This "Zero ontology", an interpretation of the void which treats it as the summation of all substantial reality (or vice versa - an interpretation of substantial reality in terms of the void), appears as either unintelligible or highly counter-intuitive from the perspective of our everyday worldview. We are used to dealing with substantial things, and we tend to think of 0, or the void, as the absence of things rather than their ultimate "summation". But this may be a problem of language rather than intelligibility. We do not have the right terms at present to describe the great totality of the world, considered as a single unit when all of its properties are taken into account. Such an entity is beyond our experience, and certainly beyond our powers of manipulation. When modern physics tells us that the ultimate value of the conserved constants of the physical universe is exactly zero, or as Pearce puts it:
"In the Universe as a whole, the conserved constants (electric charge, angular momentum, mass-energy) add up to/cancel out to exactly 0. There isn't any net electric charge or angular momentum. The world's positive mass-energy is exactly cancelled out by its negative gravitational potential energy. (Provocatively, cryptically, elliptically, "nothing" exists)"
our normal conceptual resources seem to stall. Does this really mean that the substance of the world is not really substantial at all, or is it a bizarre mathematical trick which should be interpreted in some other way? It is important to understand, of course, that there really is some positive mass-energy in certain parts of the world. That is not being denied. When it is said that the quantity of mass-energy is Zero, this is only true for the world as a whole. We think that mass-bearing material things exist because we are located in a particular part of the world where they appear to exist. Only when we have a perspective on the whole world can we see that they are effectively wiped out in the overall structure of things.
