examples. When does the soul enter the human body, as the sperm enters the egg or as they fuse into one cell or at a later stage?

Does the soul influence the body, mind and intellect? Is the soul identical with what we term conscience? What happens to the soul during dreams, anaesthesia, trance-like states? What happens to it after the soul leaves the body? Where and how are acquired characters stored in the nebulous soul? Where, in the body, does the soul reside? The answer must be in a resounding affirmative. The efforts over millennia to determine the nature and discover the location of the soul have resulted in a better understanding of the wonderful structure and function of man and his place in the cosmos.

In making this search and noting our findings, we must never lose sight of the cautionary note sounded by Leonardo da Vinci circa in And if one knows how great is the likeness between bodily and mental diseases, and that both are treated by the same remedies, one cannot help refusing to separate the soul from the body.

Chekhov echoes the question asked by so many over the centuries. Hippocrates concluded that madness originated in the brain. Plato in Timaeus felt that folly was a disease of the soul. Philistion subclassified folly into madness and ignorance Harris, The seat of the soul extended from the heart to the brain, passion being located in the heart and reason and intelligence in the brain Prioreschi, Leonardo da Vinci —; see Figure 2 , with his uncanny genius, placed the soul above the optic chiasm in the region of the anterior-inferior third ventricle Santoro et al.

Nothingness

Leonardo depicted the location of the soul at the point where a series of intersecting lines meet Santoro, Though human ingenuity by various inventions with different instruments yields the same end, it will never devise an invention either more beautiful… than does Nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing superfluous and she… puts there the soul, the composer of the body, that is the soul of the mother which first composes in the womb the shape of man and in due time awakens the soul which is to be its inhabitant Del Maestro, There is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.

And the faculties of willing, feeling, conceiving, etc. But it is quite otherwise with corporeal or extended objects, for there is not one of them imaginable by me which my mind cannot easily divide into parts. Descartes localised the soul in the pineal gland as it lay deep within the brain, in the midline and was unpaired [see Figure 4 ]. The pineal gland according to Descartes. Lancisi — agreed that the soul must lie deep within the brain, in the midline and in an unpaired structure, but favoured the corpus callosum, especially the Nervali longitudinales ab anterioribus ad posteriora excurrentes , which are still called the medial longitudinal striae of corpus callosum, or nerves of Lancisi.

He felt that the vital spirits could flow in the fibres of the medial striae. These formed a pathway for the stream of the soul or perhaps consciousness between the anterior part of the corpus callosum and the anterior columns of the fornix and the posterior part of the corpus callosum and the thalami, a sort of connection between the seat of the soul and the peripheral organs, between the soul and the body Di Ieva, Thomas Willis wrote Cerebri Anatome while being a Professor of Natural Philosophy in Oxford, where he used the anatomy of the brain as a tool to investigate the nature of the soul.

Albrecht von Haller — placed the soul in the medulla oblongata Trimble, ; p Bloom commented on the refutation of the dualist view differentiating the body and the soul:. But the question is not really about life in any biological sense. It is instead asking about the magical moment at which a cluster of cells becomes more than a mere physical thing. It is a question about the soul… It is not a question that scientists could ever answer.

The qualities of mental life that we associate with souls are purely corporeal; they emerge from biochemical processes in the brain…. They concluded that there exist two dominant and, in many respects, incompatible concepts of the soul: In both cases, the soul has been described as being located in a specific organ or anatomic structure or as pervading the entire body, and, in some instances, beyond mankind and even beyond the cosmos. What do you mean by soul? Is there not something immortal of or in the human brain — the human mind? Because we do not know what that power is, shall we call it immortal?

Also assume that concrete entities are infinitely divisible as seems natural given that space is dense. An infinitely complex object cannot be nibbled away with any number of finite bites. Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra suggests that we instead take big, infinite bites. Instead of subtracting entity by entity, subtract by the chunk of infinitely composite entities. Our metaphysical calculations are subliminally influenced by how we picture possible worlds Coggins , chapter 3.

If possible worlds are envisaged as containers, then they can be completely emptied. Similarly, if possible worlds are pictured as stories say maximally consistent ways things could have been , then our library will contain a tale lacking any concrete entities as characters. But if possible worlds are pictured mereologically, as giant conglomerates of concrete objects Lewis , our subtraction falters before we reach zero. Some kind of background theory of possible worlds is needed.

