The Dao is a model of nature. Models of nature all represent, at their deepest level, underlying presuppositions about the structure of nature. Often, students of models of nature are not aware of the presuppositions on which they are based, and are often they are not even aware that such presuppositions exist.
Before investigating the Dao, let us examine a simple Western model of nature of the same age, which we can use for comparison and enhanced understanding.
One of the most important of the scientific models of nature that have been developed by Western society, and the earliest scientific model ever developed that remains tremendously useful today, is known as Euclidean geometry, or simply geometry. Many students learn geometry at school, and this is the first formal model of nature that is taught to students at school. However, there is no attempt to have students consider, or to even recognize that there exist, underlying fundamental presuppositions about the structure of nature that must be implicitly assumed to be true in order for geometry to have meaning. For the most part, the presuppositions of geometry that were first laid out some 2,300 years ago continue to this day to dominate scientific thought and the notion of the dimensions of space.
Let us begin by presenting an analysis of the fundamental presuppositions that underlie geometry, in order to make them explicit, for the purpose of enabling deeper understanding and to provide some preliminary insight into differences that we will discover between the models of geometry and the Dao.
Geometry has proven itself to be an extremely useful model of nature. It is not a useful assumption to consider that geometry is somehow “true,” because that is not meaningful or possible. Geometry is useful insofar as the structure of nature as exemplified by geometry appears to mirror the structure of the real world. By ignoring all of the obvious incompatibilities with the real world and focusing only on the commonalities, this model has proven itself so useful as to be the first model of nature taught to all students of math and science.
Students are taught that geometry provides simple and extremely useful relationships that we can manipulate in the mind that correlate in a very useful manner and to a very high degree with relationships that exist in nature.
The basic presuppositions of geometry are unconsciously accepted without question. In other words, at its most fundamental level, geometry relates to the world on the basis of a series of presuppositions about the structure of nature that are not subject to analysis or question, and that cannot be subject to analysis or question, from within the framework of geometry itself. Let us examine those presuppositions.
Presuppositions
Geometry is a relatively simple model, and is based on 3 fundamental presuppositions about the nature of the world:
1. The only component of nature is space.
2. Space exists in 3 dimensions.
3. In each dimension, space is infinite.