/lit/ - Literature

>>11760097
The premise is wrong as you are are aware of. All of Zenos paradoxes are retarded

the only real paradoxes are recursive sentences, which is just a function of logic

>>11760097
it's like he's imagining the universe as a film, a sequence of frames. If at any given frame the arrows are static, then when does the motion actually happen?
The answer, of course, is that our reality isn't like a film. Time is continuous.

>>11760097
The path of "movement" the arrow follows can be split up into a sequence of still points. If we are to freeze-frame at any point during the arrow's travel time we get a motionless arrow.

>>11760130
>If we are to freeze-frame
>we get a motionless arrow.
i mean no shit lol

>>11760108
I mean yeah, I know that motion actually exists, Anon.

But the other paradoxes at least make sense - I can see why Zeno would argue that and an unsophisticated person would not be able to refute him.
But this? I don't get it.

It's kind of like humor. I wrote an MA thesis on humor and several of the prominent theories claim (in super oversimplified terms) that something is funny if it seems to make sense and not make sense at the same time. e.g. the joke:

>Exam question: name five African animals.
>Student answer: 3 lions and 2 giraffes

This joke would not be funny (or even interpreted as a joke) if the student's answer was correct (naming five different species), non-obviously wrong (naming an obscure species that isn't African but one might be mistaken that it is) or completely nonsensical ("half an apple"). It's only funny because it's pseudological - actually false but spuriously true.
Same with the paradoxes. They make you think because they obviously assault common sense but they are still seemingly correct.

>>11760124
>>11760130
Those formulations make more sense, thank you. But are they the same as
>in a place just its own size
?
Is it just some language quirk I don't understand? What does any of this have to do with size?

>>11760195
i think that humor is based off something more or less like what youre saying. something about subverting expectations, absurdity, but not just total randomness or irrationality.

And you arent misunderstanding anything Zeno is just completely arbitrarily associating the concept of something's relation to its environment in a given moment, and the concept of being at rest, which latter concept requires time to even make any sense, and the former one does not involve time.

>>11760185

>>11760218
>if we stop time then there is no time
bravo zeno

>>11760185
That's the paradox: at every point of the arrow's path it's still (in Zeno's terms: in its own position and nowhere else). So how does it move?

Of course it sounds silly to us: movement can only be measured between two points in time, and it observably happens, so Zeno's argument appears moot. But Zeno was part of the Parmenidean school of absolute monism. They thought there was an unchanging whole, so multiplicity and movement must be illusions, and that you can't trust common sense observations.

he didn't understand the concept of instantaneous velocity.

>>11760225
>movement can only be measured between two points in time
kind of true but this hasn't really been an issue since Newton's time because he showed how to meaningfully define velocity at a certain point (freeze frame if you like) in time

>>11760195
>What does any of this have to do with size?
think of a snail or some critter like that. it changes shape in order to move. So from one frame to the next it might have streched forward a little bit, and that would explain how motion is possible in frames, except, of course, the question then becomes when does the thing change shape? how can it be different shapes from one frame to the next?
Zeno is just crazy.

>>11760331
>it changes shape in order to move. So from one frame to the next it might have streched forward a little bit

I think size refers to the space the thing occupies not necessarily its shape. It should really be seen as the mass of the object and not its shape since mass remains constant even when shape changes.
And since air is fluid m = ρV applies, meaning the overall displacement(space occupied) is identically whether it moves/stretches or not it makes no difference to displacement, its existence alone displaces a constant volume that would not change without changing its mass which is a situational constant .

>>11760195
Would you mind giving a few sources that you used for you thesis

I've been interested in reading about humor as a concept for a long time and only have bergson in mind

at first I thought this sounded stupid because even if it is at 'rest' it still has an acting force on it and therefore movement but this isn't true since all external forces are reducible to internal stresses.

You could simply look at the arrow in terms of tensors, in this way the direction of any force applied cancels out since the stress vector and force vector will always act in opposite directions to each other, meaning you end up with just a general magnitude of stress on the arrow but no movement or direction

>>11760447
It was a pretty bad thesis honestly. I mostly just enrolled in a Master's program so that I could postpone becoming a wagecuck I have a job now and I hate it

Also it was not really in philosophy or literature, but rather in linguistics (with a bit of psychology thrown in).

Anyway, here are a few sources (copied haphazardly from my reference list, I didn't edit this to be 4chan-friendly):

McGraw, A. P. & C. Warren. 2014. Benign Violation Theory http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mcgrawp/pdf/mcgraw.warren.2014.pdf
Warren, C. & A. P. McGraw. 2015. Differentiating What Is Humorous From What Is Not. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000041
Raskin, V. 1985. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor
Attardo, S. & V. Raskin. 1991. Script Theory Revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model
Attardo, S. 2008. A Primer for the Linguistics of Humor. In V. Raskin, ed. 2008. The Primer of Humor Research
Oring, E. 2003. Engaging Humor
Oring, E. 2016. Joking Asides: The Theory, Analysis, and Aesthetics of Humor

>>11760130
>can be split up into a sequence of still points
Not really, no, because the human eye sees at 1000 FPS and that's just what we can see. The Planck length, consistent with gravity and the speed of light in a vacuum, is the smallest length unit possible, much smaller than even electrons, so if you shoot an arrow just a meter, the "frames" number is in the nonillions, or higher. You wouldn't be able to observe this due to the way time works, and if you froze time, the arrow would not drop because dropping it would involve the use of time, gravity, and motion, which would not exist in a time-frozen world.

>>11760223
kek zeno is a fucking hack

>>11760522

>>11760522
Thanks man, I'm also into semantics and linguistics so that fits the bill

>>11760195
Did you work with Koestler's definition in Act of Creation at all?

>>11760447
You might be interested in the Koestler. It's sort of an ideal type useful for categorising the many other theories that try to explain humour as (basically) the result of a category error that still "makes sense" in a different way as the other guy said. Koestler calls it bissociation I believe, the intersecting of two discursive/logical spaces, e.g., an unexpectedly "correct but wrong" answer to a question that reveals a context or interpretation the questioner hadn't anticipated.

For these reasons it is often related to work on metaphor as well, since metaphor obviously uses the relation of two semantically distinct entities/spaces, i.e., a form of bissociation.

>all these brainlets itt think they're smarter than Zeno, one of antiquities greatest thinkers
Your middle school physics classes don't really measure up as an answer, you know.

>>11760097
It has to do with phases, he's saying the inbetween of phases and the inbetweens of that are effectively infinite and so motion is impossible unless something is moving infinitely fast.

>>11760195
>>Exam question: name five African animals.
>>Student answer: 3 lions and 2 giraffes

>>11760195
That joke wasn't funny, so allow a man much qualified than me to explain humour to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTKedyQQkZQ

>>11764004
That was a good example of humour for the <90 IQ man.

>>11760225

Truth is so not in the absence of illusion but in spite of it. The moving arrow no more dissolves the Monad than the static one.

Just think of if it were frames of a video. Each frame is a picture where it is still.