Hi everyone, welcome to another entry of our Short Attention Span Reading Group
The Text
We will study On Contradiction by Mao.
It is divided into 6 sections (7 if we count the very short conclusion), none of them will take you more than 20min to read (most will take less) :).
I think this essay can be summarized by its first sentence
The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics.
And this is all it studies, starting to what is the difference between dialectics and metaphysics, the law of contradiction, what are contradictions, how are they defined, what are their different types, and so on. And of course what it means for Marxism.
The biggest question I am left with after reading this essay is the place of Nature in materialist dialectics...
Supplementary material
- On Practice by Mao Tse-tung. It is significantly shorter than On Contradiction, and they both go hand in hand.
Sure.
As for how, the first element of the ordered pair is a set of starting positions. The second element of the ordered pair is a set of ending positions. ({start_0, ...}, {end_0, ...}). The function is, of course, a set of these ordered pairs where each ordered pair's first element is unique in the set.
The X in your definition of function is the same set as Y: the set of sets of positions.
As for why, just to demonstrate that the statement was incorrect.
No, I mean actually do it for the above problem set up. With the actual numbers.
You mean to write the infinite set of ordered pairs of infinite sets? No, I can't quite do that, as it would take infinite time.
Not all of them, just a few of them. I think I know the solution you're couching in the abstract terms above, and I want you to explicitly lay it out so we can look at how absurd it is.
Let's say at t = 1, t = 1.5, and t = 3.
It doesn't quite matter how absurd it appears to you. What matters is that it fulfills the definition of function you said it didn't.
Sure it matters. I've already acknowledged you can shoe-horn the assertion into any system. But I've also pointed out that this makes the assertion meaningless.
So now I'm looking to see if you can provide me a kinematic example of a particle moving in R1 occupying two places at once, where the second point it's occupying isn't meaningless nonsense.
I don't care what you acknowledge. I can see that a function can take a set of positions and produce a set of positions, and that's good enough for me.
Times.