The notion of nothing is a rather young concept in the history of human ideas. This may be due to the apparent inability to observe the absence of everything. In mathematics, for example, Babylonian scholars first had to invent a representation for the absence of a counter, thereby laying the foundation for the number zero as used today. As a number, zero is conceptually different from other numbers, since it cannot be represented by any describable physical entity. Socially, this has been made possible by the function of negation, which allows us to state that there is something, e.g. a section of a row on an abacus, which can and often does hold counters, but in this specific observation does not. This absence is then the core of this very observation, and it serves functionally as the equivalent of zero. In fact, the number zero can be seen as a shorthand for the observation above.
This shows that it is indeed possible and, with the benefit of hindsight, relatively easy to observe an absence inside a system. All it takes is a technical abstraction of some system of observations, such as counting, and then a reference to the substrate of the system, e.g. the abacus, to show and make explicit where elements are absent. This notion of absence is, however, quite different from the notion of nothing.
In nothingness, absence cannot be made explicit by referencing a substrate, for if there were a substrate, there would not be nothing. The trick how communication deals with nothingness is recontextualization: Nothing then has a semantic boundary, so that there is a system of meaning from which nothing can be observed.
The holistic view of an all-encompassing nothing uses the same function, when it describes the world as the inside of nothing, nothing coming into existence.
With this in mind, observations become non-materialistic, as it is clear that there is no qualitative difference between something and nothing, no substrate to provide a grounding. Rather, nothing and some existence are an oscillatory state, where any side inevitably invokes the other.