[MD] Was Zeno correct?

[118]

Hi dmb,

Indeed the limits to our conceptualizations; especially with discrete
increments.  The math thus instructs us through whole numbers or their
almost infinite subdivisions.  Tiny little increments always getting smaller
all the way down to the magical Plank's constant.  And then?  Well, its tiny
little jumps, never resting in between.  The magicians tell us that such is
the nature of things, has to be, they calculated it.  Then uncertainty
claims the day, and the mystics rise again, told you so they say.

We sit and watch dumbly with our tiny little neurons on and off, on and off,
in binary fashion.  At the synapse the transmitters rush across the gap like
an army on its way to plunder.  Onwards!, to change the course of history
through a single critical firing, which spreads like an octopus, only to
fade and then begin anew.  The digital intrudes into our reality like tiny
knifes which separate and confuse.  The fog settles in for a terrifying
night.  Are we left helpless then to such disturbance in our sleep?  Where
did the labyrinth come from?  What is that hiding beneath the veil? Who is
that looking at me in the mirror?  Tell me please, somebody!  Is there
anybody, OUT THERE?

Got Milk?

Mark

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> dmb chimes in with an edited rerun:
>
> Since hammers so loudly and conspicuously hit their targets, I wonder if
> Heidegger picked the image as an intentional parody of Zeno's paradox. I
> think the paradox should be used to get at the difference between the
> continuous flow of time as we experience it and the discrete increments with
> which we conceptualize and measure time. (This paradox basically says that
> motion is an illusion, because a loosed arrow will never reach its target.
> And it never gets there because it travels half of the distance in half the
> time, and then half again and again forever.) In other words, the point of
> this absurdity is not to deny motion an an illusion. The point is to expose
> the limits of our conceptualizations.
>
> This "problem" or paradox arises only because of the way we divide and
> measure things and the guy with an arrow through his head will tell you that
> arrows certainly DO reach their targets. If he can't tell you, it's only
> because he has an arrow through his head. The point (pun intended) of this
> idea - or at least one of the points - is to say there is an important
> distinction between engagement and reflection, between direct experience and
> the concepts that follow. (Although somehow it seems that it's possible to
> be so engaged even in reflection. It seems you can lose yourself in thought
> the way you can lose yourself in motorcycle repair or hammering or painting
> or anything else.) I'm thinking Heidegger picked the image of hammering, at
> least partly, because its so repetitive. Nails are fasteners and they're
> used to construct things. That's what concepts do too.
>
> "That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had
> seemed so close to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was TAKEN from the
> rhetoricians. Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who
> had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was
> that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the
> rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality.
> It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of
> fixed, rigid way." paperback Bantam ZAMM 342
>
> Thus, Zeno explained to his lover through logic and math and passionate
> kisses galore how cupid's arrow could never reach his heart.
>
> Then he nailed her.
>
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