Nothing

The entry does two things, denies that the state exists and identifies what the word is for. Nothing is a black box word, meaning one with no definition other than circular, used to pretend a meaning where none is known or to disguise a meaning against the authoritative endoreality. What it disguises in this case is denial. Describing something as nothing is a way of declining to account for it while appearing to have accounted for it. Marsh's argument that the state cannot exist runs through conservation. If life is energy it should follow the law of conservation, which says energy can be neither created nor destroyed, so life can neither come from nothing nor disperse into nothing and the most reasonable expectation is that it is constant. That is a physical argument rather than a consoling one. Her sharpest use of the word concerns death, where she wrote that a far more magical belief than something after death is nothing after death, since nobody can describe nothing and nobody has ever experienced nothing, and yet this is what we are asked to believe in. The rhetorical machinery around the position gets named too, since denialists are flattered by being called rationalist while the experience of those who have died is marginalized through liberal use of the word claims. The pairing with imagination completes the picture, since conscious is abstracted into the two black box words imagination and nothing, one for what arrives and one for what departs.

Nothingness has a long philosophical treatment, from Parmenides denying that non-being can be spoken of, through Heidegger's question of why there is something rather than nothing, to Sartre's account of nothingness as introduced into the world by consciousness. Physics complicates the ordinary sense, since the quantum vacuum is not empty and cosmologists debate what nothing would even mean, a point Marsh makes when she says cosmologists ought to have learned that nothing does not exist. Her contribution is not to the metaphysics but to the sociology of the word, since she is interested in what asserting nothing accomplishes for the speaker rather than in whether the state is coherent.