i think i mentioned it in this post but i'm reading a collection of essays by martin heidegger. i'm really enjoying thinking about metaphysical ideas of being and nothing at the moment; concepts that, when i try to wrap my small human mind around them, i feel like i'm sucking on one of those super sour warheads that came out in the early 90s. my brain kind of pulls one of those contorted faces and probably looks like a suckerfish, were i to scan it whilst reading.

here are some questions that have yet to be answered*  - which it seems is the purpose of philosophy: to blow big gaping holes in your preconceptions about life.

why did life choose life?**
i've read recently that the cell and its code for life (respire/reproduce/communicate) has been around since the beginning of life - only a few billion years after after the big bang. the same big bang which separated space and time from nothing. and heidegger talks about Being - as in the 'thing' in life/beings that makes them being (and not nothing). but what i haven't read anywhere yet, is why.
what is the impetus for life? why did life decide to live (ie, start respiring/reproducing/communicating) - rather than just stick at time and space?

what switches nothing to being?
as an extension to the why of being, is the what. heidegger speaks about The Nothing as everything that is not being, and then some. It's the not, un and never of everything that is. And is very hard to explain in a blog post without sounding like an idiot. But, if i'm reading things correctly, Being is that which has separated itself from Nothing.
But what switches being from nothing to being? Is it really the binary action that it seems to be?

is there a relationship between sound and being?
i'm going to extend this question into a little essay for a grown-up journal, but this is a pretty exciting question i've been playing with. seeing as you (seemingly) either have being or not. and you either have sound or not (which we call silence). perhaps there is a relationship between the physics of sound and silence, and the metaphysics of sound and listening. and if there is a 'divide' or action that facilitates nothing to being, then perhaps this is understood by an action that facilitates silence to sound (listening).

all of it might be complete tosh. but i'm enjoying thinking in this way - wrapping my mind around a sourworm and making it think a whole lot differently about sound - perhaps again as the ultimate force of life. how very elizabethan of me***.

*(there may be philosophers who answer these questions, i just haven't looked yet)
**maybe there's a massive oversized t-shirt in that...
***bruce smith from USoCal talks about elizabethan english believing that sound was anime mundi, the force of life, because it orients us in time and space


UPDATE: it seems i'm not the only one considering the relationship between physics and metaphysics.