SUO: Graphical Existentialism
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John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> David,
>
> I agree with you (and John V.) that time
> is extremely important for any ontology:
>
> > I think it would be impossible to to be time-neutral.
> > It does make sense to talk about axioms that exist
> > for all-time, (ie: eternal, unchanging) or axioms
> > that don't mention time. I'm just convinced that
> > time is something that you can't be agnostic/neutral
> > about. There is an interaction with time whether you
> > like it or not. At best we define 'base assumptions'
> > that specify a default for what that interaction will
> > be with our axioms.
I say this as a person who is very interested
in the relationships that actually exist among
inquiry, logic, and time, as we participants in
a particular "form of life" (FOL), the one that
predecesses that other FOL (the one that succs),
actually experience it, but still, I think that
I can recognize the abstract sense of this idea,
that from a purely logical point of view (and no,
not the one to which Quine has lately succeeded),
that the factor of time is just plain irrelevant
to logic, at least, in this sense. What a puzzle!
This is one of the things that 'q' was telling us,
by the way, but succumbing to quanta of detractors,
it appears that 'q' was just too beautiful to live.
> However, the notion of time that we as 21st century clock watchers
> accept as almost second nature is very much a recent development in
> the long history of human nature (and the languages that human beings
> have spoken for millennia).
Process is more fundamental.
Time is reference to clocks.
Clocks are process-referees,
Thus processes all the same.
The real question that arises here is:
How do we manage to compare processes?
But a rather deeper question might be:
How do components come by comparisons?
> Much more fundamental to the languages we all speak is
> the notion of something I'll call "context", which is the
> inescapable background -- the omnipresent here and now --
> of every moment of our lives. It's the reference point of
> the verbs and adverbs of our natural languages, and it's the
> universal t=0 of physics, engineering, and rocket launches.
>
> The idea of measuring time is also important, as we can see
> from monuments like Stonehenge, cave paintings of phases of
> the moon, and the universal references to the sun and moon
> in the temporal words of every language on earth. But those
> words are secondary: they are qualifiers on the verbs and
> clauses that express the context or situation.
>
> Bottom line: Yes, time is important, but the units and
> coordinate systems for measuring time are qualifiers that
> help identify the context or situation. We must make provision
> for representing context in our systems of logic; then we can
> attach time and space coordinates to those contexts and link
> them in causal sequences that reflect (and I would say are
> the basis for) the temporal order.
>
> John Sowa
I will just cut to the chase -- yeah, that always works --
and say what I learned about context back in the 80's
when I took it up as a way of approaching pragmatics.
What happens is that you are eventaully forced to
embed each new context in an ever larger context
until the universe expands beyond your grasp.
This is not the way, I have come to believe.
It appears that it all comes round to one's
self at last, and so one needs to work out
a way to address the interpreter, or the
sign relation, itself.
Jon Awbrey
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