Proving Parmenides

 2000 words, 8 minute read

“…What-is is ungenerated and imperishable…whole, single-limbed, steadfast, and complete; nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is now, all together, one, continuous…Thus coming-to-be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of…it is not right for what-is to be incomplete; for it is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything…Therefore, it must either be completely, or not at all.”

Parmenides’ epic poem, On Nature, is the oldest substantially extant text in all of Western philosophy; it dates from the middle of the 5^th century BCE. Before Parmenides, only bits and pieces survive.

In the fragment (#8) quoted above, the father of Western philosophy describes Being in the realm of Aletheia (truth, uncovered, revealed, Sanskrit = Brahman). But Parmenides goes on to describe what it is to exist in the alternate realm of Doxa (appearance, seeming, Sanskrit = Maya):

“To come to be and to perish, to be and not to be, to shift place and to exchange bright color…”

Earlier, in an often underappreciated fragment (#1), Parmenides described the relationship between the two realms: “It is right that you should learn all things, both the steadfast heart of persuasive truth (Aletheia) and the beliefs of mortals (Doxa)…how things that seem had to have genuine existence, permeating all things completely.”

Our stated preference for so-called ‘truth’ over ‘mere’ appearance has led almost all commentators to imagine that Parmenides was advocating Aletheia at the expense of Doxa. Clearly (#1 above), this was not Parmenides’ intent.

That said, Parmenides’ fundamental all or nothing proposition has proven controversial…highly controversial…until now. Advances in science and philosophy allow us to say now with confidence: Parmenides QED.

***

At about that time, but 1500 kilometers to the south, the Book of Job, including some of the oldest texts (2^nd millennium BCE) anywhere in the Bible, was getting its final makeover.

Aletheia Today has written extensively about Job ; mercifully, we will not repeat that here. Suffice to say, the epic ends with God and Job locked in furious debate over the process of creation and the nature of justice. Heady stuff!

Their debate introduces two astonishingly 20^th century ideas. First, Job contends that God must be subject to the same ethical imperatives as humans. God does not transcend the Law, God is the Law (Torah). He must exemplify the law (Whitehead) and cannot contravene the law. Amazing!

But God’s response is even more surprising. In his best imitation of a 1970s American hippie, God shouts, ‘Ecology! Ecology!’ at his accuser.  One can only imagine him waving a ‘little green book’ like the Maoist Cultural Revolutionaries of the 1960s.

Essentially, God argues that his ecological responsibilities take precedence over his duty to act justly. God’s argument is somewhat persuasive…at first; but later, under Job’s deft ‘no-cross cross’, God admits that his concern for the environment is at least in part a function of his subjective preferences. God reveals his vulnerable underbelly in a way that is not replicated anywhere in Judeo-Christian scripture, setting the stage for Job’s historic legal triumph.

Let’s listen in on God’s testimony:

“Who cleaves…a path for the thunderstorm to rain down on land without people…spreading grassy growth?

“Who endowed the ibis with wisdom and gave understanding to the cock?

“Who provides rations to ravens when their children cry out to El (an ancient name for God) as they wander without food?

“Who sends forth free the wild ass...who scorns the city’s clamor, hears not the cries of a driver?”

God cannot be overly concerned with the complaints of one individual when there is an entire Universe needing to be managed. Ingeniously, God turns the tables on Job: If you think it’s possible to do better, go ahead and try…but don’t hold me to a standard that you yourself are unable or unwilling to meet.

“If you have an arm as strong as El’s…look for the proud and lay him low and crush the wicked where they stand.”

But then God goes off the rails. He defends his ‘creative choices’, but he also confesses a personal attachment that undermines the objectivity of his argument. The balance of God’s testimony concerns two of his creatures, Behemoth (Hippopotamus) and Leviathan (Sea Monster).

“Behold Behemoth whom like you I created….Behold the strength of his loins, the power in his belly’s muscles…his bones like an iron rod.” And Leviathan?

"Of all that's under heaven, he is mine. I cannot keep silent about him, the fact of his incomparable valor…Even 'gods' live in fear of his majesty; they're in terror of the ruin he wreaks…He has no match on earth, who is made as fearless as he? …Over beasts of all kinds he is king." (41:43-26)

God’s ecologically motivated care for the Cosmos is laudable; his Nietzschean amorality, less so. God reveals a touch of Narcissism here. He is ‘crushing’ on his creatures.

Still, God has made an important point: the Cosmos is not a collection of creatures; it is creation itself, whole, entire, and of a piece. In order to sustain human life, it may be necessary to foster ‘grassy growth’ in uninhabited regions of the planet.

***

In his opening speech (3: 3 - 5), Job offers to remove himself from the equation: “May the day disappear, the day I was born, and the night that announced, ‘a man has been conceived’…let darkness expunge it.”

Job makes it clear to the ‘cosmic court’ that he is prepared to put at risk not just his present life and future prospects but his existence per se - past, present, and future, the whole enchilada, never to have been, never to become, never to be.