For without this substantive guidance, the subtraction argument seems invalid. More specifically, from a metaphysically neutral perspective, the fact that it is possible for each object to not exist seems compatible with it being necessary that at least one object exists. Aristotle believed that all abstract entities depend on concrete entities for their existence. Yet he also believed that there are necessary truths. The existence of any particular individual is contingent but it is necessary that some individuals exist.

Science textbooks teem with contingent abstract entities: Twentieth century mathematics makes sets central.

Sets are defined in terms of their members. Therefore, any set that contains a contingent entity is itself a contingent entity. Any set that contains Cameron Winklevoss is an abstract entity that has no weight or color or electric charge. But it still depends on Winklevoss for its existence. Mathematics can be reconstructed in terms of sets given the assumption that something exists. From Cameron Winklevoss, set theorists can derive the set containing him, then the set containing that set, then the set containing that larger set, and so on. Through arachnophilic craftiness, all of mathematics can be reconstructed from sets.

But founding all of mathematics on Cameron Winklevoss would fail to reflect the necessary status of mathematical truth. Founding mathematics on a necessary being such as God would alienate atheists. So ecumenical set theorists instead spin this amazing structure from only the set that does not depend on the existence of anything: This is the closest mathematicians get to creation from nothing! This does not avoid all controversy. Early set theorists and an array contemporary metaphysicians reject the empty set.

But if that were so, then the set of all such sets would be empty, and hence it would be the empty set. Lowe , argues on behalf of the fool: Two sets are identical exactly if they have the same members. So the identity of a set is grounded on the identity conditions of its members. In the absence of members, the set is ill-defined. Mathematicians may wield it as a useful fiction. But utility should not be confused with truth. Consequently, the empty world is impossible even if there are no necessary beings.

There are other metaphysical systems that make the existence of some concrete entities necessary without implying that there are any necessarily existing concrete things. In his Tractatus phase, Ludwig Wittgenstein takes a world to be a totality of facts. A fact consists of one or more objects related to each other in a certain way.

By an act of selective attention, we concentrate on just the objects or just the relations. But objects and relations are always inextricably bound up with each other. Since every fact requires at least one object, a world without objects would be a world without facts. But a factless world is a contradiction in terms. Therefore, the empty world is impossible. Nevertheless, the persuasiveness of the subtraction argument is not entirely hostage to background theories about the nature of possible worlds. Consider the combinatorialist David Armstrong.

Introduction

He eventually acquiesced to the empty world by relaxing his account of truthmakers. A truthmaker is a piece of reality that makes a statement true. Armstrong believes that every contingent truth is made true by a truthmaker and has wielded the principle forcefully against analytical behaviorists, phenomenalists, nominalists, and presentists.

Since there can be no truthmaker for an empty world, Armstrong appears to have a second objection to the empty world supplementing the objection based on his combinatorial conception of a possible world. Yet Armstrong , 91 instead claims that the empty world could borrow truthmakers from the actual world. His idea is that the truthmakers for possibilities are actual objects and that these actual objects could serve as the truthmakers for the empty world. David Efird and Tom Stoneham object that cross-world truthmakers would be equally handy to the analytical behaviorists, phenomenalists and their ilk.

Whether or not Armstrong has contradicted himself, he has illustrated the persuasiveness of the subtraction argument. Contemporary logicians agree that universal quantifiers have existential import: However, contemporary logicians differ from Aristotle in analyzing universal generalizations as conditionals. So if there are no gods, the conditional is vacuously true. This explains why the atheist can consistently argue: All gods are immortal. Therefore, there are no gods. This equivalence is predicted by the hypothesis that universal generalizations are conditionals.

Tolerance of vacuously true generalizations does not stop contemporary classical logic from precluding an empty world. Since its universal quantifier has existential import, each of its logical laws imply that something exists. For instance, the principle of identity, Everything is identical to itself entails There exists something that is identical to itself. All sorts of attractive inferences are jeopardized by the empty world. Logicians do not treat their intolerance of the empty world as a resource for metaphysicians.

