So I was thinking, and I realized just how many things there are in the world. This led me down a path of wondering what the opposites of stuff was. I started with the basic "opposite of fire is water" shindig and eventually moved onto stuff like "ketchup is the opposite of mustard" and "carpeted flooring is the opposite of wood flooring". These thoughts were just the beginning. I realized this - opposites means opposite, right? And the opposite of something shares nothing in common with the other thing. This invalidates the ketchup vs mustard thought due to both being a sauce, but what about the other 2? Well, let's get the easy one out of the way. Carpet vs wood is easy because both are flooring, so they share something in common. Easy enough. Then, fire vs water. Slightly more challenging, but it's still pretty easy. Both of them require oxygen to exist. That's a similarity. So I started to think of other things that share nothing in common with another thing. I couldn't come up with anything. Gorillas and Freddy Mercury? Both of them have hair. Towels and clouds? Both of them soak up water. In the end, nothing had a truly perfect opposite. In fact, it seems like everything is related. Except one thing. Nothing. You know what, say, fire shares in common with absolutely nothing? Absolutely nothing. How about... the moon? Absolutely nothing in common with absolute nothingness. Not even Freddy Mercury shares something in common with absolute nothingness. So, in reality, the opposite of everything is nothing. Try to prove me wrong. Give me something that has something in common with nothing, or something that has absolutely nothing in common with something else. No long strings of reasonings, just a single link between them. I think it's impossible. In fact, I'm certain of it. In conclusion, however, perfect opposites do exist. Or, more accurately, a perfect opposite does exist.
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Perfect opposites - Do they exist?
- Thread starter ThatOneSpork
- Start date
Opchurtle100
I COULD BE BANNED!
I think we had a discussion similar to this in the 1v1 discord but I'll state my stance again: Perfect opposites could exist if you broke something tangible down to an incredibly small level. My line of thought is that everything is made up of either 1s or 0s, so all you must do is flip all the 1s and 0s in the sequence that they make up a particular object to achieve the perfect opposite.
However, this only applies to physical objects like person, woman, man, camera, TV, etc. I believe perfect opposites for concepts don't exist as they are not tangible things but rather naive human realisms that's goal is to try to oversimply the complicated world around us. This concept applies to nothingness as well. It is used as a placeholder to represent a lack of a particular something.
Sorry if my explanation was a little convoluted, I'm not well versed in these kinds of subjects, but I hope I gave you a new perspective on the subject. :)
This being why I said perfect opposites, as opposite doesn't necessarily say something is completely unrelated. However, I do believe a "perfect" opposite fits the bill of being completely different.
They require each other to exist.
I have to disagree with you here. In theory, it seems to work but in the end it is not a feasible method of determining opposites because you cannot turn everything into 1's and 0's and invert it. You may think this works with something like a soda can, but in the end there are concepts tied to any item that cannot be turned into 1's and 0's like you said.
How does light require darkness to exist? Darkness is just the absence of light
I would argue that ketchup and mustard aren't even regular opposites because they complement each other. It's like saying salt and pepper or chocolate and vanilla are opposites.
Can't argue with that.
Matter and antimatter both feature matter in the name.
Photons and tachyons both end with the same suffix.
True and false can both be used as adjectives.
Think about it this way - Cold is the absence of heat, so you could say they're opposites. But without cold, it would be impossible to define heat as it would be the only thing to exist. So without darkness, light wouldn't exist as it would be the only thing that exists. That's kinda my thought process, but you could make it a bit easier by saying both travel at the same speed.
eh this was early in the thought process, it's similar to cats vs dogs and they're somewhat complementary too.
Cats and dogs are also pretty much the same animal so I wouldn't consider them opposites either, but you may be thinking of the great conflict between cat people and dog people and their surprising differences.
what an interesting and thoughtful post. i fed this through an AI that has been fed every smogoff post* and asked it to generate the exact opposite post. here is the result:
*due to the time it takes for the AI to process posts, it has only processed the post database of one user.
if you're taking linguistic and meta properties of this sort, it's not actually possible to find a pair of perfect opposites, since if one member of the pair has the property of being describable or thinkable, then the other must have the property of being indescribable or unthinkable. making the pursuit of thinking of it and then describing it to others in this thread impossible by definition.
One could even say that putting 2 things in a post is giving them a relation, which has been my trump card in case someone comes up with something really difficult. As it stands though, this leaves (as far as I can think of) absolute nothingness to be the only opposite, as it is quite impossible in both the physical and mental sense.
Yeah. Light and the absence of light. Opposites
They're both Pokemon mechanics.
At this point you might as well say "they're both words in a dictionary".
They're all nouns, they all have vowels in them, and they're all in the top post of this thread.
Exactly, you're getting the hang of this!
Smogoff and comedy