No man ever steps in the same river twice.<\/span> In ancient Greek Philosophy, Heraclitus is the philosopher of becoming<\/span>. His ideas are most clearly in contrast to those of Parmenides, the philosopher of being<\/span>. The conflict between them is in relation to \u201cultimate reality.\u201d For Heraclitus the seemingly static structures we encounter in life are unreal, merely our<\/span> projections of stability onto a reality of flux. (for an interesting site carrying on Heraclitus\u2019 notions into the quantum realm \u2013 click here<\/a>)<\/p>\n Parmenides was a younger contemporary of Heraclitus, and wrote in conscious opposition to him. He held that all which may be conceived was real, that anything inconceivable was unreal, and that change (anything moving from unreal to real) was impossible. All that could be is<\/span>, and that which is not, could not be<\/span>.<\/p>\n My first Buddhist<\/a> teacher told the story that if<\/span> the Buddha had encountered Heraclitus, he would have corrected him thus:<\/p>\n Not even the same man can step in the same river twice.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Emphasizing that we are in the flux just as much as the river.<\/p>\n Three of my projects this spring have revolved around this notion of flux. I have managed to find and am still trying to understand the implications of that flux within the three seemingly disparate realms of thought. In Sartre the flux arose toward the end of his \u201cBeing & Nothingness\u201d where he discusses strategies for modern man in the face of our self deceptive and self destructive society. He reminisces about Kierkegaard\u2019s use of irony<\/span> in the face of the Ultimate \u2013 you should realize how small and unimportant you really<\/span><\/span> are, and then resolve to laugh at that truth. Sartre\u2019s turn on this is to suggest a sort of playfulness in life in the face of a society deluded by it\u2019s own seriousness.<\/p>\n My interpretation of Sartre is that we ought<\/span> to make a project of our lives, a serious project, but to realize all the while that the nature of reality is play<\/span>. We build structures, our lives, etc on an ever-shifting foundation. Our mistake is that we forget that reality is shifty: the earth will swallow up our homes, people will make us change the way we see our lives. This doesn\u2019t mean we shouldn\u2019t build structures \u2013 developing a \u2018structure\u2019 of selfhood is inevitable \u2013 it just means that we must always recognize that what we build on is unstable. In that vein, Sartre would wholeheartedly agree with this:<\/p>\n Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.<\/span> \u2013 Heraclitus<\/p><\/blockquote>\n My other two projects are still in progress (laziness, illness, life, etc have all gotten in the way of their completion). The one I\u2019m working on currently is David Bohm\u2019s<\/a> interpretation of Quantum Physics<\/a> and its implications in philosophy\/metaphysics and morality. Briefly, the history goes as follows: Classical Physics (Newton \u2013> Einstein) took reality to be made up of particles in some form of ultimately determinate motion, and that those particles and their motion could be known. Thus, at least theoretically, we could get enough data and know the future. Further, all other fields of knowledge (chemistry, biology, psychology) work on levels that supervene on those particles and could ultimately be reduced (eliminated?) to physics.<\/p>\n Then came Quantum Mechanics (QM), which, through experimental evidence completely undermined the vision of reality clung to by Classical Physicists (Einstein famously refused to accept QM). But QM itself provides no vision of \u2018reality.\u2019 Thus, those working in QM have had to interpret<\/span> what QM means. There are several such interpretations<\/a>, but the \u201cCopenhagen<\/span>\u201d Interpretation is currently the leading one. In it, the notion that there even is<\/span> a reality in subatomic systems is denied. Well that\u2019s not exactly right \u2013 there is a reality there, but it is strictly probabilistic<\/span>, as opposed to the reality of our experience in which things are deterministic (my computer is<\/span> on this table \u2013 not 42%, not 98%, but 100% on the table<\/span>). In the Copenhagen there are two realities \u2013 <\/p>\n Nice. The problem is similar to that of all such hard dualisms \u2013 how do things magically get from one reality to the other? \u201cMeasurement\u201d is the answer given. But measurement is something people or our machines do. Are we to think that the universe existed as nothing but probabilistic wavefunctions before the evolution of conscious life? The problem can also be expressed in the famous Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat<\/a> thought experiment.
\u2013 Heraclitus<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
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<\/a>This is where David Bohm comes in. In 1951 he wrote the definitive text on Quantum Physics and then in 1952 he developed a powerful alternative to the \u201cCopenhagen\u201d interpretation of QM. In his theory the particle-nature of the world in Classical Physics is preserved, but it is simultaneously profoundly influenced by a wavefunction as the QM experiments show. Thus the reality of our world still exists at the subatomic level, there is no strange duality.<\/p>\n
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