They do not want to get involved in metaphysical disputes. They feel that logic should be neutral with respect to the existence of anything. The ideal of ontological neutrality has led some philosophers to reject classical logic. A direct response would be to challenge the existential import of the classical quantifiers. In classical logic, names must have bearers. Proponents of free logic suggest that these departures are a necessary condition for not trivially implying an existential proposition.

Meister Eckhart

Jan Heylen agrees but contends that free logic trivially implies other existential sentences. He concludes that any deductive answer to the question will beg the question. The background logic will always intrude. In any case, the changes recommended by free logicians would certainly undermine W. Quine says that we can read off our ontology from the existentially quantified statements constituting our well-accepted theories. For instance, if evolutionary theory says that there are some species that evolved from other species, and if we have no way to paraphrase away this claim, then biologists are committed to the existence of species.

Since philosophers cannot improve on the credentials of a scientific commitment, metaphysicians would also be obliged to accept species. So how does Quine defend his criterion of ontological commitment from the menace looming from the empty domain? Normally one thinks of a logical theorem as a proposition that holds in all domains. Quine b, suggests that we weaken the requirement to that of holding in all non-empty domains. In the rare circumstances in which the empty universe must be considered, there is an easy way of testing which theorems will apply: Is Quine being ad hoc?

But exceptions are common for notions in the same family as the empty domain. If numbers were words, zero would be an irregular verb. Many of the principles used to rule out total emptiness also preclude small pockets of emptiness. Leibniz says that the actual world must have something rather than nothing because the actual world must be the best of all possible worlds, and something is better than nothing.

But by the same reasoning, Leibniz concludes there are no vacuums in the actual world: Leibniz also targets the possibility of there being more than one void. If there could be more than one void, then there could be two voids of exactly the same shape and size. These two voids would be perfect twins; everything true of one void would be true of the other. This is precluded by the principle of the identity of indiscernibles: A second problem with multiple voids arises from efforts to paraphrase them away.

From the time of Melissus, there have been arguments against the possibility of a void existing in the manner that an object exists: If this paraphrase strategy works for vacuums, it ought to work for the more prosaic case of holes. Can a materialist believe that there are holes in his Swiss cheese? The holes are where the matter is not.

So to admit the existence of holes is to admit the existence of immaterial objects! What appeared to be a wild existential claim has been domesticated into a comment on the shape of the cheese. But how are we to distinguish between the cheese having two holes as opposed to one? Lewis and Lewis , 4 Well, some cheese is singly perforated, some cheese is doubly-perforated, yet other cheese is n -perforated where n equals the number of holes in the cheese. Can holes be evaded by confining ourselves to the process of perforation?

Single-hole punchers differ from triple-hole punchers by how they act; singlely rather than triply. The difficulty with this process-oriented proposal that the product, a hole, is needed to distinguish between successful and merely attempted perforation. Furthermore, the paraphrase is incomplete because it does not extend to holes that arise from processes such as looping. If the universe popped into existence five minutes ago, then most holes formed without any process. David and Stephanie Lewis note that this strands us with an infinite list of primitive terms.

Such a list could never have been memorized. The air cannot rush in quickly enough to fill the gap. This explains why rock vapor from the impact shoots back up into the atmosphere and later rains down widely on the surface. During a meteorite shower, the atmosphere is multiply vacuumed. But this is just to say that there are many vacuums in the atmosphere. Parmenides maintained that it is self-defeating to say that something does not exist.

The linguistic rendering of this insight is the problem of negative existentials: A statement can be about something only if that something exists. No relation without relata! Parmenides and his disciples elaborated conceptual difficulties with negation into an incredible metaphysical monolith. The Parmenideans were opposed by the atomists. The atomists said that the world is constituted by simple, indivisible things moving in empty space.

They self-consciously endorsed the void to explain empirical phenomena such as movement, compression, and absorption. Since these imply that compression and absorption are also impossible, Zeno rejects the data of the atomists just as physicists reject the data of parapsychologists. Less radical opponents of vacuums, such as Aristotle, re-explained the data within a framework of plenism: Compression and absorption can be accommodated by having things pushed out of the way when other things jostle their way in.

The atoms are the Platonic solids regular, convex polyhedra , each having a distinctive role in the composition of objects. Like an irreverently intelligent school boy, Aristotle objects that the Platonic solids cannot fill space. Every arrangement of Platonic solids yields the sort of gaps that one can more readily predict in a universe composed solely of spherical atoms. Aristotle agrees that atoms could fill space if they were all cubes. Pressing his luck, Aristotle goes on to claim that tetrahedra can also complete space. Almost any choice of shapes guarantees interstitial vacua.

