Imagination is more important than knowledge

[commonsense]

Any nothingness that you imagine must include you imagining, which is something, not nothing.

Strong argument in itself for accepting that one cannot imagine nothingness. Still, I wonder if the imaginer must be part of the imagined.

I am something, but must I imagine me imagining something? Must I think of me thinking about something? Must I be aware of my awareness?

To be sure, I am not trying to imply that you cannot imagine yourself imagining something; I assert only that it isn't necessary. I say that I can imagine a black hole, for example, without imagining me in it. Nothingness wouldn't have to include me. The imagining of nothingness also wouldn't have to include me, the imaginer.

I like your style, Walker. Surely you can come back with a solid reply.

[Walker]

Strong argument in itself for accepting that one cannot imagine nothingness. Still, I wonder if the imaginer must be part of the imagined.

Yes. Without imagining, there is no imagined.

Have you ever tried to experience rather than imagine the void?

Shunyata explains the intellectual contemplation of reduction, which leads to realizing the nature of inherence. In this sense the void is not the absence of everything, which is implied by "nothingness." Rather, it's the absence of an essential you.

Example: dissect a frog and you’ll only find parts. You won’t find an irreducible essence of frog in the compounded body, although you can contemplate the body parts reducing all the way down to atoms, and then if you know the chemistry, physics, etc., you can contemplate that further to energy, splitting atoms and such.

Realization of shunyata does not result in dysfunctional disassociation, but it does result in perpetual realization that who you are cannot be found in the body. What is this like? Life is but a dream. The contemplation and realization of the void is dualistic (experience). So is imagining.

Here's something I wrote in the more distant past, in response to Gustav.

The void is what you perceive when you lose something
It's enough to make children cry
Then they grow up and lose everything
To find the void
And everything

[commonsense]

In this sense the void is not the absence of everything, which is implied by "nothingness." Rather, it's the absence of an essential you.

You almost had me at the point of imagining needing an imaginer, but I would say that the imaginer exists in a higher plane of existence than the imagined. The imaginer is in a higher plane of existence than the plane of the nothingness. The imaginer is necessary, but not as part of the imaged. Nothingness can be imagined without including the imaginer, who is, of course, something.

The score is tied at Walker 1, Brandt 1.

[TimeSeeker]

Any nothingness that you imagine must include you imagining, which is something, not nothing.

That is not the real problem.

The real problem is that you can conceptualise SOMETHING. And then you've given it the label 'nothing'. So there is this something-called-nothing in your mind.

what is it like?
Is it the same as other concepts you have in your head?

Is it the same as the concept of 0 (zero)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0
Is it the same as the concept of 'empty set'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_(mathematics)
Is it the same as a null set? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_set
Is it the same as a zero-length word? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_string
Is it the same as the Null from physics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_(physics)

In computer science this is the concept of Null ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_character ). It is a messy concept! It is responsible for so many software bugs, that a lot of programmers agree that it should not even exist.

[commonsense]

I must concede that you are right and I am wrong.

Score is Walker 10, Brandt 1

[-1-]

Any nothingness that you imagine must include you imagining, which is something, not nothing.

Again, a premise that is false. I imagine the number 5 written down. Does it include me?

Better still: I imagine God picking His toe, while creating the seven wonders of the world. Do the seven wonders include me? Or His toe, or whatever is between His toes, or God? Do they include me?

Hardly. However, you say by my imagining anything, and not the real anything, includes me. In that case it is not the object of imagination that includes me, but my act of imagining includes me.

It is the act that includes me, necessarily; but the object of my imagination, although borne out of of an act I commit, does not include me.

If that were true, God would be the worse thing to exist in this world. I am sure you don't agree with that. Everything in the creation is a product of God's act; yet you'd understandably deny that god is infinitely evil (since God is infinitely good.)

I don't see that imagining something makes me part of that imagination. That is simply not true. In fact, it is a sly, fashionable-sounding argument.

[-1-]

(1) You cannot imagine nothingness.

(2) Therefore, you can only know life.

(3) You cannot know death.

(4) Of death, you can only know of.


Do you agree?

(3) and (4) are true, but independently of (1) and (2). (1) is absolutely and factually wrong. BUT EVEN IF IT WERE TRUE, the rest of the statements would not follow from it. (2) is factually and absolutely wrong. I know clock, I know cupboard, I know water, I know a whole bunch of things that are not life.

If you use nothingness and life in a spiritual sense, then please specify that. Around here we write common English. If you have a meaning differing for a word that differs form the meaning by common consensus of the language, then please specify that. That is only courteous and (in my book at least) a requirement when communicating with a wide range of people as per their personal philosophies.

[-1-]

Without imagining, there is no imagined.

Walker, here again you make an invalid distinction between an object in reality and the same object as imagined by a person.

Does the object exist? For instance, a ball, or a Rubik's cube or a goal post.

Yes, it does.

Does my imagination match the object of my imagination perfectly? No, it does not.

Does my imagination AFFECT the existence of the object? No, it does not.

Now, you may argue that my imagination differs from the real thing. It is true in many cases. For instance, a goal post consist of 10**25 or so atoms, which I can't imagine all individually. So my imagination is false. You may say that because it is not identical to the object, it is not the object, but part of me.

I say that the act of imagining is what I do; but the imagined object is not part of me. There are differences, but there are dead-on identicalities between my imagination of an object and the object itself. Because you assert (maybe) that the differences point at the imagined object as part of me, you must then agree that the identicalities point at the real object being not part of me, and therefore my imagined object not being part of me (since it is dead-on part of the real thing).

At this point you and I must agree that if I imagine things about the object that are truly identical to the real object, then those properties make the object not part of me.

So if I imagine an object of which I can't possibly misimagine any part, then that imagination is not part of me, I am not part of it, and it is not part of me.

I suggest that nothingness is such an object. It contains nothing; I can imagine something that is void, empty, and has nothing. There can't possibly be anything in nothing that is different from what's inside in my imagination of nothing, since neither contain anything.

Therefore QED, yes, I can imagine nothing.

[TimeSeeker]

Walker, here again you make an invalid distinction between an object in reality and the same object as imagined by a person.

Everybody loves science, yet everybody always ignores the Black Swan. Falsification.

The answer to ALL of your hypotheticals below is "IT DEPENDS".

Does the object exist? For instance, a Rubik's cube

Yes, it does.

IT DEPENDS. On time.

In 1973 the object does NOT exist. The imagination exists in Ernő Rubik's head.
In 2018 the object exists.

Unless your conception of "reality" only deals with the "present". In which case you need to be explicit about the time frame you had in mind. Is it 1 jiffy, second, minute, week, month, year, decade, century?

Does my imagination match the object of my imagination perfectly? No, it does not.

IT DEPENDS. On time AND who you are.

If you were Ernő Rubik circa 1973 then your imagination matches the object perfectly.

Does my imagination AFFECT the existence of the object? No, it does not.

IT DEPENDS. On time AND who you are.

If you were Ernő Rubik circa 1973 then your imagination affects the existence of the object.

[surreptitious57]

Those temporal demarcations could merely be a mental construct and no more

[TimeSeeker]

Those temporal demarcations could merely be a mental construct and no more

And you are a prisoner of them. Prisoner of experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland

[surreptitious57]

We are all prisoners of experience until we die

[bahman]

You cannot imagine based on nothing, therefore knowledge is also important since it is a base for imagination.