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Aristotle - Physics - Motion
Identifier
014997
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Functions of the universe 'execute' and in this they produce change. As each function executes it leaves a trail - a log of the change - perceptions.
Everything has this log.
It is the movement of this log, the continual changes that cause the expansion of the universe.
Potentiality is the master function - like the master of a software package, it does not execute. Actuality is the function as implemented on a physical thing and thus capable of being executed, like a copy of a software package on a computer.
Action/activity is fuelled by energy - spirit input
Everything belongs to one or more aggregates
When a function executes it must be in the right state, if it is in the right state it then executes and moves on a version.
There is a connection here with atoms, as it is the atoms that contain the functions
A description of the experience
Aristotle: Motion and its Place in Nature - Joe Sachs
Aristotle’s account of motion can be found in the Physics. By motion, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) understands any kind of change. He defines motion as the actuality of a potentiality. Initially, Aristotle's definition seems to involve a contradiction.
In order to adequately understand Aristotle's definition of motion it is necessary to understand what he means by actuality and potentiality. Aristotle uses the words energeia and entelechia interchangeably to describe a kind of action. A linguistic analysis shows that, by actuality, Aristotle means both energeia, which means being-at-work, and entelechia, which means being-at-an-end. These two words, although they have different meanings, function as synonyms in Aristotle's scheme. For Aristotle, to be a thing in the world is to be at work, to belong to a particular species, to act for an end and to form material into enduring organized wholes.
.... St. Thomas Aquinas was prepared to take these propositions seriously. St. Thomas observes that to say that something is in motion is just to say that it is both what it is already and something else that it is not yet. .........
In the Metaphysics, however, Aristotle draws a distinction between two kinds of potentiality. On the one hand, there are latent or inactive potentialities. On the other hand, there are active or at-work potentialities. Accordingly, every motion is a complex whole, an enduring unity which organizes distinct parts. Things have being to the extent that they are or are part of determinate wholes, so that to be means to be something, and change has being because it always is or is part of some determinate potentiality, at work and manifest in the world as change.