Zenophilia

"Never confuse motion with action."

~ Benjamin Franklin

 

 

 

 

Zeno of Elea anticipated many of the points I've touched upon over the preceding few posts in formulating what Bertrand Russell described as "immeasurably subtle and profound" paradoxes. Zeno was a Parmenidean philosopher, who shared Parmenides' belief that "All is One;" his paradoxes challenge the notions of Time and Space and the existence of entitites within them.

 

His 'Paradox of Place,' for example, is both a Platonic Form of the self-reference paradox and, paradoxically enough, a refutation of the Platonic Theory of Forms:

 

"If everything has a place, then place itself has a place, and so on ad infinitum."

 

He similarly challenges Time in the Fletcher's Paradox:

 

"If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless."

 

In fact, elsewhere in his writings, Zeno demonstrates that not only is it impossible to move, it is impossible to start a journey or to reach a destination. Yet it is even more clearly demonstrable that motion occurs and that physical entities undergo motion travelling from place to place.

 

Intriguingly, advances in quantum physics suggest that apparent motion - and even more importantly, apparent lack of motion - are both not as straightforward as they seem. A famous experimental result, Young's Double-Slit Experiment, proves that light operates as a wave; Einstein's Nobel-Prizewinning verification of the photoelectric effect proves that it operates as a particle. The fundamentally paradoxical notion of wave-particle duality, which follows from these two results and leads to a bizarre conception of matter as a measure of quantum interference patterns and mass as a byproduct of collisions with Higgs bosons - all of this is just another paradigmatic way of representing the Parasimplicity Principle.

Connecting the dots

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our
aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
~ Alfred North Whitehead

 

What we perceive in the objective entity is only its properties. I say this as an adjunct to another important unproved result from another very lengthy examination, in this case an examination of Time - the result is intuitive and obvious, but involves some very complex analysis if we want to go about proving it, and it states simply that we can only directly perceive one objective entity at once. When we understand that a relation is necessarily the product of some comparison of more than one entity in the context of this result, we obtain the happy insight that relations necessarily concern subjective entities, while properties necessarily concern objective entities. Our understanding of discrete entities, either subjectively or objectively, requires us to understand both properties and relations: of course, the experience of observing some property creates the endogenous impression of that property, and it is strictly this rather than the property itself that informs our identification of any entity.

A subjective entity, which we have said is a created thing, a manifestation of the willed agency of the mind-artist, is therefore a deliberate arrangement of property-impressions and relation-ideas. The distinction between impression and idea can be more clearly understood in this framework if we appreciate that we can choose to arrange a given set of property-impressions and relation-ideas any way we like - we are not constrained to those arrangements which correspond to identifiable objective entities in our experience. We can invent entirely novel arrangements of property and relation that have no objective existence. We can, in fact, posit continua of relationship, along which entities of successively greater bigness or redness, say, can be intuited. The ability to intuit such relational chains, which is what cognitive scientists call pattern recognition, is an immensely powerful mechanism of rational thought. In the limit, we can consider relations as continua without specifying any entities lying anywhere along a particular continuum. This is what Plato meant by an ideal; in Platonic idealism, every thing that physically exists partakes of the ideals of its necessary properties.

Pulling this back to your understanding of my writing - you, as a self-aware conscious individual, have a reaction to this (to any subjective entity, in theory) which is essentially emotional, or sentimental to use a Humean expression. This reaction represents your critical evaluation of its conformity with your own subjective ideals, which develop organically out of an extrapolation of your historic perceptions. In hopefully plainer English, you develop your ideal of 'bigness' through having had to compare different entities along a continuum of increasing size in the process of identifying them as uniquely individual objective entities. For a fundamental physical property like 'bigness,' there might be quite significant agreement between several observers on the ideal of bigness, but it should be obvious that more abstract 'properties' can be perceived which give rise to far more heterogenous ideals.