Stephen Paul King (stephenk1@home.com)
Wed, 01 Dec 1999 13:39:23 -0500
Dear Prof. Matsuno,
Please forgive the tardiness of my response to this kind post. :-)
koichiro matsuno/7129 wrote:
>
> Dear Stephen and All:
>
> On Fri, 19 Nov 1999 01:30:45 -0500 Stephen Paul King
> <stephenk1@home.com> wrote:
[SPK]
> >By the way, are
> >you familiar with the work of Howard Pattee?
> >(http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~rocha/pattee/)
[KM]
> I think I have been pretty familiar with what Pattee has written.
> His linguistic-dynamic complementarity is quite ontological despite
> its outlook of being merely a matter of epistemology.
I understand. It seems inevitable that the specialization of scholars
narrows their focus...
[KM]
> >> To define something indefinite definitely is a funny endeavor, but
> >> let me give it a try. The present progressive is about an agency of
> >> making distinctions in progress, and any material body is such an agency.
[SPK]
> >Could we go so far as using this statement as a formal theorem? It is
> >interesting in that it focuses on the capacity of "making distinctions
> >in progress" as a fundamental property of material bodies. The notion of
> >Local Systems (LS) as clocking agents follows a very similar vein. :-)
[KM]
> You are right. I wish I could do this by myself.
Do you have any references that would bolster this line of thinking? It
seems that one of the requirements of acceptance of a notion is the
weight of the persons that support it. This seems to follow from the
idea that in a concrete sense, the truth value or weight of a
representation is given by the number of observers that concur, e.g.
have a similar (within their epsilon of error) representation.
[SPK]
> >The relationship between the finiteness of an observers spatial and
> >temporal horizons and its ability to make distinctions is, I agree, very
> >important! I have been thinking of the computational "simulation"
> >capacities of a LS as being a measure of this finiteness toward the
> >goal of a "bisimulational model of LS interaction.
[KM]
> Reading others and adjusting itself to the others on the part of any
> clock are sequential but insepararable.
In your thinking is this property of sequence defined by the reading
and adjusting fundamental? I see it as a fundamental aspect of
observation. This follows from the idea that "clocking" is fundamental.
Perhaps, we need to work out a semantic for thinking and communicating
about "clocking".
To try to start this, I propose the concept of "mapping" used widely in
mathematics. It seems to imply an identification of objects, concrete or
abstract -spanning the gamut, that are distinguishable in some sense,
yet have some commonality that can be used for the purpose of the
identification. Umm, it seems that we also need to understand how to
groups objects, viz. how to subjectivize or relativize the concepts of
set and class so that they are not assumed to be fixed absolute
universals. I see attempts toward this in tense and modal logics, but
these seems to fail in ways that are overcome in non-well founded set
theory (AFA), but the difficult and abstract nature of the texts on AFA
seems to cause a problem for our folks... :-(
[SPK]
> >We might consider this metaphorically as being a measure of how much
> >can be "held consistent simultaneously". I think that we could agree
> >that the complement of migrating inconsistencies is a moving locus of
> >consistency.
[KM]
> Exactly.
So could we construct a formal way of representing this idea, perhaps a
matrix-like representation. In fact I see the various formalisms that
are used in QM as a way of doing this, what is lacking in them is a
coherent explanation or understanding of the limitations inherent in
observation, e.g. infinite observers are not allowable! The idea of
thinking of sequences of observations as defining a "moving locus of
consistency" seems to marry the idea of time with set theoretical
primitives that may give us a toolbox with which to build a geometry!
:-) I am thinking that the idea of "space-time" should be derived from
such a methodology, instead of merely assuming an a priori and "for
free" constructed space-time!
[SPK]
> >The idea of selectively applying the principle of the excluded middle
> >(PEM) reminds me of my silly idea of constructing a set theory that is
> >analogous to Riemannian geometry, the latter has a variable local
> >geometry while the former would have a variable membership and/or
> >subsethood...
{[KM]
> I could see some of your sense. The real problem is how to implement
> it.
