Absence is odd because there are an infinite number of things that are absent at any given time. How do you figure out what the thing is that's absent?
Barnett was interested in absence before he was interested in zero. The majority of consciousness and perception science over the last century has focused on what happens in the brain when we detect something in the environment. “But this ignores the whole other side of things,” he said, “which is that you can often have experiences of something not being there.” For example, if you go to grab your keys and they aren’t where you left them on the hallway table, you experience absence.
Previously, researchers assumed that absence was represented in the brain by neurons not firing. But recent studies have shown that the brain encodes absence with unique neural patterns.
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Nieder, for his part, has been obsessed with zero and absence for the better part of a decade. In 2016, he proposed that the neurological mechanisms that encode absence may be shared with those that encode zero. He hypothesized that zero must have evolved from more fundamental representations of perceptual absence. First, the brain had to understand the absence of a stimulus, like a light being off; only then could it recognize “nothing” as a category akin to “something,” but representing everything that isn’t something. Finally, it had to turn “nothing” into a quantitative concept. By understanding how the brain encodes zero, he believed, we might be able to understand how the brain deals with absence.
Absence is odd because there are an infinite number of things that are absent at any given time. How do you figure out what the thing is that's absent?
Interesting. Specifically;
Barnett was interested in absence before he was interested in zero. The majority of consciousness and perception science over the last century has focused on what happens in the brain when we detect something in the environment. “But this ignores the whole other side of things,” he said, “which is that you can often have experiences of something not being there.” For example, if you go to grab your keys and they aren’t where you left them on the hallway table, you experience absence.
Previously, researchers assumed that absence was represented in the brain by neurons not firing. But recent studies have shown that the brain encodes absence with unique neural patterns.
...
Nieder, for his part, has been obsessed with zero and absence for the better part of a decade. In 2016, he proposed that the neurological mechanisms that encode absence may be shared with those that encode zero. He hypothesized that zero must have evolved from more fundamental representations of perceptual absence. First, the brain had to understand the absence of a stimulus, like a light being off; only then could it recognize “nothing” as a category akin to “something,” but representing everything that isn’t something. Finally, it had to turn “nothing” into a quantitative concept. By understanding how the brain encodes zero, he believed, we might be able to understand how the brain deals with absence.
This "perception of absence" is called Sunyata (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81) in Hindu/Buddhist philosophy and various Meditation techniques are often prescribed to experience it.