Sunday, June 17, 2012

On Numbers and Motion

on numbers and motion:

there is Zeno's paradox of motion that holds that travel from one point to another is impossible mathematically for if you were always to travel half the distance again from that just covered you would never arrive. although theoretically possible, could infinitesimally little numbers simply not be real? if we assume space is finite, we could not even write an infinitesimally little number down, there is not enough room!

but what is motion as assumed in this model? that an object really moves from one place to another relative to a fixed spatial location! the other view is that everything has a fixed spatial location, nothing can truly move. what we see, which i think could be agreed upon, is that there is a fluid change of the pixels of our eyesight which shows the object's recognizable configuration flowing across our visual range. this is just the same as what happens on a television except in 3 dimensions. therefore if only what we see is real and not based on any material world where the objects truly exist beyond our senses, we could conclude that motion is only virtual and the conventional model is false. i feel this a fundamental argument in metaphysics.

just as infinitesimally little numbers are not real, can we apply this reasoning to distance in space? everything that exists, let us call it matter, is in its own fixed space. surely an infinitesimally little distance is not real either? there are differences in matter. matter adjoins other matter. therefore, we can reason that, in isolation, neighbouring matter, by definition, is different matter, for if it were the same or subject to the same changes over time, surely you could not argue that it is indeed another separate bit of matter. we could reason that the littlest distance that matters is the size of the littlest bit of matter. it would seem obvious then, just as infinite space is impossible, that an infinitesimally little bit of matter could not exist.

CLEARCHARGE

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