A nothingness that in at least two instances that we know of comes into contact with somethingness--birth and death.
But our nothingness referred to here is really figurative, as Jesse Bering reminds us below. It's just where consciousness terminates (in either temporal direction) and accordingly becomes the absence of everything formerly (or yet to be) presented and apprehended (ourselves and the world). We never get outside of conscious experience to categorize / perceive a nothingness or to be aware of a what it's like to 'not be'.
Jesse Bering - "The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist:
'Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what's next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness and make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of blackness)and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.'
"Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn't as though there will be a 'you' around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you've died, and once you've died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: 'When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there's an obstacle!'
"This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you've never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that 'everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.'" --Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death; Scientific American
I am bewildered by what this relationship is and how it can even be. How does a being come out of non-being, and how does a being go back into non-being?
This eventually leads into the Greek idea of substance (below), but later information philosophy perhaps clarifies better how living organisms fit into it: "Information is neither matter nor energy, but it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication. Immaterial information is perhaps as close as a physical scientist can get to the idea of a soul or spirit that departs the body at death. When a living being dies, it is the maintenance of biological information that ceases. The matter remains."
Kelley L. Ross - "Since Parmenides did not believe that not being could exist, then Being could not become Not Being and Not Being could not become Being. [...But] there is one area where predication becomes an issue in the theory of Parmenides. In the world, things seem to come into being and pass out of being. For a while, Prussia is there, and then it is gone. For a while, the Beatles are there; then they are gone. The parrot in the Monty Python skit has 'ceased to be.' Parmenides believes that this violates his principles, since Not Being does not exist for Prussia to become. He therefore says, 'So coming into being is extinguished and perishing unimaginable', and this presumably must apply to every kind of thing.
"Now, although it does not trouble Parmenides, this looks to be contradicted by experience and common sense. Thus, in Aristotle's metaphysics, substances are durable, but they do come into being and pass out of being. The element that survives from Parmenides is that in this generation and corruption, the substances do not become nothing, they always become something else. That happens because there is a durable underlying reality, the hypokeímenon, that persists through all changes. Aristotle identified that as matter, hýlê. Eventually, rather than Aristotle's substance as Form, we come to think of something like the matter, the underlying thing, as the substance, something that cannot be destroyed or created.
"Today, however, matter has come to look rather more like Aristotle's substances. Electrons and protons can become neutrons. Electrons and positrons can become energy, etc. Many physicists may now think of the truly 'underlying' thing as energy, but then energy itself always takes some particular form. Electrons and positrons do not just become 'energy' in general. They mutually annihilate to become electromagnetic radiation, because the reaction is mediated by the electromagnetic force. That radiation can then hit something and excite an electron to higher energy level in an atom. I have argued that the thing that truly underlies all these transformations is just space itself, but we need not consider that now.
"If there is coming into being and perishing, then what survives from Parmenides is the principle of the hypokeímenon, substrance, or conservation. One kind of thing can turn into another, but things cannot simply become nothing, or arise (permanently) out of nothing (there is some fudging on this in quantum mechanics -- only things with no real mass or energy can permanently arise out of the vaccuum)." --The Metaphysics of Nothing; Friesian Site
At least in a Minkowskian spacetime, existence seems to exist in an eternal, transtemporal state.
The macroscopic continuity of an Eternalism structure must deal with the discrete and supposedly random nature of the quantum level. This could be remedied by a mathematical structure more complicated than a block-universe, that features all the deterministic divergences into multiple universes, with subjective experience providing the origin of the apparent randomness of being in one version of reality as opposed to another.
Max Tegmark - "Although quantum mechanics is often described as inherently random and uncertain, the wave function evolves in a deterministic way. There is nothing random or uncertain about it. The sticky part is how to connect this wave function with what we observe. [...] Unadulterated quantum theory does not, in fact, pose any contradictions. Although it predicts that one classical reality gradually splits into superpositions of many such realities, observers subjectively experience this splitting merely as a slight randomness, with probabilities in exact agreement with those from the old collapse postulate.
