Deep thoughts... okeydoke

[Wonder Woman]

This sextion is giving me brain drain. And, that's my deep thought of the evening.

[biglin]

You wait till Mike starts posting one of his more complicated philosophical threads, Lynne!

It's cruel and unusual punishment!

[beth]

It is at that, Lin, but it's great, too, because it makes one focus and think - whether one wants to or not.

Just like doing leg lifts and sit ups - keeps the ol' brain cells from getting flat and flabby.

I've got a couple of sub-boards for this one going up tonight. Then, Mike is more than welcome.

[Wonder Woman]

Apr 22, 2010 12:01:45 GMT -5 @biglin said:

You wait till Mike starts posting one of his more complicated philosophical threads, Lynne!

It's cruel and unusual punishment!

Tell him I said bring it. I can take it. Really I can.

[Deleted]

Very well, Lynne. Let me begin by presenting you with the famous paradox first offered by Zeno of Elea.

The arrow must be where it is because it cannot be where it is not.
But if it is where it is, it cannot move.
How then do we observe its movement?

[Wonder Woman]

Apr 23, 2010 17:52:42 GMT -5 @mikemarshall said:

Very well, Lynne. Let me begin by presenting you with the famous paradox first offered by Zeno of Elea.

The arrow must be where it is because it cannot be where it is not.
But if it is where it is, it cannot move.
How then do we observe its movement?

With our eyes?

Why can't it move? I am where I am and I can't be where I'm not, but I'm about to go outside to donate my share of pollution, so I'll be where I'm not now, and when I move I won't be where I am.

Duh. Of course IT can't move.

We can observe its movement because we move it.

That's my final answer.

[Deleted]

Paradox of time and motion

Let me recapitulate and enlarge upon Zeno's argument.

1 An arrow flying through the air must at any given moment in time occupy a specific space
2 If it occupies this space it cannot be in motion, for if it WERE moving it could NOT be occupying this space.
3 As an arrow in flight always occupies space it CANNOT be in motion.

There are several ways in which philosophers have attempted to resolve this paradox. Before I discuss them I will briefly outline the consequences of Zeno's argument.

In essence, Zeno claims that both time and motion are illusions. When we believe that we perceive them, we are in error.

Many people have agreed with him in that claim, from the Upanishads (among the sacred scriptures of Hinduism) to Plato, St Augustine, (at least in part) Berkeley, and McTaggart.

It is certainly difficult to find a credible answer at first glance. The 'common sense' approach fails to deal with the LOGICAL paradox at the heart of Zeno's claim. The argument from empirical observation is only a partial response.

Even Bertrand Russell's attempt to dismiss Zeno was one of the poorest and laziest pieces of reasoning in which he ever indulged (not much above the level of George Moore's attempt to refute idealism by holding up his hands.) Russell simply asserted - without bothering to justify his argument - that 'this is based on the illusion that movement is discontinuous.'

Sadly, in certain aspects of the quantum world, movement is INDEED discontinuous, so any attempt to refute Zeno's claim by insisting upon the continuous nature of motion and time falls foul of scientific reality as well as the laws of logic.

[Erasmus]

I was about to say that Zeno anticipated Heisenberg's Uncertainty and see that you have got there already - so in fact, Zeno stands vindicated. I see no real problem with Uncertainty because velocity includes speed, which is change of position, so attempt to measure both position and its change is an attempt to measure something in terms of itself - ultimately a futile exercise.

[fretslider]

Is Shrodinger's cat dead or alive, then?

[Deleted]

Zeno does have some points of contact with quantum physics but less so than Heraclitus.

As for Schroedinger's cat, well, of course, we will only know if he/she is alive or dead when we open the box!

[Deleted]

There have of course been numerous attempts to answer Zeno's paradox. One is simply to embrace it and to accept that the whole concepts of time, space and motion are illusory. That is in essence the approach to the problem most brilliantly (if highly eccentrically) put forward by McTaggart. It is ironic that he, the arch-enemy of time, should have been chose to review the magnum opus by Alexander, its arch prophet.

[fretslider]

Apr 25, 2010 16:08:37 GMT -5 @mikemarshall said:

Zeno does have some points of contact with quantum physics but less so than Heraclitus.

As for Schroedinger's cat, well, of course, we will only know if he/she is alive or dead when we open the box!

Indeed, this is quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox. Since we cannot know, the cat is both dead and alive according to quantum law, in a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other.

[Erasmus]

Well, as has been said, the cat knows whether it's alive! If knows when it's dead that raises all sorts of interesting questions!

I do see two problems with it though. One is what seems to me a presumption that if nobody hears a tree fall, it makes no sound (to quote another one); that is, events have to be observed to occur, that observation creates reality. It was this point that Schroedinger was making, because he intended to show the absurdity of the Copenhagen Convention, not to vindicate it! His point is that the cat is either dead or alive whether anybody witnesses the fact or not: the superposition exists only in their mind, not in reality. Instead, it has gone in the direction of mystical philosophy (especially Buddhist) that observation is creation (not creation a nihil admittedly) but still, or the material world from a more Platonic realm of potential. This does raise some interesting thoughts about 'magic' but I don't want to go into them right now.

It gives a fix on 'God' though (in the mystical, not the spirit up the sky sense). God - or the Godhead - becomes the range of all potentials. That can well be omniscient but does not imply predestination because although `Ain Soph 'Aur (The Infinite Light of Nothingness) or Parabrahm or Nirvarna may contain all potentials without distinction (which is what the last word means literally) we do not. Therefore, in David Bohm's Multiverse a near infinite number of 'us' experience existence according to its most probable possibility. 'God' might be quite capable of knowing what all those possibilities may be, but since we are not, our free will is also a superposition that generates multiple copies, each in its own universe.

This is the sort of thing probably best considered by students passing the legal stuff one way and the illegal the other after their first lecture on Georg Cantor!

[Wonder Woman]

Alrighty then. I so know when I'm twelve thousand feet under sea water. Never took philosophy. Now I never will. Doesn't make a lick of sense to me not to accept that the arrow is indeed moving through the air by sheer force, and when it's not, it's just laying there, doing nothing.

[Erasmus]

Sounds like you're saying 'Tis an almighty load of moonshine, bullshit and bollocks, - which generally speaking sounds about the right approach