This geometrical pressure for tiny vacua creates a precedent for the cosmic void which surrounds the material cosmos and the intermediate empty spaces that provide a promising explanation of how motion is possible. Yet Aristotle denied the void can explain how things move. Movement requires a mover that is pushing or pulling the object.

An object in a vacuum is not in contact with anything else. If the object did move, there would be nothing to impede its motion. Therefore, any motion in a vacuum would be at an unlimited speed. This conflicts with the principle that no object can be in two separate places at the same time.

There were two limited dissenters to his thesis that vacuums are impossible. The Stoics agreed that terrestrial vacuums are impossible but believed there must be a void surrounding the cosmos. Hero of Alexandria agreed that there are no naturally occurring vacuums but believed that they can be formed artificially. He cites pumps and siphons as evidence that voids can be created. Hero believed that bodies have a natural horror of vacuums and struggle to prevent their formation. You can feel the antipathy by trying to open a bellows that has had its air hole plugged. Try as you might, you cannot separate the sides.

However, unlike Aristotle, Hero thought that if you and the bellows were tremendously strong, you could separate the sides and create a vacuum. God could have chosen to create the world in a different spot. He could have made it bigger or smaller. God could have also chosen to make the universe a different shape. This possibilities entail the possibility of a vacuum.

A second motivation is a literal reading of Genesis 1: This opening passage of the Bible describes God as creating the world from nothing. Such a construction seems logically impossible. If creation out of nothing were indeed a demonstrable impossibility, then faith would be forced to override an answer given by reason rather than merely answer a question about which reason is silent. All Greek philosophy had presupposed creation was from something more primitive, not nothing.

Consistently, the Greeks assumed destruction was disassembly into more basic units. If destruction into nothingness were possible, the process could be reversed to get creation from nothing. The Christians were on their own when trying to make sense of creation from nothing. Ancient Chinese philosophers are sometimes translated as parallel believers in creation from nothing.

JeeLoo Liu cautions that both the Daoist and Confucians are speaking about formlessness rather than nothingness. Creation out of nothing presupposes the possibility of total nothingness. This in turn implies that there can be some nothingness. Thus Christians had a motive to first establish the possibility of a little nothingness. Their strategy was to start small and scale up. Accordingly, scholars writing in the aftermath of the condemnation of proposed various recipes for creating vacuums Schmitt One scheme was to freeze a sphere filled with water.

After the water contracted into ice, a vacuum would form at the top. Aristotelians replied that the sphere would bend at its weakest point. When the vacuists stipulated that the sphere was perfect, the rejoinder was that this would simply prevent the water from turning into ice. Neither side appears to have tried out the recipe. If either had, then they would have discovered that freezing water expands rather than contracts. To contemporary thinkers, this dearth of empirical testing is bizarre. The puzzle is intensified by the fact that the medievals did empirically test many hypotheses, especially in optics.

Hero was eventually refuted by experiments conducted by Evangelista Torricelli and Blaise Pascal. In effect, they created a barometer consisting of a tube partially submerged, upside down, in bowl of mercury. What keeps the mercury suspended in the tube? Is there an unnatural vacuum that causes the surrounding glass to pull the liquid up? Pascal answered that there really was nothing holding up the mercury. The mercury rises and falls due to variations in the weight of the atmosphere. The mercury is being pushed up the tube, not pulled up by anything.

When Pascal offered this explanation, Descartes wrote Christian Huygens 8 December that the hasty young man had the vacuum too much on his mind. Descartes identified bodies with extension and so had no room for vacuums. If there were nothing between two objects, then they would be touching each other. And if they are touching each other, there is no gap between them. Well maybe the apparent gap is merely a thinly occupied region of space. There is merely unevenly spread matter. This model is very good at eliminating vacuums in the sense of empty objects. However, it is also rather good at eliminating ordinary objects.

