What is darkness?

[xlostie]

What are your opinions on darkness? Is it real? Would darkness exist without a light? Is darkness it's own entity?

 

[obligatoryshackles]

So long as you interact with the world in some way, there will always be darkness.

If you perceive light, there will be an absence of light. If you hear sound, there will be silence. If you feel the world, there will be numbness.

What's interesting though is that you might very well have a world without darkness - after all, there are many colors in the world, so you would still be able to see and distinguish even if everything was illuminated. But if there was only darkness, then you may as well not have that sense since it would color everything the same and thus render it pointless to perceive.

So would darkness exist without a light?

Since darkness with a total absence of light makes the corresponding sense irrelevant, you could not even be aware that there is darkness in the first place. If you have no senses, no way to perceive the world, then how could you know there even is a world, much less darkness in it? You might think you could still exist as a mind in total darkness, but even that's dubious - if you've never seen, heard, or touched anything, what could you even think about?

Now, there is such an idea as the Boltzmann Brain, where your mind forms with pre-existing memories, but that's a whole other thing...

 

[skepsis]

I think darkness is a concomitant of light. Or, to put it another way, light and darkness are not just to be seen as sheer opposites, but as a dualism. If you look at the universe in a causality-based mind map, you notice that light and darkness are descendants of a common causal origin. Quite objectively, darkness is thus not "darker", "colder" or anything else, it is just the focus of a different perspective looking at the same situation.
Probably this is also the case whenever the concepts of light and darkness are used in a figurative sense (e.g. mental health, ethics, "opposites"), because it is in the nature of darkness to be a sibling of light. Darkness is not an entity at all for me, neither is light. They are in my eyes only different ways of looking at one and the same situation. And darkness cannot be without light, not because light would produce darkness, but because the causal origin must always result in both light and darkness.