Can 'nothing' exist?

Why do you downplay the fact that you exist in concert with the Universe? That one depends on the other, that it is a collaboration of observer and observed. That you are important enough that if you didn't exist, neither would the Universe. What is so hard to understand about this? Our best scientific minds have determined that the observer inevitably affects the observance.

"Nothing" is existence's description of where it isn't currently at.

Again, it's not that I don't understand it. It's simply that I don't buy it. Sure, I'm part of the universe, a subset in fact, and the matter of which I am made always was and will be part of it, but no, I don't buy the idea that the universe ends with my loss of conciousness. That it ends for me is just not relevant.

Now that, I like!

Can you explain this a little more, gtrxtc, please?

It means that what you see it in part decided by how you look at it.

But you must distinguish between gtrxtc's observance and the object itself. One think that is helpful to me in getting my head around this is if I think of the act of observation as interaction or communication.
When I look at a rock I am in reality communicating with it.

Gtrxtc writes of non-duality from a mystical position (yin-yang) and perhaps offers support from the field of quantum physics in which observers and observed interact (Niels Bohr adopted yin-yang as his coat of arms). However a simpler analogy worth considering is that “life” is a complex wave among an ocean of waves. A “living observer” can no more separate itself from the ocean than can a water wave. Nor can an observer have a vantage point independent of the holistic dynamics of the total ocean (i.e universe). Fundamentally, there are no “sense data” passing between waves, they are merely engaged in mutual “co-shaping” transient inter-relationships. It the abstract permanence of words for "things" which seduces us into believing in the independent permanence of "objects". But all permanence is illusory and relative to our lifespans.