Metaphysics (4): Possible and Something

Note: This is the fourth and final instalment in my comprehensive summary and an opinion piece of this book.

Possible

Possibilities are simply events that could’ve occurred but did not. We are not talking about how things went down this timeline but rather what could have possibly happened.

Team A winning over Team B is an event that occurred as it is but the vice versa is the possibility we are looking at.

This is certainly a realistic possibility but for that possibility to take place not as a thought but in reality means introducing parallel worlds.

If this is true however, it means that they are concrete possible worlds but spatiotemporally separate.

That being said, taking the possibility of these possible worlds being possible means that we are dealing with an infinite possible world for every literal instance.

As long as a particular and a property exist, it can be redistributed or rearranged.

If I typed ‘this’ instead of other English letters for some reason then all of the other ones must have their own possible world no matter how small that possibility may appear to be.

Obviously, if this is true, it is not very economical. While it may feel absurd and counterintuitive, that does not negate the fact that it might be very well true.

But this also proves an interesting point from David Armstrong (A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility, 1989). If all the world elements are in a grid then ticking off all the grids means we know every fact about the world.

Coming back to the topic, there are two distinctions between possibilities: logic and the natural possibility.

Something logical can be naturally illogical but not vice versa.

A man can be logically of red color but not within the confines of the laws of nature/science.

However, if we do indeed add another property or particular then the original one must be of different origin by default.

This proves a major weakness to possible worlds.

Something

If the apple has a centre open hole then does that space mean nothing or between something of being and non-being?

Someone may say there’s either something or nothing, a binary duality.

What if there are negative properties though? A man is 70 kg so he has the properties of not being 75 kg.

Then everyone who has a weight of 75 kg has a unity but can we also say that person A and B with 72 kg and 73 kg respectively have the negative property of not being 75kg? Think about it.

Anyways, the absence of a player in your team made you lose but couldn’t this player be anyone with sufficient experience with the game, not just your player?

Either way, the concept of nothingness is hard to describe and evade.

If you consider void space as nothing then is it literally nothing or linguistically nothing?

What I mean is, are we taking in assumptions that make us believe nothing as nothing or is nothing literally nothing as it is?

However, a compelling argument is that we can only linguistically say nothing exists.

Void space is not nothing, it is something since it exists. The moment we admit it exists, it cannot be nothing.

If something is nothing then nothing is nothing and something is something that means nothing is something as well.

Nothing seems good so far as an extreme and a concept to wrestle with since our human minds cannot comprehend non-existence as it is.

Whether that’s because we lack the biological capability or an existence cannot interact with a non-existence is interesting.