Chance meetings. They can unite people for a moment or for a lifetime. You can search your memory for them: How did you meet your significant other, for example? How did you meet a person you now think of as a friend? In your memory search, you’ll also note the influence of those chance meetings.They were points of departure for, as the sci-fi writers like to say, your current timeline. At the unmarked intersection of your road with another, you collided with someone, and the resultant vector of life is the one you are now on. Didn’t Robert Frost write a poem about this, something about a “road not taken”? Yours is the “road taken,” or the vector forced on both by that meeting.
Achilles Shoots an Arrow at a Tortoise
Remember Zeno’s paradoxes? There’s the famous one that keeps Achilles from catching a tortoise because any distance can be divided by half multiple times, making moving from point A to point B impossible (1/2; half of that is 1/4; then 1/8; 1/16; 1/32…) and the other famous paradox that stills an arrow in flight as it occupies specific spaces moment by moment. I think there’s a connection here with the chance meetings of your life—and mine. You were moving (maybe), but that chance meeting is frozen in memory and (maybe) in time.
A Life in Superposition
Chance meetings illustrate our dual perspectives that seem to lie in superposition. We see ourselves in moments and in continuations. So, life appears to be an uninterrupted continuation or it appears to be a series of discrete episodes loosely connected because they occur in the channel of your life. You were, for example, a third-grader, a high school student, a graduate, all separate yet somehow linked, discrete, yet continuous, the same person, yet different in isolated moments over a lifetime. You are that third-grader; you aren’t that third-grader. Those who have known you since third grade see you as a continuation. Those who meet you now do not see the third-grader in you.
Stopping in the Middle of Movement
Somehow the flow stops. On a shallow rocky stream in the mountains years ago, one of my children and I put our small rubber boat into the water and paddled across the flow to where a pool of glassy water exhibited no movement—in the middle of the stream! The quiet water had been isolated between two turbulent flows, water in the turbulence churned as the Bernoulli principle manifested itself in narrow channels between the coarse sandstone boulders and in the eroded stream’s bedrock. We remained stationary between two such flows; no effort was required to keep the little boat on the placid water. After sitting there for awhile in still water discussing the physics of flow, we paddled into the more turbulent water to cross to the bank. We’re humans, modern humans; that made us impatient with the stillness. The rest of the family, waving to us from the bank, was ready for a picnic lunch. Time pressed us to move through space. We reached the channel’s side and pulled the boat onto the bank. It might have been a better tale if one of us bore the name Achilles. I could then have written, “Achilles actually crossed the river and reached the other side.”
Illusion vs Reality
We live lives of illusions and realities, and the problem in knowing which is which lies in part in what Zeno said about distance and time. We know that whenever we stopped in a chance meeting, we also continued, just continued on a different vector. We think of the stop that lay in superposition to life’s flow. Strange. Did we actually “stop”?
Is space continuous or discontinuous? Big question. Arguments on both sides have been both convincing and unconvincing. Planck’s minimum length of 10^-35 m and his minimum time of 10^-43 throws quantum physics on the side of discontinuity, at least on the subatomic scale. On the macro scale we just don’t see the divisions as we walk from point A to B, with both space and time seeming rather continuous. We know we can reach B from A; we’ve done it many times, and during no drive to the grocery store do we envision half after half after half with the bread, milk, and eggs never quite within reach. The moving car continues to move and even pass slower moving tortoise cars, you know, the ones driven by the guys in the short-brimmed fedoras who use turn signals as they round every curve. Our movement stops only where intersections in our journey are the actual intersections where stop signs and traffic lights command blind obedience to traffic laws—at least when the cops aren’t looking. Disobedience to the laws of interrupted space there could result in an unpleasant fender bender or even fatal chance meeting with cross traffic.