What we call objects would just be relatively thick deposits of matter. There would be only one natural object: Indian philosophers associate nothingness with lack of differentiation. Descartes was part of a tradition that denied action at a distance. This orthodoxy included Galileo. How could the great Kepler believe something so silly? How else could the universe be bound together by causal chains? Hunger for ether intensified as the wave-like features of light became established. It is tautologous that a wave must have a medium. As the theoretical roles of the ether proliferated, physicists began to doubt there could be anything that accomplished such diverse feats.

He presented his theory as a relational account of space; if there were no objects, there would be no space. Space is merely a useful abstraction. Even those physicists who wished to retain substantival space broke with the atomist tradition of assigning virtually no properties to the void. Instead of having gravitational forces being propagated through the ether, they suggest that space is bent by mass. To explain how space can be finite and yet unbounded, they characterize space as spherical. When Edwin Hubble discovered that heavenly bodies are traveling away from each other like ants resting on an expanding balloon , cosmologists were quick to suggest that space may be expanding.

Quantum field theory provides especially fertile ground for such speculation. To say that vacuums have energy and energy is convertible into mass, is to deny that vacuums are empty. Many physicists revel in the discovery that vacuums are far from empty. Frank Wilczek , Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow , as well as Lawrence Krauss explicitly claim that this answers the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The basic idea goes back to an issue raised by the symmetry of matter and anti-matter.

Given that the symmetry implies equality, matter and anti-matter should have annihiliated each other. Creation should have been aborted. Why is there NOW something particles rather than nothing mere energy in a quantum field? This question was answered by calculations suggesting that there was about a billionth more matter than anti-matter. Although it is still possible for the universe to be without particles, the slight numeric imbalance biases the universe toward states in which there are many particles.

A small random change can trigger a phase transition analogous to the transformation of very cold liquid beer into solid beer when the cap of the bottle is popped suddenly reducing the pressure in the bottle. A proud physicist is naturally tempted to announce these insights through the bullhorn of metaphysics. But philosophers interested in the logic of questions will draw attention to the role of emphasis in framing requests for explanations.

But for rhetorical effect, physicists anachronistically back-date their domain of discourse to the things of nineteenth century physics. Philosophers complain of misleading advertising. They asked one question and the proud physicists answered a different question. Lawrence Krauss defends the switch as an improvement. Often scientists make progress by altering the meaning of key terms. Why stick with an intractable and arguably meaningless question? We should wriggle free from the dead hand of the past and rejuvenate our curiosity with the vocabulary of contemporary cosmology.

Although the new terms are not synonymous with the old, they bear enough similarity to disarm the objection that the physicists are merely changing the topic. Our questions, like our children, can mature without losing their identity over time. The idea of there being two different questions being asked is pursued in Carroll , Other Internet Resources.

David Albert is open to the possibility of old questions being improved by new interests and discoveries. Pascal thinks human beings have a unique perspective on their finitude. Pascal elevates us to the level of angels by exalting in our grasp of the infinite, and then runs us down below the beasts for wittingly choosing evil over goodness. From this valley of depravity Pascal takes us up again by marveling at how human beings tower over the microscopic kingdom, only to plunge us down toward insignificance by having us dwell on the vastness of space, and the immensity of eternity.

For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.

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Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up. Their poetry de-emphasized salvation, seeking to immerse the reader in a raw apprehension of nature, unmediated by reason.

Kant further obscured God by casting Him into the noumenal abyss, available only through practical faith rather than theoretical reason.

According to Schopenhauer, religion and rationalism aim to reassure us that the universe has a design. Our astonishment that there is anything betrays awareness that it is all a meaningless accident. Readers of Schopenhauer were presented with the awesome contingency as an actuality rather than a terrible possibility. The experience captured the attention of William James who had experimented with nitrous oxide to understand the oceanic philosophy of Georg Hegel and, in , published the phenomenological investigation in Mind.

James provides a simple recipe for eliciting the emotion:. Not only that anything should be, but that this very thing should be, is mysterious! Another close reader of Schopenhauer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, characterizes the phenomenology as exhausting the thrust of the riddle of existence. Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical. In Lectures on Ethics, Wittgenstein uses the language of seeing-as. This gestalt switch is not a mistake. Nor is it an insight. Even the logical positivists were willing to grant the question has emotive meaning just not cognitive meaning.