From Job’s perspective, we can divide the biosphere into organisms that live, lived or will live. But from the cosmic perspective this is a distinction without a difference. Presumably, everything comes to be, is, and then is not, so what’s the difference?

From the cosmic perspective, entities can be divided into two classes, those that ‘be’ (past, present orfuture) and those that ‘be not’ (past, present and future). The class of entities that do not experience being is a boundless, undifferentiated void: Bobby Kennedy’s ‘things that never were’…and never will be, Whitehead’s set of all unrealized propositions.

In a cosmic game of Texas Hold ‘em, Job has just gone all in on God. He has called God’s bluff. The whole universe is waiting for God to wipe out this annoying pipsqueak, but God double clutches, he cannot call. He doesn’t have the cards. In a stunning reversal of fortune, the creator of heaven and earth folds, and Job walks off with the entire pot (quite literally in this case).

***

Parmenides and the Job-poet faced the same problem, how to juxtapose becoming (and un-becoming) with being, and they came to the same conclusion: it can’t be done!

Being and becoming are not opposites. Being is Being, period, regardless of whether it is mortal, immortal, or eternal. Becoming and perishing are ‘accidents’ of Being; they describe the contingent experience of being but not its necessary essence.

This is where ordinary language trips us up. Properly speaking, the verb to be should only appear in the present tense, indicative mood. I mean, that makes sense, doesn’t it? What can you say about being? It is, or it is not, (0 or 1); anything else is a corruption. Was and will be, might and should be, are forms of to be highjacked to express not being.

(Of course, these pseudo-forms are extremely useful in everyday life, even if, like geometric forms, they don’t correspond to anything material.)

If something is, it cannot not be. It is, or it is not, period. You cannot meaningfully say, “It is and it is not.” If it is, it is, and if it’s not, it’s not.

Of course, from a subjective perspective within fluid spacetime, things are coming to be and ceasing to be all the time. But from an objective perspective beyond spacetime, they are…or they are not. 

***

“…Nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is now…Thus coming-to-be is extinguished and perishing not to be heard of.”

“…It is not lacking, but if it were, it would lack everything…It must either be completely, or not at all.”

What would it mean to expunge a quantum of being, any quantum of being, from the cosmos? To flip a bit from 1 to 0, from being to not being?

To be expunged is never to have been. An ‘expunged event’ never occurred; it never set in motion any of the falling chains of dominoes that intersect it. Every interaction of one quantum of being with another triggers waterfalls of dominoes in all different directions. It’s like a particle collision at CERN. Come to think of it, it is a particle collision (just not at CERN).

Every time one quantum of being (call it ‘A’) interacts with another quantum (‘B’), both are irrevocably altered by the event (entangled). If the interaction of A and B expunges B (so that it never existed), everything around

A changes too (It’s a Wonderful Life); and in almost no time (Six Degrees of Separation) the effects of that change have radiated out into every nook and cranny of the anthroposphere.

And not just prospectively. Presumably B was a node in many intersecting causal chains (e.g. X, Y, Z). If  X → B, Y → B  and  Z → B and if we allow A to preclude even the possibility of B, then our three causal chains (X, Y, Z) would need to disappear (also expunged) or be irrevocably altered.

In the first instance, it is easy to see that the annihilation would cascade through the universe at the speed of ‘the propagation of influences in the medium’ (e.g. the speed of light in a vacuum, c). 

In the second instance, where causal chains survive but in altered form, those alterations would cascade, inevitably annihilating certain entities in their path. Eventually, the process would run out of phase space, causal chains per se would vanish, and total annihilation would ensue.

Annihilation in the second instance would likely be orders of magnitude slower than in the first. But would we even notice the difference?

But total annihilation is impossible! The Universe exists, it is not a node on any causal chain, it cannot be annihilated, and since the Universe consists of its elements, those elements would be safe from annihilation as well. 

Are you getting the picture? It’s an all or nothing proposition!

To the extent that your physical being is an effect, prior states of affairs would need to be altered to eliminate that effect (i.e. you). If a particular chain of causes terminates organically (e.g. in natural death), that termination will have been part of the causal sequence itself. On the other hand, if the termination were ad hoc, then the causal chain itself would have to be rebuilt, retroactively, to eliminate you from the catalogue of its effects.

Effects are not optional. Causes are not capricious. It is a major fallacy to imagine that you can preclude a certain effect without thereby altering its causal chain…in both directions!

Therefore, every quantum of being is modified if just one quantum is modified. Every quantum is annihilated if just one… Adjusting for rate limitations on the propagation of influences, the effect of any local modification would be immediate and universal.

And if a single quantum of being were to be expunged? The Cosmic fabric would unravel and the universe as we know it would exist only as a pile of thread, now and forever: “Formless and empty with darkness over the abyss.”  (Gen 1: 2) “Therefore, it must either be completely or not at all.” QED