Time, too? Both illusion and reality. Haven’t we all experienced interruptions in time as we stop going where we’re going, maybe during a trip to the beach, our stopping along the way for an overnighter in a motel before we resume. Yet, we perceive that the journey lies before us and that we could easily do without the rest if we so desired, traveling uninterrupted for hours, the travel time never stops even during the motel stay. As passengers in the car, we stare into the distance down the road or off into wide fields making us stop as we move. Even a daydream interrupts the reality—if it is reality—of time’s flow. Tick, tick, tick…
Zeno’s Dilemma Is Your Dilemma
Zeno followed Parmenides, the older of the two philosophers and the guy seemingly stuck on unity and Wholeness and immovability, who wrote, “Nor is it [Being] divisible, since it is all alike, and there is no more of it in one place than in another, to hinder it from holding together, nor less of it, but everything is full of what is. Wherefore it [Being] is wholly continuous; for what is, is in contact with what is” [translated by John Burnet]. Surely, Zeno, in spite of his teacher’s teachings, had had chance meetings, brief encounters, stops along the way of life that made him wonder what truth lies in Parmenides’ statement that “all is one.” Doesn’t that apparently moving arrow occupy a particular space at a particular time?
Can you understand the reason for Zeno’s paradoxes? His teacher taught that movement is an illusion and that Being is One; Zeno divided it into an infinite number of moments and spaces. Thanks to Calculus, we know that an infinite number of steps can produce a finite answer, the many divisions leading to continuity. Thanks to experience, we know that we can drive to the grocery store and catch and pass a turtle-driver. Head spinning? Mine is because I’m writing two topics: 1) The question of continuity in the physical universe and 2) The question of continuity in the life of conscious finite beings, each obsessed with defining Self or Identity.
Saccades
Is life-continuity an illusion? I think of the stops our eyes make as we read. That we do not scan a line smoothly is demonstrable by watching closely the eyes of a reader. The hesitant little jumps, or saccades, reveal that smooth scanning isn’t smooth; it’s jerky. It’s a discrete jumping from word to word or from units of words to adjacent units of words. Seems that we live with many such perceptions of smooth and uninterrupted processes that are, in fact, not smooth but interrupted. Smooth scanning is an illusion from the inside perspective of the Self; saccades are the reality from an outside perspective of another Self.
We can act in our macro world as though continuity ties actions together into a unit, the steps in the park become a unified “walk” whose discrete units an Apple watch or Fitbit enumerates and also records as “a mile” or “two miles.” That larger measurement is a coalescence of all the component steps.
Another way of looking at the continuity of life can be found in the writings of John Updike. Sorry to say that it’s been a couple of decades since I read his Self-Consciousness, and I lost my copy. I believe that it was in that book that Updike speaks of life in the metaphor of wave function and particle. Being the same person you were as that third-grader makes you a wave (or maybe even a “field”), but being a third-grader and then an adult makes you a particle, the wave function having collapsed into the past discrete younger you and the present discrete older you. As a “particle” you embody a collapse at every interruption to the flow of life; as a “wave” or “field,” you embody a Self. And that Self is continuous.
Every chance meeting or every chance interruption is also a “collapse to a particle.” You can remember those specific moments that are significant. The other, not so significant episodes or events are a continuous blur. Are you getting the picture here? Like the dichotomous nature of light and electron, your nature is dual, comprising wave and particle, smoothness and jerkiness superposed, continuous and discontinuous simultaneously.
The Simple Takeaway
Most of us are given to self-definition. Our egos demand it because self-definition engenders a sense of security. How we define ourselves depends on our perspective. Do we see ourselves in discrete moments in space and time or as a continuation of Self? Multiple Selves or One Self?
And if we choose at times to see our Selves stopped in moments of chance meetings, do we acknowledge a “defining moment” or “defining place,” or even “defining event”?
Do we define or identify Self as a collection of Selves? Or does Self override and unify Selves as though we are immovable Being that encompasses particle selves and unites them all regardless of our perceptions of an episodic existence? Are both perceptions—wholeness or discreteness—simultaneously true even as they contradict one another? Is life merely a matter of observations made after the fact, like discovering that light or electrons can be waves or particles through the act of observation or that apparent smoothness is really a series of jerky saccades?
