musings on interesting ideas

We tend to think of events as happening in sequence. An event happens which causes another event which causes another. This may only be what is happening because we are traveling forwards in time and so have built up a whole way of thinking that makes this appear to be true.

What if all these events were happening simultaneously. If we were outside our normal experience of time then events would just seem to occur spontaneously. If this was true then by making an event happen in the future we would automatically have caused the events which were necessary (from a sequency point of view) to happen.

Arrows and Trees

Xeno’s (Zeno’s) Paradox (Sequency)

Xeno’s paradox brings out some of the difficulties in thinking in a sequential mode. An example is that of firing an arrow at a tree. Some time after the arrow is fired it will have reached a point half way between the bow and the tree. This will take a finite amount of time. The arrow must then get to a point where it has covered half of the remaining distance. Again this takes a finite amount of time. Xeno argued that you can continue this process infinitely i.e. 1/2,1/4,1/8,1/16,1/32 etc. Therefore the arrow takes an infinite number of finite (they may be small but they are still finite) amounts of time to reach the tree.

Xeno then argues that an infinite number of finite amounts of time must be an infinite amount of time, therefore the arrow never reaches the tree!

Our Experience (Simultaneity)

Have you ever had the feeling when throwing a stone at a rock, that you actually know that it is going to hit the rock? You may have experienced this feeling when playing a sport or in some other area of activity. It is as though the stone has already hit the rock.

If we could get that level of focus into other areas of our thinking wouldn’t that be useful? I think that dropping the whole idea of sequency would be very useful in many situations. If we could think in a simultaneity way things would become an awful lot easier.