BtZ42Read

[Joseph Tracy]

Isn’t the zero in western numbers from Arabic mathematics?
In Taoism and Tibetan Buddhism the concept of emptiness or nothing is not just negation. Emptiness is the substrate for all form and movement - No-thing-ness the necessary context for thing-ness and vice versa.
Western science seems to need zero but also seems to have no way of definitively measuring experiencing or perceiving nothing; is it space-time? What is that? It is always both fundamental and elusive even via science. Behind the Void of the Hebrew Genesis there is a voice about to say “Let there be”. Not so different from Taoism. Steven Hawkng claims the mathematical language of physics can dispense with that voice, but the mystery seems undiminished to me, the difference linguistic rather than substantive.





> On Mar 15, 2016, at 6:44 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> From the wikipedia article on Zero. 0 
> 
> Records show that the ancient Greeks seemed unsure about the status of zero as a number. They asked themselves, "How can nothing be something?", leading to philosophical and, by the Medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero and the vacuum. The paradoxes of Zeno of Elea depend in large part on the uncertain interpretation of zero.
> 
> We know that such talk will come up later in GR. The Vacuum by name. Nothing as concept. Beyond "nothingness' throughout and esp near the end @p700+
> 
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 6:18 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> i think Right On, brilliant. 
> 
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 5:46 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> 
> On 15.03.2016 09:39, Ian Livingston wrote:
> 
>> Then there is this pe-orgasmic pause:
>>  
>> “There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet. Screaming holds across the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light? Will the light come before ar after?
>> 
>> But it is already light," GR 5.
>> 
> 
>>  
>> Are we beyond the zero at this point? What, exactly, is the zero?
>> 
> 
> 
> Could it be that the zero refers to behaviorism? Pavlovian thought is via Pointsman very present in this first part of the novel. In this context, - please correct me if I'm wrong! - the one (1) refers to the successful conditioning, manifest in a concrete behavior. The zero (0) refers to the state where the conditioning is extinguished and the behavior is not shown by the test subject anymore.  The formulation "beyond the zero" then, perhaps, indicates a new phase in human history where the thanatoid forces of society start, metaphorically speaking, to go beneath our skin. Where science becomes "big science" (and data "big data"), and even political mass murder, so very common to history, enters a qualitatively new level with the Holocaust, as well as with Hiroshima. Sentences like "It is too late", or "It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now", would fit such a reading. What do you think?
> 
> 
> 
>>  
>> “Astrologically the beginning of the next aeon, according to the starting-point you select, falls between A.D. 2000 and  2200. Starting from the star “0“ and assuming a Platonic month of 2,145 years, one would arrive at A.D. 2154 for the beginning of the Aquarian Age, and at A.D. 1997 if you start from star “a 113.“ The latter date agrees with the longitude of the stars in Ptolemy’s Almagest“ CGJ, Aion, 1959, 94n.
>> 
> 
> 
> 

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