The Meaning of Impossible Things
Actually written OCTOBER 09, 2022
We have words for impossible things. One such word is the word “nothing”. The existence of a “nothing” is impossible. A “nothing” would be a “gap” in existence, a place of no existence. It would be the existence of non-existence – a contradiction – and thus impossible.
If there’s no such thing as “nothing”, why can we think and talk and write about it?
My tentative answer is: minds capable of abstraction can take abstraction to impossible extremes, creating meanings for things that are literally impossible.
The abstractions whose meanings are impossible things I call “imaginary-concepts”. Imaginary-concepts are one kind of abstraction. Regular valid concepts are another. Together they comprise the “conceptual level” of consciousness.
One way I also think about this is that both kinds of abstractions have meanings, but only valid concepts have actually existing referents. Alternately, maybe both kinds of abstractions have referents, but the referents of imaginary-concepts are the imaginary-concepts themselves. The imaginary-concept of “nothing” refers to the very state of consciousness that is the imaginary-concept of “nothing” itself. “Nothing” refers to thinking about nothing. Or, maybe, “nothing” refers to experiencing the meaning of this imaginary-concept.
The abstraction “nothing” is just one prime example of an imaginary-concept. There are plenty of others. For example, the abstractions “impossible” and “contradiction” are also imaginary-concepts. They have meaning, but there’s no such thing as the “impossible” or a “contradiction”. Neither exist in the world outside of our abstracting minds. But we know what they mean. Others are “infinity”, “omnipotence”, “epistemological anti-realism”, “metaphysical continuum”, “metaphysical space”, “metaphysical time”, “self-control/volition”, “set” (of set theory), and probably many more.
There are also other words/abstractions that could be either imaginary-concepts or valid concepts, but we can’t know which they are. One classic example is the abstraction “unicorn”. We don’t know whether the abstraction, “unicorn” has any referents. We don’t don’t know whether unicorns exist. If they don’t exist, and never have, and never will, then the abstraction “unicorn” is an imaginary-concept. But if even a single unicorn ever existed, now exists, or ever will exist anywhere in the universe, then the abstraction “unicorn” is a valid concept because it has referents. But we don’t know which is the case. I call these “mystery concepts”.
Imaginary-concepts are hella useful, as long as we don’t mistake them for valid concepts. “Nothing” for example, is the zero we need to do mathematics. But even more importantly: imaginary-concepts, at least potential imaginary-concepts in the form of mystery concepts, can be the fountainhead of our ability to imagine solutions to problems, states of existence that don’t yet exist and may never exist. They are great for solving problems.
All this now somewhat explained in brevity, I would like to return to dwelling on how bizarre it is that imaginary-concepts have meanings that we can experience.
The imaginary-concept of “nothing” for example, is quite bizarre in this respect. I maintain that no mind can experience an actual “nothing” (and likewise that there is no actual thing that is a nothing). A mind that somehow managed to focus on “nothing” would instantly shut down and become unconscious. More precisely, such a mind could not actually “somehow” manage to focus on “nothing”, but could only approach such a focus like an asymptote that cannot be reached. If such a mind could make the final leap toward actual focus on “nothing”, it would just shut down. And yet we can experience the meaning of the abstraction “nothing”. We understand what it means, even if we can’t experience an actual instance of it. Bizarre. But that’s abstraction for you.
But it might be helpful to understand how the mind can form the imaginary-concept of “nothing” – in terms of what the mind actually can experience. While the mind cannot experience “nothing”, it can experience the absence of specific things from specific places. When there’s no mail in our mailbox, we might tell our house-mates “there was nothing in the mailbox”. We don’t literally mean the mailbox had an existential void in it. The mailbox was still full of air, dust, and bacteria and so on. But the items we regard as relevant, actual mail, were absent. We experienced an instance of absence. The imaginary-concept of “nothing” comes from generalizing this and other instances of absence to a “generalized absence of everything.” We can imagine our mailbox having everything absent from it. Abstraction gives us this ability to so imagine.
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