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August 16, 2024
We imagine, in other words, a continuous movement between and beneath our measurements of their progress.
In its place he now drew an airtight border between what we experience with our senses in space and time, on the one hand, and eternal truths and principles, on the other, which exist outside space and time and remain true despite what our senses tell us.
we could derive objective truths about the causal connections between our perceptions, even as they remained subjective and variable. In other words, while we can only know what we learn through our senses, he still thought we could infer from our senses certain objective facts about the world, such as the relation between a cause and the effect that must follow that cause.
Kant realized that he had not been radical enough in his analysis of what happens when we observe something—even if it would take him another decade (and almost nine hundred pages) to turn that realization into the “all-crushing” Critique of Pure Reason.[25]
Like Kant before him, he also discovered that the conceit of slowing time down to a single frame, honing the moment of an observation to a pure present, destroys the observation itself. The closer we look, the more the present vanishes from our grasp.
the central debate in quantum mechanics today is not so much about mathematics as it is about language.
by its very nature, an observation must relate at least two distinct moments in space-time.
An observation, any observation, undermines perfect being in the present, because the observation itself brings space and time to the picture.
by presuming we know the ultimate nature of reality, we limit our ability to understand.
the “true method of instruction in philosophy” to be “zetetic, as it was called by some of the ancients,” meaning “to search for,” but better known by our modern term “skepticism.”[17]
Doubt for Kant was “not dogmatic but a doubt of waiting,” for the “method of doubting is useful because it makes the soul act not from speculation but from healthy understanding.”[18]
the young Socrates asked Parmenides himself: “If someone should demonstrate that I am one thing and many, what’s astonishing about that? He will say, when he wants to show that I’m many, that my right side is different from my left, and my front from my back, and likewise with my upper and lower parts…. But when he wants to show that I’m one, he will say I’m one person among the seven of us, because I also partake of oneness. Thus he will show that both are true.”[19]
a demonstration of how to use dialectical analysis to get to deeper truths. During the dialogue that ensued, Parmenides gave a master class in what posterity would come to call the Socratic method.
Or, to put it slightly differently, we can focus on a particle, or we can focus on its movement, but if we want to see both simultaneously, we can’t. While they may strike us as arcane, as modern physicists began to train their extraordinary instruments on those minimal pixels of space-time, they discovered that Zeno’s paradoxes weren’t so irrelevant after all. They weren’t for Kant either.
that things in space and time are, by definition, always in relation to other things and that someone, an observer, needs to put them in that relation.
Thirdness: see Peirce, Meade, Plato's Demiurge in the second account of creation in Timaeus.
“I was gaining the growing conviction that one could hardly make progress in modern atomic physics without a knowledge of Greek natural philosophy.”[11]
make the cosmos move, even if there were nothing outside the cosmos in which to make it move. This then raised the head-scratching question of relative to what, exactly, the cosmos was moving.
Why would the cosmos move? Everything in the cosmos could move in relation to the cosmos and other things.
But the universe is not a thing in time and space that can be either finite or infinite; the antinomy is provoked by thinking of it as if it were. The questioner, the observer, brings something unique, namely, a finite self, to each and every perception in time and space; this very observer produces bad infinities the moment he or she tries to step into the shoes of the god of very large things by transforming the limited connecting of moments and places necessary for any perception into the unlimited realm of everything at all times.
we must describe for it an alternate architecture, a paradoxical geometry whose notation was only worked out in the late nineteenth century but whose concepts have permeated the mystic and theological musings of poets and philosophers alike since time immemorial. That world, our library, was finite, yes, but boundless as well, its architecture inverted such that its center was everywhere, and its circumference, nowhere.
the very memory needed to see a recurrence as a recurrence would of necessity be an alien element.
It is, indeed, that very observer for whom the conditions of possibility of knowing anything at all also require that universe turn itself inside out, become a hypersphere whose central point envelops all existence.
No matter where we train our gaze on the starry skies above, we look inward toward the very origin of space and time. Thus freeing our minds from our senses, we find that the universe is, indeed, turned inside out.
That we can only ever understand things in relation to one another means that understanding will always stem from a limited perspective.
Campbell, Joseph. The Ecstasy of Being: Mythology and Dance.
