Zeno's Paradox and Identity

Materialism says we have no persistent identity. The fact we experience one means materialism is wrong, and mortality with it.

How does a thing move from point A to point B?

Isn’t it true that for every such movement, this thing must always pass through a half-way point?

And, thus, to pass through that point, there must likewise be a point half-way between the start and that point.

And, again, between that and the starting point, there must also be a half-way point it must pass through.

The problem, though, is that where do you stop? Aren’t there an infinite number of these half-way points? Wouldn’t that mean it would take an infinite amount of time for it to move at all?

And if it takes an infinite amount of time to move at all, doesn’t that mean it’ll be stationary?

So how does anything actually move?

This is called Zeno’s paradox.

In our every day lives, we don’t really know how things move - we just see them move. Now, you may wonder, what happens if we look really closely at super small things and see them move?

It turns out, when we do this we don’t see things move at all. This phenomenon is called, rather aptly, the Quantum Zeno Effect.

Computer Screens

In computer graphics that are displayed on LCD screens, things are simpler. This half-way point stops at the size of a pixel - that smallest dot on a screen.

Then, when a dot moves from one pixel to another, it’s not actually moving at all. Instead one pixel is switched off, and then the pixel next to it is switched on, and this is done simultaneously to give the impression of movement. It’s so small, we don’t notice. If you really zoomed in, though, it really wouldn’t look like movement. It would just be like a light going off in one area, and coming on in another.

In reality what you see isn’t a pixel, it’s information that is being projected onto the screen. The pixel location becomes an approximation for its actual mapped location, in the computer’s information space - its memory. It can turn off the previous projection and switch on the new projection every time its location is updated.

In computer games, characters are modeled in memory as 3D vectors and instructions on drawing them, such as the textures to use. This information is constantly being sent to a GPU, which then figures out how to represent that on pixels on the screen. Change the character a bit, and it’ll just change which pixels light up and which ones shut down.

This model is the information, what we see of it is a representation of that information. We can ask “what caused it to be there?” and look at it closely and conclude that what caused it to be there are the pixels lighting up. But that isn’t the truth: what caused it to be there is the model that describes the character. That is what best explains its behavior and what we experience.

Identity

And this tells us something important about identity: the pixel on the screen cannot be the thing in itself, it is just a projection of the information. How could it be the thing itself, if it has to switch off and then switch on in a different location? It could just as easily stay illuminated in both spots at the same time, and if it did that then it would no longer be the same thing. The actual continuity exists only at the level of the information, what we see in the projection is simply an approximation of that information.

I can’t help but think something similar happens in real life. The reason we cannot explain the Zeno’s paradox, or even see movement at the quantum level, is that the reality of space and time around us is also a projection. There is no actual movement. It’s a projection of abstractions that exist in deeply encoded in our mindset.

Consider, also, causes. We suspect that all things have causes, and that the very requirement of this causation is that there is movement. The movement continues like momentum, passing on its energy onto the things it impacts, like dominos.

But none of that actually causes movement. It only goes so far, and then we find nothing out there actually moves at all.

The only thing that moves, is the mind.

So likewise, causes must be projections. They are synthesized when we inspect the origin of events, projected from our ruminations and analytical processes to the world around us. And we come up with explanations based on this false idea of movement and causal laws. And then we apply those explanations to create a further illusion of movement, and the process perpetuates until we totally convince ourselves this is how the world works.

The very idea that everything can be reduced to such causes is an unavoidable conclusion from materialism. What other explanation can there be for a thing to exist, than its causes? And those causes have their own causes, ad infinitum. Just like Zeno’s paradox, how can anything actually have any causes at all in this case? How can anything even exist?

Surely this is evidence that tells us that materialism must be false.

I can’t help but think this is precisely the error of “anatta” or “no self” in Buddhism, a thing they also call Dependent Origination. The very logic of materialism ultimately proves that nothing truly exists. This is how dangerous false thinking can be.

Before that grim realization sets in, what we are left with is a world we think self-governs according to physical laws, but is actually governed by our own mind’s analytical thirst, projecting an illusory reality - a dream world.

The idea that the world is moving on its own accord, governed by laws, is simply false and leads to the kind of nihilism that creates an actual living hell.

Realizing this, though, we can let go of this false idea. We can let go of this torturous reality where things appear to come and go, and where our very idea of mortality comes from. We can give up this illusory view of the world and embrace instead a world governed by dual-causation: both the material and the intimately meaningful.