Author: Warren Tang

I write about linguistics and philosophy. I also write poetry and take photographs.

Stasis or Kinesis

Warren Tang

“The world is in a state of flux,” said Heraclitus. His contemporary Parmenides said the exact opposite – “everything is unitary and static”.

While it is easy to show that something that looks stable is in fact changing it is hard to show that it is not. One can say that both are illusions, only that one eventually does show itself to be the case (kinesis). Over time an object in rest gradually changes its form. What Parmenides was arguing for was that this was all an illusion and that really everything is the same. In other words, he was a kind of rationalist.

In some ways Christians are rationalists, that sense empirical data is imperfect and should be ignored.

Priority and preference is given to the thinking mind rather than to the physical reality. Rationalists will argue that all that is necessary is the mind and its reason.

But if that is the case why have we not evolved to be rid of sensory faculties. Clearly, the senses do matter, and it is to sense the changes in the environment, not its staticity. Stasis is a controlled look at all things. There is something abstract about stasis, it’s removal of movement of reality, like a photographic still or a painting of a scene.

One Consciousness 

Warren Tang

There is a belief that as long as there is one consciousness that exists in the world that the world will exist. So even if all corporeal life disappears from the universe there is still God to watch over it all. 

I am not so sure. 

To me, that amounts to cheating. It is not only deception but more importantly self-deception. The problem with self-deception, though, is that it is so good at it that you do not even notice that you are being deceived. And the concept of God does not help either. It only perpetuates and “substantiates” the self-deception. 

Human/Animal

Warren Tang

The advantage of being human is that we can group things easily by convenience of language. Take the word “human” for example. The term means us the single species of animal that is contrasted with all other animals. The opposite of human is “animal”. It also denotes us as different (when we are not) from other animals by putting everything into the container of “animal”.

This is how anthropocentric we are.

We must, at all times, be careful with and be aware of the nature of language. To think that language is natural and error-free is to not understand its nature. For it is wholly artificial, reliant upon the tools, the limited mechanics, we call the “body” that is available to us.

One system?

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The other day a fatal accident occurred on a highway in Japan where the car somehow skidded and launched itself into the air jumping the median strip and ramming into an oncoming bus. The all passengers on the bus, including the bus driver, survived. This is a prime example of our understanding of objects. Objects never occupy the same space as another object. Any attempt to do so will end in tragedy.

Objects “occupy” space in predictable manner. Something that I do not believe anyone has pointed out is that a point in space can either be space or object, never both. So in reality, an object in space and time are predictable. There is only one space and one time. There is no reverse. And there is no fast forward. Time is steady and predictable as well.

There is inherent stability and predictability to object, space and time. If this never changes, then can we conclude that object, space and time are one thing, or at least one system?

Space, object and time

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Space, object and time must be one complete system, for the existence of objects infers the existence of both space and time. Space, objects and time are not independent of each other.

It is possible to think (imagine) that they are separate “things”, just as we can think of the front and back of a piece of paper as discrete sides, but they are never separate from each other as such (even though with great skill, ingenuity and difficulty we can do it but they will always remain from the original one piece of paper).

space 

Warren Tang4 Comments

what is it
about you
(or rather
the lack of you)
that gives you
your quality?

is it the objects
that do not fill you
or is it
the march of time
so steady
that make you
what you are?

some people fear
your vast emptiness
but really
you are nothing
nothing
whatsoever

you should be
embraced, loved
if possible
for without you
i & everything else
would not exist

Space, time and perception

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There is no reason for space and time to cease to exist simply because of the end of perception. Any one birth or death does not change space/time. There being necessarily a time in which nothing sentient existed to perceive space/time must mean that perception of it does not define it.

Therefore, space/time is independent of perception.

mao

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it was inevitable
but only too soon
too young at thirty-four
the order was wrong
all too wrong
she left behind three
dear ones
(the world was a stage
and she adored them
through every fault
and every perfection
until the very end)
& thousands more
who knew her generosity
her kindness, her courage
people wanted to know
to connect with her
and she chose to connect
publicly
in the most modern of ways
that may have taken her away

The non-agreement of logic

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It is said that there is no agreement of the exact definition of logic. Considering that formal logic, symbolic logic and mathematical logic all have a different understanding of the sign, then, it would be difficult to come to any agreement.

The fact that in mathematical logic signs are joined in a numerical abstract relation divorced from reality it cannot be applied directly to it (although most people think it is the purest language). And symbolic logic tries to work with grammar, again abstract and different depending on the language.

The only real description of logic is therefore one which is based on the physical without being related to the signifier. We need to separate the signifier and signified in a meaningful logical way.