I guess that isn’t really a simple takeaway, is it?
Achilles Shoots an Arrow at a Tortoise
Remember Zeno’s paradoxes? There’s the famous one that keeps Achilles from catching a tortoise because any distance can be divided by half multiple times, making moving from point A to point B impossible (1/2; half of that is 1/4; then 1/8; 1/16; 1/32…) and the other famous paradox that stills an arrow in flight as it occupies specific spaces moment by moment. I think there’s a connection here with the chance meetings of your life—and mine. You were moving (maybe), but that chance meeting is frozen in memory and (maybe) in time.
A Life in Superposition
Chance meetings illustrate our dual perspectives that seem to lie in superposition. We see ourselves in moments and in continuations. So, life appears to be an uninterrupted continuation or it appears to be a series of discrete episodes loosely connected because they occur in the channel of your life. You were, for example, a third-grader, a high school student, a graduate, all separate yet somehow linked, discrete, yet continuous, the same person, yet different in isolated moments over a lifetime. You are that third-grader; you aren’t that third-grader. Those who have known you since third grade see you as a continuation. Those who meet you now do not see the third-grader in you.
Stopping in the Middle of Movement
Somehow the flow stops. On a shallow rocky stream in the mountains years ago, one of my children and I put our small rubber boat into the water and paddled across the flow to where a pool of glassy water exhibited no movement—in the middle of the stream! The quiet water had been isolated between two turbulent flows, water in the turbulence churned as the Bernoulli principle manifested itself in narrow channels between the coarse sandstone boulders and in the eroded stream’s bedrock. We remained stationary between two such flows; no effort was required to keep the little boat on the placid water. After sitting there for awhile in still water discussing the physics of flow, we paddled into the more turbulent water to cross to the bank. We’re humans, modern humans; that made us impatient with the stillness. The rest of the family, waving to us from the bank, was ready for a picnic lunch. Time pressed us to move through space. We reached the channel’s side and pulled the boat onto the bank. It might have been a better tale if one of us bore the name Achilles. I could then have written, “Achilles actually crossed the river and reached the other side.”
Illusion vs Reality
We live lives of illusions and realities, and the problem in knowing which is which lies in part in what Zeno said about distance and time. We know that whenever we stopped in a chance meeting, we also continued, just continued on a different vector. We think of the stop that lay in superposition to life’s flow. Strange. Did we actually “stop”?
Is space continuous or discontinuous? Big question. Arguments on both sides have been both convincing and unconvincing. Planck’s minimum length of 10^-35 m and his minimum time of 10^-43 throws quantum physics on the side of discontinuity, at least on the subatomic scale. On the macro scale we just don’t see the divisions as we walk from point A to B, with both space and time seeming rather continuous. We know we can reach B from A; we’ve done it many times, and during no drive to the grocery store do we envision half after half after half with the bread, milk, and eggs never quite within reach. The moving car continues to move and even pass slower moving tortoise cars, you know, the ones driven by the guys in the short-brimmed fedoras who use turn signals as they round every curve. Our movement stops only where intersections in our journey are the actual intersections where stop signs and traffic lights command blind obedience to traffic laws—at least when the cops aren’t looking. Disobedience to the laws of interrupted space there could result in an unpleasant fender bender or even fatal chance meeting with cross traffic.
