[MD] Democritus and MoQ

[118]

As you know, Democritus was Greek living around 500 BC.  There are two
quotes of his that I wanted to bring up, and perhaps discuss.

The first one is of interest to me because of my scientific training:

“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion"

This quote is interesting since it predicted our current notion of
reality (at least at the atomic scale).  Now, Democritus knew this to
be true.  However, such knowing did not have the convincing physics
based analogies to support it at the time.  So we can say that such
knowing was intuitive.  Unfortunately sages such as Plato and
Aristotle dominated Western thought for several thousand years, and
most people believed in the continuity of matter.  Of course Aristotle
also created other myths such as the nature of the cosmos, and that
the natural state of things was to be at rest.  Newton and others
created much more acceptable analogies for our present day.  As we
have discussed in other posts, many entrenched academia professors
will often prevent advances due to conservative views.  However, that
is not the point of this post.

The second quote:

"Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity"

is the one I wanted to discuss.  Based in Democritus' insight into the
nature of physics, perhaps he had insight into MoQ.

In this quote, we have split reality into chance and necessity which
is another knife division of reality like the dynamic/static split.
We have a pretty good analogy for what chance is, and have discussed
that quite a bit in this forum.  I do not want to belabor that side of
the split, but want to look into Necessity.  I have posted what I call
Intent.  This can be loosely translated as will or even desire.  This
Intent is all we have when we are first introduced to this world, from
a personal level.  We of course also have our physical bodies and all
that happens within them.  Intent could also be translated as
necessity.  So, what is necessity?  I suppose it could be "that which
we have to do".  Why is there something that we have to do?  Well,
this is the connection with Intent.  It is something that we come
with.  A tree is born to become a tree, that is its necessity.

If we were to relegate the world of chance to that of static quality,
and consider Necessity to be the dynamic aspect of Quality, then it
may be possible to begin creating analogies of Dynamic Quality based
on such a premise.  From purely the human point of view, each level
could be labeled with its own Intent.  This has actually been done by
some in the forum already when they state that the organic level does
what the organic level is supposed to do.  Or put another way, each
level exists for itself, that is its intent.  It uses static quality
to perform such necessary functions.

In addition to placing some more descriptive terms into MoQ, it may
also serve to better encompass our place in such a thing.

Regards,
Mark