Yes, this is the most difficult part, and we must be up to the
challenge. I believe that we could accomplish this iff we remember the
importance of the result! :-)
[SPK]
> >The way that records "freeze" consistencies, I believe, is important to
> >note. But we should also note that the material in which the consistent
> >record of distinctions is "engraved" is by no means eternal, it to
> >degrades in the thermodynamic sense...
[KM]
> The material in the product is the record or memory allowing
> constant overwriting upon it. It is not a ROM. In contrast, the material
> body in progress is the carrier of moving inconsistencies. What is
> specific to such a material body is that it can remain passively
> immobile even momentarily until its inevitable next updating. Because of
> this temporary tranquility, can one expect to associate the tranquility
> with a representation of such a material body. If there is no duration of
> tranquility between successive updating, there would be no likelihood of
> having a material body serving also as a representation. Quarks could
> have been a proper representation of the materials available right after
> the Big Bang, while protein molecules must be a trustworthy
> representation of the mateirials currently available in the biosphere on
> the planet Earth. Any reliable material body is quite competent in
> enclosing inside itself the migrating inconsistencies almost completely
> but, of course, not quite. Those inconsistencies being squeezed out of
> such a material body now serves as a means of implementing interactions
> with the similar material bodies in the neighborhood in a bottom-up
> manner.
Umm, I think that we need to look carefully at the necessity that "a
material body is that it can remain passively immobile even momentarily
until its inevitable next updating". This reminds me of the notion that
there is a non-zero duration involved in the reaction recordable in a
system given a perturbation, e.g. the reaction to an action is not
instantaneous, as is implied in Newton's model of the world. This
connect us to the finiteness of the "speed of light" and limits on
computation.
Perhaps the key is the amount of closure that a material body can
"squeeze out" inconsistencies. This notion reminds me of the ideas
involved in the compression of information!
[SPK]
> >Umm, the notion that we could halt migrating inconsistencies by
> >"cutting the whole into pieces" is
> >interesting! It looks like the situation where a geometrical manifold
> >where cut into small enough pieces, each piece would have zero
> >curvature, while the whole could have non-zero curvature. This situation
> >is exploited in General Relativity! The problem that I see is that the
> >infinitesimal pieces can not contain clocks or rulers, as Hitoshi
> >explains, so inconsistency is avoided by default!
[KM]
> I am pleased to know this fact.
:-)
[SPK]
> >What I propose is that we consider each LS as an observer having a
> >large but finite space-time framing at any given "instant" of their
> >subjective measure of time, the migrating inconsistencies come into the
> >picture when we consider any acceleration as a change of the total
> >framing.
> >In this regard I am in complete agreement with Matti's thinking! The
> >"geometric time" is not the subjective time, it is a record of the
> >precedence ordering within the frozen record. In other words, the flow
> >of time in the subjective experiential sense is a shifting from one
> >frozen Minkowskian manifold to another. This idea is still in a very
> >primitive state and requires discussion! :-)
[KM]
> Time retrieved from the frozen consistent record in the present
> perfect mode is not agential any more, while its genesis is local and
> multi-agential. As far as the things registered in the present perfect
> tense are concerned, I cannot see any problem with the standard
> practice grounded upon formal language or axiomatic set-theory.
The usual formal languages and axiomatic set theories seem to refer to
an infinite observer that is capable of discriminating with arbitrary
precision, so it seems that we need to work within the limits of
Heisenberg's Uncertainty toward the end of constructing a empirical
model. Even the concepts of records must involve limitations on the
ability to recover the original information. It seems that we forget
that there exist more than one language and that records encoded in one
language are usually not decodable within another language such that the
original object could be reconstructed, e.g. we need to consider the
issue of faithful reproducibility...
[SPK]
> >I hope that you understand my interest in mathematical models, I
> >wholeheartedly agree with your thinking with regards to the difficulties
> >that it inherently creates. I am merely trying to generate a template or
> >dictionary upon with to communicate effectively with our folks. :-)
[KM]
> Of course, it's quite fine with me.
