this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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[–] dsilverz@thelemmy.club 3 points 6 days ago

It's a concept I've been thinking about for months or even years, the concept of non-existence. In my mind I can sorta visualize it, but I'm not able to transcribe it to words, I'm not able to start explaining it because whenever I try to start writing something, it starts morphing into existence. For example: a phrase I can think of is "Light needs a darkness to shine unto", it sounds like it can describe the concept, but then science comes out of nowhere to slap me in my face with the understanding of how matter emits radiation and how there's no such place as "completely absent from any radiation".

In my mind, the complementary makes sense, substance needs substrate which needs the substance, light needs darkness which needs the light, Hadit needs Nuith which needs Hadit (the infinitesimal point needs the infinite circumference which needs the infinitesimal point), and so on. See, human language is made to conceptualize what can be conceptualized, and non-existence is not conceptualizable in essence. However, the existence needs a counterpoint, a counterpart, something to contrast with its conceptualization, because if there was only existence, there'd be no existence at all (how can we conceptualize a thing if it's the only thing wherever you look, wherever you go?). We can conceptualize the fabric of spacetime because "it's there" and, by "there", I mean "there" as in "where the fabric of spacetime sits on", just like the shine of a spotlight illuminating a place where it was shadowy and dark.

There are things that we do know, there are things that we don't know yet but we can know, and there are things that can't be known. Who is the first Sumer person to ever write, what was his name, when he/she was born and when he/she died? What about the person who discovered the fire, who exactly were he/she? We don't know, we can't know, but they existed because now we have fire and writing systems. The impossibility of determining them doesn't rule them out of existence, just like the non-existence itself. I mean, it's the very essence of the non-existence to "don't exist" but that somehow makes it "existent", somehow the state of non-existence is a state, therefore, it exists as a state of being (as in "not being").

To make matters worse, the human language is made to describe things within the realm of existence, time and space, when and where, while transcendental concepts can't really be described through it without losing its transcendental essence. Non-existence is such a concept, a non-conceptualizable concept, so paradoxical in its nature.