More on Nonexistence

In my post on David Benatar’s antinatalism, I wrote in passing about the concept of nonexistent people. I’d like to expand upon it here.

Nonexistence is something we have a lot of trouble talking about because we know absolutely nothing about it. All we have ever known is existence, so when it comes to nonexistence we can only approach the concept by analogy with things that we can conceive of but which do not currently exist. These approximate nonexistence closely enough for us to be able to say a few things about it, but even so they don’t tell us anything about what nonexistence, if it even “exists”, might look like from the inside.

This is something that has to be kept in mind when trying to talk about nonexistence or nonexistent things, as Benatar did. Though we may have ideas about what nonexistence might “be like,” these aren’t nonexistence itself. For instance, in an attempt to imagine nonexistence we might picture an empty void whose inhabitants have no experiences whatsoever, as if suck in a dreamless sleep. We might also imagine how we would feel if we found ourselves in such a situation. None of this would be nonexistence, however, for even an empty void is still a thing that exists, and if we didn’t exist we wouldn’t have any feelings about “being” in one.

Really, since any attempt at picturing or conceptualizing nonexistence runs into the same problems, I would argue that nonexistence is utterly inconceivable. The only thing we “know” about nonexistence is that everything existence is, nonexistence is not, but we are no more capable of knowing what this means that we would be of knowing what white looks like if we had only ever known black. If I am correct about this, then it’s best to just remain silent about nonexistence.