Change is intrinsic to all phenomena. And once we recognize this, we must accept that none of the verities that we wish were forever perfect and true could be: nothing exists unchanging forever. Not even our notion of nothingness remains unscathed by the passage of time. However much we may want to believe that what is real and true and good is real and true and good forever, we can only embrace such a delusion by embracing a form of intellectual infantilism, painting a fixed and unchanging canvass over a tableau of unceasing flux. But we cannot live in comfort if we perceive the world as it is. So we avoid asking "deep" questions, we do not long attend to beginnings and endings, we say things like "we will never forget" and refuse to ask what comes after there is no longer a "we."
I embrace this notion not out of love or affection but out of scientific acceptance: the standard model of modern physics compels us to conceive of change as inherent in all phenomena. This is relevant because all of the electronic devices exists only because the standard model taught us how to make them. Electronics implies the standard model and the standard model requires that change is intrinsic: change exists in everything from fundamental particles to the universe entire. Change is not excluded from any region of spacetime nor from any aspect or description of it. And while others may find it justifiable to postulate entities that exist in some manner other than physically, I do not.
The cell phone we carry around compels us, via the philosophical mouthful ontological commitment, to accept that change is intrinsic to all phenomena. Even to our thoughts. Even to number and ideas. Even to fantasies, Change applies to the smallest and most ephemeral entitles (such as electrons and tau leptons) to the largest and most persistent (such as galaxy clusters and the universe itself) . While we often have an emotional need to imagine that something is fixed for all time, we should not allow such an affect to hide this universal feature from us. Everything flows and nothing abides.
While our individual mortality may be, just barely, possible to bear, it is far more difficult to accept that humanity as a whole has not always existed and will, in all probability, eventually cease to exist.
When I hear the phrase "there will always be…" followed by some human relevant phenomena (e.g., war, poverty, stupidity, etc.) I find it difficult not to see those mouthing that phrase as children, intellectually speaking. For accepting one's own mortality is something that usually comes late in adulthood (if it does), and a persistent unwillingness to accept the universality of change seems to be little more than another level of immaturity, one that persists in many of those even after they have accepted their own impermanence.
We can choose to remain as children throughout our entire lives or embrace the impermanence of all things, even everything. Nothing is fixed, not even the notion of fixity. Nothing is infinite, not even the notion of infinity. Nothing is forever, not even the notion of eternity.
To be kind, I will end by providing the reader with the balm of a numbing puzzle, one that is clear, though it may seem to most to be no more lucid than a Zen koan:
Nothing is nothing, not even the notion of nothingness.
It's curious that you should end with a koan as Zen sees the inability to properly perceive the world as it "really is" as being the source of human discontent (or in Buddhist parlance, "suffering"). As for Zen's "Nothing", perhaps it's an abstraction that indicates that we could be getting off track, still stuck in that misperception.
ReplyDeleteIs it the ceaseless changing nature of things that rubs us wrong way? Or is it that sense of uncertainty that unexpected change creates, or the feeling of powerlessness that accompanies overwhelming uncertainty that activates our thoughts and behaviors?
In Buddhism (and other manners of thought), it is the realization of "no fixed nature" that is the liberating insight. That insight in turn points to the possibility of living in a world of changing events and contexts without having to mistakenly experience that life as on of suffering.
It was easy to find a work that will give you something to do and ONE wonders if this notion that "certainty is conferred only on the just" is simply a regurgitation of your own google search.
ReplyDeletehttp://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/certainty.pdf
Actually, I don't think Gonzo's post here is all that bad. To respond:
ReplyDelete"This sentence is false." is a sentence, I assert. And it is an exceptionally useful sentence in that it conveys a particular logical conundrum with self-reference and formal systems.
If you are going to mention that sentence, then surely you are aware of Russell's paradox about the set of all sets that do not contain themselves and Godel's theorem. The sentence does not fail to be a sentence, it fails to have a definite truth value.
The sentences I wrote "Nothing is fixed, not even the notion of fixity. Nothing is infinite, not even the notion of infinity. Nothing is forever, not even the notion of eternity." have very specific points to make, but I made them in rather poetic language rather than stilted, philosophic terms.
Let me rephrase: No physical entities are perfectly fixed and unchanging, since in a purely physical worldview, all phenomena are limited in space an time and all physical phenomena are composed of physical entities such as fields, waves, or fundamental particles whose properties vary over time. To take but one important feature, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle compels us to accept that we cannot ever have a perfect measurement of all of the properties of fundamental phenomena. Uncertain equals unfixed means in a process of change. Even our notion of fixity is itself a physical phenomena of our brains and is so a phenomena bounded in spacetime.
We cannot find fixity anywhere in the physical world around us--that is what modern physical entails. Thus the sentence "Nothing is fixed, not even the notion of fixity."
Infinite entities cannot exist within a finite universe and so, physically speaking, there are no infinite entities, not even our ideas of infinity can be infinite, since we are constrained to a physical world and so are all of our productions.
No entity exists forever--all physical phenomena are bounded in time. Even our notion of eternity was something that was created and will, itself, eventually cease to exist.
If you replace "nothing" in the above statements with "no entity" (surely a reasonably substitution) and interpret these as statements about entities as being physical phenomena, the meaning of these statements may be challenging to some minds, but they are far from meaningless.
I'm sorry if this was too much for you. I'm sure it is much easier for you to criticize than actually try to think.
1. Not sure what your question is. Do you mean the issue with can a language contain its own truth predicate?
ReplyDeleteWhile your second group seems clearly to represent the project to reduce mathematics to logic (famously ended by Godel), I don't have a good idea why you are grouping Lewis Carroll and Saul Kripke. On the change that I missed something obvious I got out my copy of Naming and Necessity and looked for something indicating Kripke's view of sentences. But Kripke doesn't discuss sentences very much there.
If you question is about what is the proper way of resolving meaning or names, I don't really hew to either the view of the logical positivists or to Kripke's view. If you question is something else, then what is it?
2. Simply put, yes. Various interpretations of quantum mechanics assert that there is no clear cause to be found (no "hidden variables") for the actions of single particles. If the observed behavior of the physical world motivates us to rethink the law of causality, then absolutely, we reject the a priori assumption of causality.
I don't know that there are any philosophical laws--actually, I'm rather skeptical about the notion of laws themselves. I see physics as providing us with highly reliable and useful descriptions, not with discovering laws.
Alan Watts - On Nothingness
ReplyDeleteHere's a different perspective. What do you think?