2.5.5 Similar Arguments
In his Science and Civilization in China, Sir Joseph Needham describes an ancient Chinese paradox from the surviving Mohist School of Names, book of logic, which states, in the archaic ancient Chinese script, “a one-foot stick, every day take away half of it, in a myriad ages it will not be exhausted.” Several other paradoxes from this philosophical school are known, but their modern interpretation is more speculative Needham (1959).
Similarly, at the end of his short book al-Durrat al-Bayda (“The White Pearl”; another symbolic name of the Single Monad), Ibn al-Arabi wonders how people do not so easily realize the delusion of motion and space. He says that everything that moves does not move in occupied space, thus the thing may not move into a new place until this new place is emptied in advance. So by simple logic, this false assumption would lead to the conclusion that the result of an action would occur before the action itself. This is in fact a supplementary paradox of motion that could be added to the preceding paradoxes of Zeno, and it is the same argument of Parmenides that movement is impossible because it requires moving into “void”. Therefore, for Ibn al-Arabi, as well as Parmenides and his follower Zeno, the phenomena of movement and change are simply recurring appearances of a changeless eternal reality.
More recently, some physicists discovered that the dynamical evolution of a quantum system can be hindered or inhibited through observation. This effect is usually called the “quantum Zeno effect” because it is strongly reminiscent of Zeno’s arrow paradox. In the field of verification and design of timed and hybrid systems, the system behavior is also called Zeno if it includes an infinite number of discrete steps in a finite amount of time.