@JLNobody,
To be fair, I think Olivier did mean "consciousness".
...yet there's another word word
existence, the bed fellow of
reality, with which we can play language games. With respect to the antithesis of the concept of
nothing physicists certainly talk about "particles popping in and out of existence". Are they talking about "particulate states" which result from interactions of e.m. waves ? ... and if so
who defines such statehood in a hypothetical observerless void?.....
Such thought experiments which evoke Godel's ( not God's*
) incompleteness theorem
should reveal the flaws in any absolutist claims about the words "reality" and "existence", yet how many have the ability to muster such thoughts ? If we accept Godel's implication that there can be no
ultimate axioms about reality and existence, we are surely left with the pragmatists position that such concepts are merely
useful for joint human enterprise, dependent on specific contexts. They may be considered as "the ball" in assorted ball( =language) games, whose form is dependent on the particular game being played.
* Berkeley's requirement that "God is the ultimate observer" is a "completeness theorem" antithetical to Godel's "incompleteness theorem".
This underscores the point that absolutist claims about existence and reality are no different to religious ones.
