How the Human Brain Contends with the Strangeness of Zero

Re:How the Human Brain Contends with the Strangeness of Zero by pwdiscflatmajor on Sunday October 27, 2024 @04:18AM (#41960744)

I've heard it said that English tends to reify language; that it tends to turn every-thing into a "thing". So no-thing still gets processed as a thing, in English. I'd be curious how "nothing" and "zero" are processed in other languages/cultures and if the experience/phenomenology changes. E.g., if 0 is recorded state of a place-value on an abacus, that's got a very different feel than 0 as a count term. And the 0th position in an array has a very distinct feeling as a location, and say the transition from an empty basket to a basket with one apple, has it's own *feel. Emptiness is a state of being, not a "thing". Not every-thing is a thing, but English makes it seem so. Maybe all languages make it so seem (And maybe German too, [c.f., Heidegger: the nothing noths])?

*edited to say feel instead of fill

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Re:How the Human Brain Contends with the Strangeness of Zero by red75prime on Sunday October 27, 2024 @05:36AM (#41961100)

I'm not a fan of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. People extend the language to fit their needs, not other way around. "Turning everything into a thing" is probably the inevitable way to accommodate philosophical thinking. Not everything is a thing, but to be able to make anything into an object of consideration and communication you need a word for it and a word is a thing.

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Re:How the Human Brain Contends with the Strangeness of Zero by pwdiscflatmajor on Sunday October 27, 2024 @04:34AM (#41960797)

...and treating a term for a state of being as if the state we an object, a thing, vs the state a thing is in, is a category mistake (and perhaps one that only happens with overthinking)--like what I might be doing right now? is what I'm doing right now a "thing"? No, right? Because, verbs aren't nouns. Are the states of things things? Are adjectives nouns? Are verbs nouns?

(no, but since in English I can verb my adjectived nouns into all sorts of noun-y verb craziness, nothing can get nouned and verbed out of adjectiving all day long, because English.)

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