A Whole Load of Nothing.

The conundrum I referred to a few posts ago. I daresay it’s well known enough, but it bears looking at. If you project a missile at a target, whatever point it reaches in its trajectory leaves a remaining distance still to be travelled. That remainder can always be sub-divided, and so the missile can never reach the target. 

But it does; or it might be truer to say that within our perception of reality it does. And that just might be the crux of the matter. If someone can give me the stock answer to this riddle, I would very glad to hear it. I can’t get further than a simple ‘rational’ conclusion, which is that the missile must reach a point at the end of its travel where the remaining distance is indivisible. But isn’t that a little absurd? Surely, anything that has substance – be it space, time or solid matter – can be divided. The only thing that can’t be divided is nothing. So does the missile cross a ‘nothing point’ at the end of its travel? In that case, why should there be only one ‘nothing point’ there? Surely, the whole length of the travel would have to be nothing but ‘nothing points.’ 

 

You come across the same problem when you try to define a ‘point’ on a solid surface, and yet every solid surface consists entirely of points. So should we conclude that space, time and all solid matter is just a whole load of nothing? Such a conclusion will sound nonsensical to most people, or at least in the realm of rarefied theory. It doesn’t to me, because it appears to rationalise one of the cornerstones of mystical philosophy; that we are but fragments of the universal consciousness trapped within an illusion. The only reason we don’t recognise the fact is because the mechanism we use for experiencing existence is the brain, which is part of the illusion and therefore incapable of seeing beyond it. 

 

That’s the view I favour at the moment. Tomorrow I might change my mind.