DOES NOTHING EXIST???

We will most likley never truley know the answer to this question. You can think about it this way: Imagine are not real that we a just a dream of somebody else. But for this dream to occur that would mean that the person or thing that dremt it would have to exsist. What I'm trying to say is that somthing must exsist in order for us not to exsist.
The universe is there but nobody knows how it came to be, I's just there maybe its always has been maybe it hasnt, who knows? But this univeres has to be somewhere. Which would mean that because the universe is somewhere that it does exsist. If not in our understanding of what exsitance is then something or someone elses.
Thats my take on things and its open for discussion.
Dylan...

Does everything exist? or is everything nothing

What difference would it make if someone provided you with unanswerable logical proof that the ham salad sandwich you were eating did not exist, but it certainly tasted real and satisfied your hunger?
Or what if you were hungry and had no food, but someone provided you with unanswerable logical proof that you had a ham salad sandwich in your fridge but when you opened it it was empty?
obviously I've got nothing to do right now.

Because everything has no start or duration, everything is not existent because it would be absurd to say, 'Everything exists but it does not start to exist nor does it remain existent for any length of time whatsoever'. But everything is not non-existent because everything appears... therein lies the paradox or just the limitations of language and concepts.

Can it be actualised?

It is self refuting, being that it does not exist in the subjunctive spectrum.

However, it has been argued that an unmoved mover is necessary.

I ask this then, If the universe does in fact exist(it appears so), would there need to be a empty space for it to ever have a chance of existing?

If nothing existed it would be a something, thus not "nothing"

Nothing only exists in the mind, if it existed it would be both nothing and not-nothing, an impossibility and a contradiction

another good question would be "does ANYTHING exist?". I don't know if anyone asked this already, but it did just occur to me.

zodiark

" nothing" can't because this means that we are made of nothing, and in every millisecond that passe everything could happen , may our main search in life is nothing

Another set of questions might be "What do we mean by 'nothingness' or 'existence'?"--not "What is the essence of 'nothingness' or 'existence'?"After all, we invented the terms; we didn't find their references.
I've suggested before somewhere in these threads that the original kind of question (paradigmatically speaking) was not "What IS a "puppy?"; it was "What shall we CALL a young dog?"
At the same time we do have--or think we have--experiences that we can name, for various reasons, "emptiness" and "form"--as do the Buddhists, for their reasons (keeping in mind that the Heart Sutra declares that "form is exactly emptiness and emptiness is exactly form". But that's another problem.

Well it seems apparent that nothingness can be achieved within our own minds. But does it have a place within the physical universe or beyond?

My guess is that "existence" is ultimately no more than an idea, a human idea, that I am "performing" and projecting onto something I/we call reality. Indeed all the words I have used just now are no more than forms of performed (human) behavior.

Is it meaningful to demand proof of "nothingness" as apposed to merely demanding its existence?

yes, nothing is exist. if we assume we are exist, then nothing is exist as idea in our conception of existence, prolongation of our existence, create by limitation of our existence it self. but if we assume we are not exist, then we are the nothing.

i said there is an elephant as big as planet orbiting our sun right now (or kettle, if you want). but "elephant as big as planet orbiting our sun right now" is not exist. now that i just said that idea, i know that the idea "elephant" is exist, although the elephant it self is not. therefore it's define the concept of what is exist and what is not. then by using the same way of thinking, we can say that the idea of nothing is exist but nothing it self is not.

i think, we create the concept of nothing to represent any idea that we do not know or any thing that we can not perceive. as matter of definition than i think nothing is something that we perceive do no exist.

This is on the assumption that we exist. Does that mean we exist therefore the concept of nothing can exist? What came before existence?

Nothing must exist in the same way that eternity must exist. They are concepts that have been set into our hearts so that we never know all that they contain.

What's the relevance for our lives of this matter of essential existence or non-existence? If everything is real, actual or existant, OR NOT, what does it matter if in either case one's experience and ability to cope remain the same?

If we move to the realm of spiritual understanding then it may be that it's irrelevance is relevant. In Buddhist philosophy it is spiritually relevant to realize that things do and do not exist simultaneously, as a quality of their very nature (forget logic). The Heart Sutra declares that form (existence) IS emptiness (non-existence) and emptiness is form, that each is (also) its exact opposite. And elsewhere we are instructed that opposites exist only in our heads.

Provacative. Could we also say that SOMETHING must also exist in the same way that eternity must exist? The idea of all such "things" ARE--as are all the principal constructs of our worldview--so "deeply internalized" or, as you put it "set into our hearts" such that they become unexamined tacit presuppositions of our taken-for-granted perceptions and understandings.