If we look, again, at the translations into English Prime, we see that no contradiction now exists at all, no "paradox," no "irrationality" in the universe. We also find that we have constrained ourselves to talk about what actually happened in spacetime, whereas in Standard English we allowed ourselves to talk about something that has never been observed in spacetime at all -- the "isness" or "whatness" or Aristotelian "essence" of the photon. (Niels Bohr's Complementarity Principle and Copenhagen Interpretation, the technical resolutions of the wave/particle duality within physics, amount to telling physicists to adopt "the spirit of E-Prime" without quite articulating E-Prime itself.)
The weakness of Aristotelian "isness" or "whatness" statements lies in their assumption of indwelling "thingness" -- the assumption that every "object" contains what the cynical German philosopher Max Stirner called "spooks." Thus in Moliere's famous joke, an ignorant doctor tries to impress some even more ignorant lay persons by "explaining" that opium makes us sleepy because it has a "sleep-inducing property" in it. By contrast a scientific or operational statement would define precisely how the structure of the opium molecule chemically bonds to specific receptor structures in the brain, describing actual events in the spacetime continuum.
In simpler words, the Aristotelian universe assumes an assembly of "things" with "essences" or "spooks" inside of them, where the modern scientific (or existentialist) universe assumes a network of structural relationships. (Look at the first two samples of Standard English and English Prime again, to see this distinction more clearly.)
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Topic: What I talk to myself about late at night. (Read 7737 times)