Barrington Bayley - The Zen Gun

7. Finally, the recessive hypothesis is the answer to the paradoxes of Zeno on the impossibility of motion. I will not repeat them here (for an illuminating discussion of them, see G.J. Whitrow’s The Natural Philosophy of Time ) but the three relevant paradoxes “prove” that (1) a fast runner cannot overtake a slow one, (2) an arrow cannot reach its target, and (3) the arrow can’t move at all anyway.

From the point of view of the recessive hypothesis, Zeno’s paradoxes aren’t paradoxes at all. They are demonstrations that what we see as motion is impossible. Therefore it must be something else.

What the arguments do is to destroy the concept of place: the idea that a physical object occupies a location in a receptive space and can move “through space” to another such location. In the recessive hypothesis space is purely relational; there is no “place” except where a physical body is. When such a body appears to “move” in relation to another, it is the space between them that is modified. The objects stay in the same “place” i.e., they simply remain themselves.

The same insight is admirably expressed in the zen aphorism: “Nothing moves; where would it go?”