Day 7. Time is crawling. I’m secretly writing this blog post behind my desk at work. If I can believe my officemates, this could be a fireable offense. Exaggeration? Maybe. I’ve heard some frustration this week, expressed in technicolor language. So, some people are tense, for some reason.
All in all, it’s not as bad as I was afraid it could have been. I think administrating a single application might drive me crazy sooner than I hoped, but I may have an out. Surprisingly, a few job opportunities popped up – secrecy is paramount – I have an interview for a systems support position with the University of Hawaii and the others are entry SE roles at Amazon. If somehow I get offers for both positions it’ll be a difficult decision, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. Speaking of crossing bridges….
Zeno explained his original paradox in terms of a race between Achilles, the greatest of Greek warriors, and a tortoise.
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Zeno’s Achilles-Tortoise paradox (the guy loved his paradoxes) can be illustrated as follows: you are standing at one end of a bridge and traverse halfway, and as you continue in this manner, traversing half of the remaining distance, you never reach the other side, even after making an infinite number of traversals. According to Aristotle’s axiom “That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.” How then can an individual cross an infinity of half-way points regardless of their size? An infinite number of 0.5mm is still infinite length, after all.
Well obviously, bridges are crossable, hence the paradox: It is possible cross an infinite number of non-zero length subsections in a finite amount of time. That’s a fun thought experiment, but when we bring physical reality into the mix, a flaw is obvious: At a certain point, the length of the half-way traversal will be smaller than Planck length which seems to be a physical impossibility in this universe. So, there’s a finite limit to smallness, and it turns out Zeno’s paradox is not actually a paradox in the physical universe, but in the metaphysical….
Zeno extrapolated this theory into an argumentative technique dubbed the Vicious Infinite Regress. Again, pushing the bridge analogy to its limits, a bridge can be thought of as a relationship between two ideal points A and B, but each point has its own relationship with the bridge. And that relationship has its own relationships with the already existing relationships, and on and on, ad nauseum.
According to the VIR, no two ideas can actually be related because there are an infinite number of relationships separating the original ideas.
Maybe this paradox can be resolved by accepting there’s a finite limit to the granularity of knowledge. Heisenberg would probably agree.
Anyway, I’ve escaped detection and time to get back to the grind. I’ve finally reached the half-way point of my workday. Only an infinity more to go.
