this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Seems like it should and the result should be one. Does mathematics agree with me on that?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Mathematically, zero is nothing.

You can't have one of nothing.

There's no such thing as a single nothing. All of the nothings are all the same nothing, there are infinite amounts of nothing but no nothing at all.

Of course there is a limit to nothing because there is something, in a more real and universal sense, but mathematically speaking there is no nothing.

So whenever you divide or multiply anything by nothing all that you get is nothing. If you multiply nothing by itself you end up with nothing. If you divide nothing by itself you get nothing.

When I was a kid I got really fascinated with Zen Koans.

Koans being the kind of self-evident riddles that are most famously popularized by the question, "if a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

And ultimately I ended up creating my own Zen Koan by accident.

That Koan being, "What does nothing look like?"

I did everything in my power to visualize what nothing would look like. I imagined infinite black spaces with nothing around and nothing in it, a void of eternal darkness. Vast mental landscapes devoid of heat or cold for light or dark or sound or wind or air, but it just wasn't "nothing", and I didn't know why.

I tried and I tried and I tried but I couldn't help but feel like I had failed to understand.

Then one day I was standing on a hill, the wind was blowing through my hair, the Sun was shining on me, it was spring outside and the birds were singing and I was trying to visualize what nothingness would look like when I realized the reason why I couldn't visualize nothingness.

I couldn't visualize nothingness because I was looking at it.

If there was nothingness I wouldn't be there to see it.

It was at that moment a space in my brain opened up for the concept of nothing and I understood.

You can't divide nothing by nothing because there's nothing to divide with. You can multiply something by nothing because there is something to multiply with, yes, but you can't divide something by nothing because there's nothing to divide with.