Imagine an arrow shot from a bow travelling directly towards a tree. It is ten meters away, travelling fast. Then it is five meters, two meters, one meter. Now it is really close, just a centimetre or so. Now it is a millimetre, half a millimetre, and half that again. Wait just a minute, if at every point of its trajectory it travels half the distance it previously was, how can it ever arrive at the tree? The distances would just divide themselves infinitely, without the arrow arriving.
This is Xeno´s paradox, and it demonstrates an interesting point. The explanation to this paradox is that the arrow never was at any of these points. To the person experiencing the arrows flight towards the tree, it traveled the distance in one complete movement. It is only when we look back and analyse its flight that we imagine actually being at these different positions.
What am I getting at here? Well, a simple point – simple, but by no means trivial. We experience the world differently from how we reconstruct it. In fact, was one to develop this idea it actually points towards two fundamentally different ways that humans can correlate with the world – one qualitative and one quantitative. However, this paradox will have to suffice for todays post.
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