Time, too? Both illusion and reality. Haven’t we all experienced interruptions in time as we stop going where we’re going, maybe during a trip to the beach, our stopping along the way for an overnighter in a motel before we resume. Yet, we perceive that the journey lies before us and that we could easily do without the rest if we so desired, traveling uninterrupted for hours, the travel time never stops even during the motel stay. As passengers in the car, we stare into the distance down the road or off into wide fields making us stop as we move. Even a daydream interrupts the reality—if it is reality—of time’s flow. Tick, tick, tick…
Zeno’s Dilemma Is Your Dilemma
Zeno followed Parmenides, the older of the two philosophers and the guy seemingly stuck on unity and Wholeness and immovability, who wrote, “Nor is it [Being] divisible, since it is all alike, and there is no more of it in one place than in another, to hinder it from holding together, nor less of it, but everything is full of what is. Wherefore it [Being] is wholly continuous; for what is, is in contact with what is” [translated by John Burnet]. Surely, Zeno, in spite of his teacher’s teachings, had had chance meetings, brief encounters, stops along the way of life that made him wonder what truth lies in Parmenides’ statement that “all is one.” Doesn’t that apparently moving arrow occupy a particular space at a particular time?
Can you understand the reason for Zeno’s paradoxes? His teacher taught that movement is an illusion and that Being is One; Zeno divided it into an infinite number of moments and spaces. Thanks to Calculus, we know that an infinite number of steps can produce a finite answer, the many divisions leading to continuity. Thanks to experience, we know that we can drive to the grocery store and catch and pass a turtle-driver. Head spinning? Mine is because I’m writing two topics: 1) The question of continuity in the physical universe and 2) The question of continuity in the life of conscious finite beings, each obsessed with defining Self or Identity.
Saccades
Is life-continuity an illusion? I think of the stops our eyes make as we read. That we do not scan a line smoothly is demonstrable by watching closely the eyes of a reader. The hesitant little jumps, or saccades, reveal that smooth scanning isn’t smooth; it’s jerky. It’s a discrete jumping from word to word or from units of words to adjacent units of words. Seems that we live with many such perceptions of smooth and uninterrupted processes that are, in fact, not smooth but interrupted. Smooth scanning is an illusion from the inside perspective of the Self; saccades are the reality from an outside perspective of another Self.
We can act in our macro world as though continuity ties actions together into a unit, the steps in the park become a unified “walk” whose discrete units an Apple watch or Fitbit enumerates and also records as “a mile” or “two miles.” That larger measurement is a coalescence of all the component steps.
Another way of looking at the continuity of life can be found in the writings of John Updike. Sorry to say that it’s been a couple of decades since I read his Self-Consciousness, and I lost my copy. I believe that it was in that book that Updike speaks of life in the metaphor of wave function and particle. Being the same person you were as that third-grader makes you a wave (or maybe even a “field”), but being a third-grader and then an adult makes you a particle, the wave function having collapsed into the past discrete younger you and the present discrete older you. As a “particle” you embody a collapse at every interruption to the flow of life; as a “wave” or “field,” you embody a Self. And that Self is continuous.
Every chance meeting or every chance interruption is also a “collapse to a particle.” You can remember those specific moments that are significant. The other, not so significant episodes or events are a continuous blur. Are you getting the picture here? Like the dichotomous nature of light and electron, your nature is dual, comprising wave and particle, smoothness and jerkiness superposed, continuous and discontinuous simultaneously.
The Simple Takeaway
Most of us are given to self-definition. Our egos demand it because self-definition engenders a sense of security. How we define ourselves depends on our perspective. Do we see ourselves in discrete moments in space and time or as a continuation of Self? Multiple Selves or One Self?
And if we choose at times to see our Selves stopped in moments of chance meetings, do we acknowledge a “defining moment” or “defining place,” or even “defining event”?
Do we define or identify Self as a collection of Selves? Or does Self override and unify Selves as though we are immovable Being that encompasses particle selves and unites them all regardless of our perceptions of an episodic existence? Are both perceptions—wholeness or discreteness—simultaneously true even as they contradict one another? Is life merely a matter of observations made after the fact, like discovering that light or electrons can be waves or particles through the act of observation or that apparent smoothness is really a series of jerky saccades?
I guess that isn’t really a simple takeaway, is it?
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