Junk mail and nothingness

I received this e-mail in my inbox the other day.

And by "other day" I mean in December of last year. Look, e-mail isn't my forté, OK? It reads:

This is how you get the universe from nothingness. Nothingness is the property of not being. If there were a never ending amount of things to not be, nothing would not be able to not be them all. This is because never ending never ends. So the universe would be nothing getting around to not doing of a never ending amount of things. It would get around to not doing them one at a time. Each frame of time in the universe another configuration of it slips off into the past and becomes nothing. This would mean that there is a never ending amount of time in the universe. The future would go on forever. Now think of an example of nothing getting around to not doing a thing: where events slip off into nothingness. Look close enough and you will see that perception does this. Our perception is like a hole that experiences go into. The past frames of time don't stack up on the present frame of time. The past frames of time have become nothingness. Being that our perception is more like a hole than a material, might it be that we live after we die.

I think what this zany spammer is trying to say is that human beings are like walking black holes, swallowing a lifetime of sense data, converting it into memories and then obliterating it when we die. There is a strange irony to this version of our consciousness -- rather than being a thing in the universe -- it's a vacuum into which the things of the universe are made into nothing. Existentialism isn't being and nothingness, it is humans themselves: beings of nothingness.

I guess this is why it is so important to write things down.

And stranger still consider: our scribbles might be read by subsequent generations, and our thoughts could be kicked along through time like a pebble that keeps catching your foot. But of course one day when the very last human being dies, every human thought will die, and the transmogrification of our ideas up until that point will finally become nothing. History will be nothing. What it means to be human will be nothing. Everything will be nothing.

This last man (I say 'man' because I'm sexist) is the caretaker of an endless game of Chinese whispers, holding a paltry collection of human knowledge that has ricocheted through the ages like a silver pinball, ending up dented and faded in the recesses of his brain. Is that what it means to be human? To hold your shred of the everything, before your failure to exist turns it into nothing?

I need a better spam filter.