[KM]
> >> Fuzzy set theory is quite rigid and artificial in saying how the
> >> membership function should be defined. In other words, the theory is
> >> extremely competent in coping with a fuzziness as a general universal.
> >> By general universal, I mean a universal but not concrete enough. The
> >> notion of a class is a representative case of general universals. The
> >> definition of a class is an artifact at its best, for instance, by
> >> finding a commonality among those pieces obtained by dissecting
> >> something singularly unique.
[SPK]
> >Can this be fixed? Pun intended :-)
KM]
> No, this is an artifact at best. Sometimes, it would turn out to be
> extremely useful.
I agree; so long as we do not forget the limits of such, we can use
these tools, e.g. we can hammer nails with a wrench, but a hammer is
useless to tighten screws...
[SPK]
> >Bohm tended to focus on the moving point/field of explication, which we
> >can see as the complement of migrating inconsistencies...
[KM]
> You have a very sympathetic view towards Bohm.
Yes, I learned much from his writings...
[KM]
> >> The mechanistic dynamics is
> >> wonderfully peculiar in that the law of motion as a general universal
> >> is claimed to be supplemented by non-dynamic boundary conditions as a
> >> concrete particular. It cannot address dynamic boundary conditions as
> >> dismissing the latter simply by declaration. In contrast, the dynamics
> >> of migrating inconsistensies is intrinsically intensive in exercising
> >> the capacity of leaving none of those inconsistencies behind in the
> >> completed record.
[SPK]
> >This clearly reveals the shortcomings of the conventional inductive
> >models that assume universal initiality. By operating within
> >asynchronous "windows" of consistency, we can have boundary conditions
> >that are subjective (in that they apply to individual LSs) and not
> >independent of context and history.
> >I need to understand your notion of intensities better!
[KM]
> I remember that intensities were a favorite subject matter to
> medieval Scholastic philosophers including Duns Scotus. Intensities were
> taken to be the agency of individuation. This idea has survived even
> until now though in a very restricted form known as boundary conditions
> that are already deprived of dynamic capacity of changinging themselves.
I still am unsure of this line of thinking. Umm, I believe that I will
grasp it eventually. :-)
snip
[KM]
> >> The issue is again about the nature of time. If globally synchronous time
> >> is sanctioned from the start, the mechanistic scheme would survive there.
> >> Potential and kinetic energies complete their whatever transactions
> >> instantaneously in the globally consistent manner. On the other hand,
> >> potential energy as a non-frozen leftover of migrating inconsistencies could
> >> survive only when time is taken to be locally asynchronous on the spot.
[SPK]
> >Yes, I agree! Hitoshi's model, in showing that there can be no time
> >associated with the Universe as a whole, denies globally synchronous
> >time a priori. The best we can get is an asymptotic approximation of
> >such in the limit od infinite interactions among the LSs! ;^)
[KM]
> Or, the whole Universe is a gigantic clock. But there is no one who
> can read it as such, and accordingly no time because time is intrinsically
> relational.
Yes, I find Leibnitz's writings to be somewhat helpful in giving a
starting point toward the discussion...
[KM]
> >> Energy in general or potential energy in particular in locally
> >> asynchronous time incorporates into itself the capacity of constraining
> >> or cocretization. This attribute is nothing other than what we know under
> >> the banner of information, though I do know I have to do a lot of homework
> >> to convince our folks on this point.
snip
[SPK]
> >We do, on the other hand, need to flesh out our thinking and notions so
> >that we can work toward implementation of the physics that is implied.
> >:-)
[KM]
> One strategy must be to implement interactions in a bottom-up manner
> instead of a top-down. That is to say putting small clocks together one
> by one.
I tend toward the use of both bottom-up and top-down thinking, like a
zig-zag between seeing the Vase or the pair of faces in the illustration
if FACES / VASE STEREOGRAM:
http://www.wiley.co.uk/college/huffman/faces.html
Kindest regards,
Stephen
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Tue Dec 28 1999 - 12:02:34 JST