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- Title
Continuity, Time, and Order.
- Authors
Weimer, Walter B.
- Abstract
Western intellectual history has embraced two incompatible metaphysical doctrines: first, the doctrine of atomism (as a representative of continuity, or the Great Chain of Being, or the Plenum universe) and equally, the doctrine of atomism (as the thesis of ultimate discontinuity of all existants). Our approach to understanding -- taking things to pieces to discern their essential parts and their workings -- is blatently contradictory, with the universe being continuously discontinuous (atoms as smallest bits) or vice versa (a continuously filled plenum). We have tacked between incompatible opposites. The second doctrinal opposition concerns time -- first the Greek view, as succession or endurance through events, then time as absolute in Newtonian mechanics. After the pendulum swing following quantum theory, all that remains of Newtonian absolutism is the hyphenation, from Einstein, of space-time, and a tendency to regard time-as-endurance as disposible -- solely observer relative, secondary or merely psychological, rather than ontological. Science sees time only as succession. Contemporary science finds no continuity in the universe, and time only appears as succession in relative inertial frames of observers. Thus the problem of the order of ourselves and the universe becomes more problematic (and a solution more necessary) than usually acknowledged -- especially with regard to the nervous system (cognition) and agency. Since order is existence, which is endurance in living systems, order must become a temporal rather than a spatial concept. Time is an absolute (absolutely necessary) only in the order of epistemology, not in the order of physical theory.
- Publication
Journal of Mind & Behavior, 2022, Vol 43, Issue 2, p119
- ISSN
0271-0137
- Publication type
Academic Journal