If one endorses the view that everything flows, an endpoint doesn't exist - everything is an in-between. — TheMadFool
What real world example of "something in between" being overlooked or trivialized provoked you to ask the question? — Gnomon
Actually, my view is BothAnd. Our world is both a Holistic System that works as a unit, and a swarm of Holons that work independently. The "holistic view" is top-down, while the "holon view" is bottom-up. The bottom-up view is basically that of reductive pragmatic Science, but the top-down view is more like a philosophical objective perspective from outside the universe. Perhaps, what Thomas Nagel called "The View From Nowhere".I don't see why 'continual progression' should be any more empirically established in the real world, whereas our digitized categorizations of reality is not. Why do you think so? — SaugB
Your original question may be motivated by a scientific desire to slice the "flow" of Change (cause & effect) into ever smaller increments. — Gnomon
It’s Saturday morning. Time for Banno to run around piddling on lampposts, marking his territory. — apokrisis
So, a similar question still stands: how does the nature of the flowing entity change from yellow flowing to orange flowing to finally red flowing in a given process? — SaugB
Maybe you are questioning how the human mind can analyze seemingly unbroken processes of change into smaller bits. Plato proposed the metaphor of "carving nature at its joints", but in practice, scientists have found those "joints" elusive (as in defining a species). Yet, if you are asking about a metaphysical issue, modern psychology should be able to shed some light on our tendency to divide ongoing processes into arbitrary "beginning, middle & end". Unfortunately, I'm not aware of studies that analyze "analysis". But you might find something on Google if you look beyond the first page.Basically, I am asking why there can be made at the very least three slices to any 'thing,' as this idea of becoming I have in mind seems to have it. — SaugB
Maybe you are questioning how the human mind can analyze seemingly unbroken processes of change into smaller bits. — Gnomon
I apologize for sliding into some irrelevance up there, but more will follow! Your point is a really interesting point, but how are the no sound point in a volume dial and the max sound point in a volume dial transit points? Are they rather not 'interior limits' to how soft/loud the sound can become? The sound becomes 12 dB loud, but does not go beyond, so it cannot be a transit point, and has to be the interior end point, as I see it. I was actually thinking of systems like that when I made my post.
If you say 'everything flows,' it is as if my loud song always already exists at 12dB and that that loud song is only a transit point in something getting louder. But before my turning the dial approaches that loudness of 12dB, my song at that loudness does not even exist, so how can it flow from there? I am a little suspicious that my example of sound here might not be scientifically founded, but I am asking philosophically. — SaugB
If your concern is more physical than metaphysical, then you might profit from reading Into The Cool, by Dorian Sagan. It analyzes how the natural laws of Thermodynamics cause all change in the world. On the macro scale, Energy Flow seems to be continuous, but in our imagination we can zoom-in to look at smaller & smaller pieces of that fluid process. At the very bottom limit of our mechanically-assisted perception though, that flowing stream of causation begins to break-down into the physical bits we call "quanta". At that point, philosophers will ask if reality is inherently continuous or discontinuous. This may sound disingenuous, but I think it's BothAnd. — Gnomon
In sum, if nature was continuous, or a flow, I would have gotten the sense of its continuity even if I observed it now, and then ten years from now, and then twenty years from now, if continuity was really its independent nature. — SaugB
As you suggest, the mind perceives that physical objects can be broken-down into smaller pieces, and then it conceives (in imagination) that metaphysical processes can be analyzed likewise. Processes (the flow of time) are indeed natural, but they don't have obvious "joints" to guide our cutting. So, we slice & dice them as desired.I think the human mind does not just "analyze" unbroken processes of change into smaller bits, because the eyes can actually 'see' reality [or nature: I use reality and nature interchangeably, if you don't mind] as broken into smaller bits. . . . Your denial of joints in reality/nature has not denied the joints for the eyes, as I see it. — SaugB
Beginning, Middle & End and Past, Present, & Future are human concepts, not natural increments. Are you thinking otherwise? — Gnomon
I don't know that there is any authoritative answer to your interesting question. But in my own imagination, I can speculate. First, there is a significant difference between Reality and Ideality. Reality is limited by the laws of nature, while Ideality is limited only by the loose constraints of imagination in a physical body that evolved as an adaptation to physical laws. The human mind has gone way beyond the pragmatic limitations of the physical brain. So, it can create mental models of things that "never were" but could be. Human culture --- architecture, language, technology, etc --- has broken loose from the constraints of Nature, in part by imagining Super-Nature : something better, more ideal. In other words, we are free to create un-real ideas (Utopias, Gods, Virgin Birth, etc), and then to vainly pursue them in reality. Hence, it's possible to analyze wholes into any number of parts, because humans can "see" things that are not there --- in imagination, we have X-ray vision. But, our flights of fancy remain "plausible" to the extent that we can convince others to see them too.My question is, how is it possible to conduct and operate with quite plausible analysis of that hallucinated river using concepts of Beginning, Middle and End, regardless of the truth that any river is not in fact broken into such steps? — SaugB
One can only go so far as to assume for the sake of some function one wants to do that the discrete marks are not relevant, but they are never any less real, in my example. — SaugB
So rather than focus on the apparent contradiction, appreciate the fundamental mutuality of the metaphysical dichotomy which is the discrete~continuous. — apokrisis
So, in a sense, whichever block of water that comes 'there' becomes discrete because that gap has an origin and a 'history' of discreteness. — SaugB
It's interesting that you say that the continuous and discrete measure each other though — Gregory
↪Gregory
But maths treats infinity as a "discrete" whole. You have infinities of many different "sizes". — apokrisis
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