溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
If Being Has No Coming-to-Be or Passing-Away, Is Time an Illusion?
If what truly is does not change, is flowing, passing time real, or only appearance?
It never was nor will be, since it is now, all together, one.
Parmenides's bold claim that "change is illusion" collided head-on with Heraclitus's flux, raising the two pillars of Western metaphysics. His pupil Zeno defended him with the paradoxes of arrow and tortoise, showing motion rationally impossible. Remarkably, this ancient question revives in modern physics in an unforeseen way — some physicists hold that the flow of time is not fundamental reality but only an impression our consciousness makes, and that the universe is one "block" where past, present, and future are laid out all together. Whether time truly flows, Parmenides's question, is debated at the frontier of physics twenty-five centuries later.
The question of whether time truly flows or only feels so to our minds remains unresolved even now, where science has dug deepest.
Parmenides drives reason to its limit.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Parmenides drives reason to its limit. What is, is; what is not, is not. Then coming-to-be — a not-being becoming a being — is impossible, and so is passing-away. What truly is has no past nor future but is wholly, all together, "now." The flow of time, then, is an appearance the senses fabricate. I cannot accept the extreme conclusion in full. But that visible flux and the permanence reason demands can diverge so far, I meet again before this ancient fragment.
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