[...] "A mathematical structure is an abstract, immutable entity... If history were a movie, the structure would correspond not to a single frame of it but to the entire videotape. Consider, for example, a world made up of pointlike particles moving around in three-dimensional space. In four-dimensional spacetime --the bird perspective-- these particle trajectories resemble a tangle of spaghetti. If the frog [perspective] sees a particle moving with constant velocity, the bird sees a straight strand of uncooked spaghetti. If the frog sees a pair of orbiting particles, the bird sees two spaghetti strands intertwined like a double helix. To the frog, the world is described by Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, it is described by the geometry of the pasta --a mathematical structure. The frog itself is merely a thick bundle of pasta, whose highly complex intertwining corresponds [in is view] to a cluster of particles that store and process information. Our universe is far more complicated than this example, and scientists do not yet know to what, if any, mathematical structure it corresponds." --Parallel Universes; Scientific American
That certainly solves the problem, but somehow it seems unsatisfying.
Information philosophy provides a source for novelty being introduced, with the quantum quirkiness still averaging out to a deterministic-appearing universe at the classical level. How this would ever fit into an Eternalism version of a multiverse (above) is up for grabs, however. But it would tentatively appear that any unpredictable 'surprises' would once again be dependent upon what 'route' an individual's own subjective experience took in the course of unfolding events or branching realities.
Bob Doyle - "In less than two decades of the mid-twentieth century, the word information was transformed from a synonym for knowledge into a mathematical, physical, and biological quantity that can be measured and studied scientifically. [...] Information is constant in a deterministic universe. There is 'nothing new under the sun.' The creation of new information is not possible without the random chance and uncertainty of quantum mechanics, plus the extraordinary temporal stability of quantum mechanical structures. It is of the deepest philosophical significance that information is based on the mathematics of probability. If all outcomes were certain, there would be no 'surprises' in the universe. Information would be conserved and a universal constant, as some mathematicians mistakenly believe. Information philosophy requires the ontological uncertainty and probabilistic outcomes of modern quantum physics to produce new information.
"But at the same time, without the extraordinary stability of quantized information structures over cosmological time scales, life and the universe we know would not be possible. Quantum mechanics reveals the architecture of the universe to be discrete rather than continuous, to be digital rather than analog. Moreover, the 'correspondence principle' of quantum mechanics and the 'law of large numbers' of statistics ensures that macroscopic objects can normally average out microscopic uncertainties and probabilities to provide the 'adequate determinism' that shows up in all our 'Laws of Nature.'
"Information philosophy explores some classical problems in philosophy with deeper and more fundamental insights than is possible with the logic and language approach of modern analytic philosophy. By exploring the origins of structure in the universe, information philosophy transcends humanity and even life itself, though it is not a mystical metaphysical transcendence.
"[...] Information is neither matter nor energy, but it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication. Immaterial information is perhaps as close as a physical scientist can get to the idea of a soul or spirit that departs the body at death. When a living being dies, it is the maintenance of biological information that ceases. The matter remains.
"Biological systems are different from purely physical systems primarily because they create, store, and communicate information. Living things store information in a memory of the past that they use to shape their future. Fundamental physical objects like atoms have no history. And when human beings export some of their personal information to make it a part of human culture, that information moves closer to becoming immortal." --Dedicated to the new information philosophy; The Information Philosopher
Seth Lloyd - "It's been known for more than a hundred years, ever since Maxwell, that all physical systems register and process information. For instance, this little inchworm right here has something on the order of Avogadro's number of atoms. And dividing by Boltzmann's concept, its entropy is on the order of Avogadro's number of bits. This means that it would take about Avogadro's number of bits to describe that little guy and how every atom and molecule is jiggling around in his body in full detail. Every physical system registers information, and just by evolving in time, by doing its thing, it changes that information, transforms that information, or, if you like, processes that information. Since I've been building quantum computers I've come around to thinking about the world in terms of how it processes information." --The Computational Universe; Edge [10.22.02]