Logic versus Experience

The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno was a paradox-spinning machine. He used his considerable skills to prove counter-intuitive claims like “there is no such thing as motion.”  One of his most famous paradoxes has to do with Achilles (a speedy runner) attempting to overtake a tortoise (famously slow). The tortoise has been given a head start. To  reach the tortoise and then overtake it, Achilles must, first, cover half the distance to the tortoise. By then the animal, however

slowly, will have moved forward. Once again, Achilles has to arrive at the half-way point before reaching his competition. But this “get to the half-way point” pattern will never end.  There will always be yet another, and still another, half-way point. Conclusion: Achilles will never catch the tortoise, i.e. common sense is just appearance. There is a deeper level of reality, accessible via logic. It casts doubt on much common sense.

In the area of food this would translate into something like Brian Wansink’s famous never-emptying soup bowl.  Wansink’s conclusions are now suspect, but his experiments were attention-grabbing. The bottomless bowl involved hidden tubes that gradually refilled soup as it was being consumed.  In that case, Achilles (soup eater) would indeed never catch the tortoise (empty the bowl of its contents). All of it, though, was rooted in trickery.

Regardless of what Zeno could concoct in the realm of pure logic and Wansink in the realm of rigged experiments, good old lived experience leads us to believe that Achilles would sprint right past his challenger, and diners could empty a bowl of soup. Careful attention to detail can indicate why Wansink’s bowl is never emptied.  Careful attention to logic seems to support Zeno.

Still, in life, both logic and experience need to be balanced off each other. The logic of Zeno may be impeccable, but surely his conclusion is flawed.  

Zeno succumbed to a  pervasive philosophical temptation.  It involves two steps:. (1) substitute a mental grid for lived experience. (2) make that grid one of granularism.  In other words, substitute isolated units for the continuum that is life experience. For Zeno this meant thinking of time as a series of discrete points.

So prominent is Zeno’s legacy that we  automatically think that, of course, time is composed of separate, discrete

instants. But lived experience, if we will attend to it, suggests otherwise: not granular units, but events and spans, entangled fluxes of experience.  Temporality is inherently linked, as Aristotle long ago noted, to activities and events. In this characterization time is not a separate, neutral counter but is correlative with events. Baseball still treats time this way. It is the activities on the field, not a separate clock, that determines the time of a game.  Post-Einstein physics moves in a similar direction.  If we could move at the speed of light, it suggests, we would never age.

The Zeno grid assumes that a photograph captures something basic--an instant, a moment, a discrete unit.  Experientially, however, discrete moments do not exist. Photographs distort experience, creating a singular instant as if it existed separately. There is no frozen instant. Temporality is continuous. The present is the past flowing into the future.  

Traditionally, this sense of time as correlative with events was taken for granted.  One of the characters in Dickens´ A Tale of Two Cities says he is tired

because he has worked through “two tides.”  It is, as we know, possible to impose a granular grid, one disconnected from specific actions. Such a time might even be necessary in an industrial world, one where whistles and horns signal the beginning and end of work.  

Still, natural time persists.  All biological entities (and even geological ones)  are

beings in time. This means that temporality is measured by spans associated with activities. Examples: Achilles racing the turtle;  working through one or two tides; the era lived at a specific address; a birthday party; the trip to Morocco; the high school years. In each case, temporality and activity are intertwined.  Time is not artificially cut up into discrete units. It is characterized by courses of overlapping activities connected by some thematic ordering.

Zeno, his descendants, and our dependence on clocks  have left such a legacy that we hardly question the granular understanding of time.  It may have once been quite natural to speak of time in terms of tides. Today, that way of speaking, instead of balancing clock time, has been totally occluded.

It does not have to be so. Experience and logic can serve as mutual self-correctives.  After all, Zeno, no matter what were his intentions, has taught us an important lesson.  If we start with the assumptions of a granular take on things, we will land ourselves in impenetrable paradoxes.