The characteristic phenomenology of the question has also been suggested as a resource in explaining why we fail to recognize the radical ambiguity of the question. Andrew Brenner , conjectures that the multiplicity of interpretations is masked by the emotional unity. Instead of tossing the question into the emotivist waste basket, like the logical positivists, or lapsing into quietism, like Wittgenstein, existentialists provide detailed treatments of the awe expressed by the ultimate question.

Emotions are intentional states; they are directed toward something. If angered, I am angry at something. If amused, there is something I find amusing. Free floating anxiety is often cited as a counterexample. But Kierkegaard says that in this case the emotion is directed at nothingness. According to Heidegger, we have several motives to shy away from the significance of our emotional encounters with nothingness.

They are premonitions of the nothingness of death. They echo the groundlessness of human existence.

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Some have hoped that our recognition of our rootlessness would rescue meaning from the chaos of nothing. But Heidegger denies us such solace. Heidegger does think freedom is rooted in nothingness. He also says we derive our concept of logical negation from this experience of nothing. This suggests a privileged perspective for human beings. We differ from animals with respect to nothing. Since Heidegger thinks that animals do not experience nothingness, he is committed to skepticism about animal reasoning involving negation. Consider the Stoic example of a dog that is following a trail.

The dog reaches a fork in the road, sniffs at one road and then, without a further sniff, proceeds down the only remaining road. The Stoics took this as evidence that the dog has performed a disjunctive syllogism: Sniff—he did not go down this road. Therefore, he went down that road. They deny that human beings have a monopoly on nothingness. A classic anomaly for the stimulus-response behaviorist was the laboratory rat that responds to the absence of a stimulus:.

These anomalies for behaviorism fill rationalists with mixed emotions. On the one hand, the experiments refute the empiricist principle that everything is learned from experience. On the other hand, the experiments also constitute a caution against over-intellectualizing absences. A correct explanation of emotional engagement with absences must be more general and cognitively less demanding than rationalists tend to presuppose. Even mosquito larvae see shadows. Doubts about whether they have consciousness do not make us doubt that they see shadows.

So the perception of absences cannot depend on consciousness or any other advanced mental state. Perhaps the earliest form of vision was of these absences of light. So instead of being a pinnacle of intellectual sophistication, cognition of absences may be primal.

Existentialists tend to endorse the high standards assumed by rationalists. Their disagreement with the rationalists is over whether the standards are met. The existentialists are impressed by the contrast between our expectations of how reality ought to behave and how it in fact performs. This sense of absurdity makes existentialists more accepting of paradoxes. Whereas rationalists nervously view paradoxes as a challenge to the authority of reason, existentialists greet them as opportunities to correct unrealistic hopes.

Existentialists are fond of ironies and do not withdraw reflexively from the pain of contradiction. They introspect upon the inconsistency in the hope of achieving a resolution that does justice to the three dimensionality of deep philosophical problems. For instance, Heidegger is sensitive to the hazards of saying that nothing exists.

Like an electrician who must twist and bend a wire to make it travel through an intricate hole, the metaphysician must twist and bend a sentence to probe deeply into the nature of being. This paragraph, especially the last sentence, became notorious as a specimen of metaphysical nonsense. There is a difference between a failure to understand and an understanding of failure.

After all, Carnap was patient with the cryptic Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus , Wittgenstein speaks like an oracle. He even characterized his carefully enumerated sentences as rungs in a ladder that must be cast away after we have made the ascent and achieved an ineffable insight. And Wittgenstein meant it, quitting philosophy to serve as a lowly schoolmaster in a rural village. Other critics deny that What is Metaphysics?

When Heidegger connects negation with nothingness and death, these logicians are put in mind of an epitaph that toys with the principle of excluded middle: The comedic effect of such errors is magnified by the fundamentality of the question. Error here comes off as pretentious error. But the question itself appears to survive tests for being merely a verbal confusion. In any case, the question or pseudo-question has helped to hone the diagnostic tools that have been applied to it.

For genuine questions become better understood when we can discriminate them from their spurious look-alikes. Kyoto School nonexistent objects Parmenides Zeno of Elea: Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there at most one empty world? Can there be an explanatory framework for the question? The restriction to concrete entities 5. The contingency dilemma 6. The intuitive primacy of positive truths 7. The subtraction argument 8. The problem of multiple nothings Is there any nothingness?

Phenomenological aspects of nothingness There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.

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