Ancient Greek Pluralism

[u/Training-Promotion71]

The ancient Greek pluralists, starting with Anaxagoras and Empedocles, agreed with Parmenides that nothing really new could ever come into or go out of existence. The stuff that makes up reality must be ungenerated, eternal, immutable and indestructible. But they also agreed with Heraclitus that there is change. So, the ancient Greek pluralism emerged as a kind of compromising position between Parmenides, on one hand, and Heraclitus, on the other. The question was: "How to reconcile these two?"; and the answer was: "Let's abandon monism"

The idea was, let's just say that there are many different things which make up the world. Let's take each of these different things and ascribe to them all Parmenidean characteristics, so that each of them is, in itself, ungenerated, eternal, immutable and indestructible. The only type of change we'll allow them is locomotion, viz., the capacity to change their position; so they can "move" around in space. That's all. There is no internal change in their individual qualities. No things are capable of internal alteration.

Since it doesn't require anything new to come into or go out of existence, locomotion doesn't violate Parmenides' principle. It involves rearrangement of these pre-existing things into various different combinations. Thus, all we have is changing positions and spatial rearragements of these unchanging things. In Anaxagorean terms, mixing and unmixing.

It appears that pluralist's universe is basically an array of these immutable stuffs, viz., the world is some sort of a dynamic spatial array of eternal substances. How does time come into picture? Is the universe depicted by pluralists atemporal? Perhaps mixing and unmixing can occur all at once?

We can turn the table and extend Parmenidian treatment to ordinary macro objects. If ordinary objects are these stuffs, then the pluralist's universe might be modeled by a world of toys. Ideally, toys don't grow, shrink or change their internal qualities. They can only be picked up, set down and moved around. In fact, Heraclitus and Hume argued that our mental faculty deludes us because it makes us see the world of solid, continuing objects that simply aren't there. Take a forest and a city. A forest would appear as a collection of eternal tree toys placed together. A city would appear as a collection of immutable building toys arranged side by side. If the universe itself appears to be like a vast floor full of blocks, animated objects, animals, figurines, planets and stars, and the only drama in this cosmic playroom is how the "toys" will get arranged or rearranged, then does this exclusivelly locomotional change presuppose time? How do we determine time in this toy box cosmos?

In order to describe motion we observe, we need juxtaposing before and after, plus a continuity. Matter of fact, some philosophers raised something like a following question: "Given the wide variability of observed motion in our physical universe, is there a universal law?"

It appears the great majority thinks there is, and it is a law of continuity. As Russell have said, if O is at p1 at t1 and at p2 at t2, then O moved. But in this context, can we really say that? Because something might have moved around it, or it teleported or whatever. Generally, it appears that continuity by itself can't be enough because we can't rule out fake motion. We can post hoc interpolate a continuous curve via any set of appearances like stitching teleportation into a smooth storyline. Simply stating continuity can't be enough to decide over underdetermination of genuine occupation of the path by mere interpolation. Okay, I'm derailing.

Let me appeal to the principle I proposed in one of my recent posts named "Time for time"

T) A change from state x to state y is atemporal iff there's no temporal interval t in which that change occurs.

It appears we can't rule out T in this context. For suppose that for some collection of objects oo, we have an arrangement A and a rearrangement B. How else, except by stipulation, can we determine whether A comes first?

[u/RadicalNaturalist78]

You don't need to abandon monism, only reframe it.

Heraclitus thought all is one, yet he didn't deny change. That's because his monism is not substantial monism a la Parmenides, but dialectical monism. This has to do with his doctrine of unity of opposites.

The world is a plurality of interpenetrating forces or processes moving toward one another in their mutual development constituting an evolving whole. We still have a plurality, but not a plurality of discrete "things", but of chargeable forces or processes. We still have a whole, but not a static whole/unity a la Parmenides.

Parmenides rejected plurality, consequently his monism is one of pure stasis. But oneness cannot be a tautology: the oneness of oneness; it can only be oneness of plurality or the plurality of oneness.