Problem of Change

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The problem of change was first raised by the Milesians as they speculated about the primary substance, then the chief problem in the inquiry concerning nature. They had taken it for granted that change occurs and that the world of sense-experience is not an illusion, but philosophers soon began questioning their understanding of the external world and whether or not they could trust their senses. The problem of change related to the question of the origins and fundamental ingredients of the world. Assuming we have determined what the fundamental ingredients of the world are, would they be changeable or unchangeable? If they are truly the fundamental ingredients of which everything is made, then they should be unchangeable. If change were possible with these fundamental ingredients, then we would have to assume that there was something even more fundamental, since ultimate reality must be unchangeable.

Greek philosophers who wanted to consider the issue of change had to come to terms with the arguments of Parmenides. Parmenides took a radical view of the foundations of knowledge and insisted that reason alone could be trusted, while the evidence of the senses should never be trusted, seeing that evidence as utterly unreliable and misleading. In his philosophical poem, Parmenides discussed what he calls the Way of Truth. According to the Way of Truth as he develops it, coming-to-be, passing-away, and change of any sort are all impossible. Zeno, a pupil of Parmenides

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rgued that change in form takes place betwen a pair of contraries, with one being the form to be achieved, and the other being its privation or absence: "Change, for Aristotle, is thus never open-ended, but confined to the narrow corridor connecting pairs of contrary qualities; order is thus discernible even in the midst of change." In modern science, the issue of what is real and what is observed in the physical world has resurfaced in observations at the subatomic level. Science has broken down the "fundamental" substances of nature far beyond what the Greeks could have envisioned, and we are still not certain we have broken matter down to its constituent elements as yet. There appears to be a breakdown at the subatomic level. Some actions seem to take place contrary to common sense about the relatinship between observation and reality, and some actions take place when they are observed and do not take place when they are not observed. Time and space also do not operate as we have come to think of them in our sensory experience. The issue of how the experimenter influences the outcome of the experiment simply by observing has been analyzed with reference to several different sciences and scientific disciplines, and it see
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Approximate Word count = 1474
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

Problem of Change

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