I realized then that nulls were truly unknowable. That they weren't actually nothing, nor were they anything in particular. They were any and all, yet still undefined, unpinnable. Always potential, never anything real; the energy of all they could be and yet never will.
Heh. This totally reminds me of the “Is nothing something?” debates I used to have with my friend Kevin Miller. Always interesting things to talk about when you have philosophy majors for friends. Especially when they like to drink a lot.
In my mind, the answer to “is nothing something” question is a snarky yes. It’s one of those inherently paradoxical things. The argument is that the word nothing refers to some mental manifestation of a concept, and if something can be conceptualized then it exists on some rudimentary metaphysical level. Of course, what we commonly refer to as “nothing” isn’t really Nothing because as soon as you think about it, it stops being Nothing and instantaneously becomse something – at best, the most formless imagination of utter emptiness is but a first-order approximation of the non-void that is (or rather isn’t) Nothing. Since conceptualization implies ontological existence, the best we can do is to create a special type of something (i.e. nothing, or null) to use a stand-in for the concept that doesn’t exist and that we can’t actually ever truly imagine. The only way to really come to terms with Nothing is to not think about it. (But what is it exactly that you’re not thinking about? Ha! Wrong answer!)
The other meaningless debate we always came around to was the question of “Is water wet?” My short answer to that is no, because ‘wetness’ is a name we ascribe to the interaction between water and thing it makes wet; water isn’t wet in an of itself. Of course, Harper et al are entitled to their own interpretation of that one.
