On Feb 5, 2011, at 2:09 AM, doug foxvog wrote: (01)
> On Fri, February 4, 2011 12:41, John F. Sowa said:
>> On 2/4/2011 10:07 AM, Ronald Stamper wrote:
>>> The recent discussions of presentism , space-time and noun-verb
>>> distinction have left me wondering what are the ontologies (in the
>>> metaphysics sense) that lie behind the messages on those topics.
>>
>> I stated my preferred ontology quite explicitly in an earlier note,
>> but I'll delete details that might be distracting. After deleting
>> the qualifying points 2, 3, 6, and 7, that leaves:
>>
>> JFS
>>> 1. As a basic metaphysical stance, I prefer a 4D ontology, which
>>> considers the whole universe from a God's eye point of view,
>>> as one giant domain of discourse.
>
> One issue with a 4D, God's eye, ontology is it fixes the future part of
> 4D worms. This suggests predestination and all that follows from that
> including the lack of free will. (02)
No, this is wrong. The 4D view makes no claims about predestination,
determinism, free will, etc.. There can be many alternative 4D projections of a
known partial 4D history: one can be in doubt about the future, just as one can
be about the past, in a 4D ontology. Doubt is expressed simply by having
partial, incomplete, information. (03)
>
> In 4D, whatever is true of any 4D worm or time slice of 4D worm is
> timelessly true. (04)
Yes, but... (05)
> That means that all information about your death
> is true *now* and can not be changed. (06)
... no, it does not mean that at all. On the contrary, it means that facts
about your death are not true 'now' or indeed 'at' any other time: they are
simply true. And to say they are true is not to say that you know them, by the
way. (07)
> Although some people believe the universe is an automaton, many do not,
> so it behooves us not to base a universal core ontology on such
> metaphysics. (08)
Nothing in any of this entire thread is based on, or even addresses, such a
metaphysical assumption. (09)
> A 4D ontology which does not include predestination would be more
> acceptable to many, especially with mechanisms to convert statements
> to 3+1 D statements. (010)
Well, that is good, because AFAIK none of the 4D ontologies include
predestination. (011)
Pat (012)
>
> -- doug f
>
>>> 4. As a convenient 3+1 D way of talking, thinking, and computing,
>>> I like the notion of a *situation* as a finite chunk of space-time
>>> that could be mapped to some region in domain #1, but it could
>>> also be mapped to a domain that may include some part of #1 and
>>> any arbitrary set of set of anything anybody would like to think
>>> about or talk about. Think of those entities as mathematical
>>> objects, which mathematicians freely assume whenever they please.
>>> But they might be virtual reality things like Sherlock Holmes,
>>> since VR objects that look like people are just as mathematical
>>> as spheres or cubes.
>>>
>>> 5. Given the option of having the whole 4D universe as a ground
>>> domain plus the option of throwing in any kind of VR entities
>>> we'd like to think or talk about plus situations that can
>>> include any mixture of any of the above, we get a rich semantic
>>> domain plus a rich syntactic system -- and fortunately, we can
>>> formalize it in Common Logic, if we wish.
>>
>> In summary, the domain of quantification I recommend includes
>> a 4D view of everything in the universe, past, present, and future.
>> To that domain, I would add all mathematical entities that anyone
>> can specify by any mathematical methods whatever.
>>
>> Among those mathematical entities are all the kinds of virtual reality
>> constructions that look like fictional, mythical, or imaginary people,
>> beasts, or things of any kind. The domain would also include all
>> mathematical generalizations and classifications of them.
>>
>> This is a huge domain, which includes far more than I would need for
>> any particular application. For most applications, I would extract
>> some suitable subset for my purpose.
>>
>> In order to facilitate a 3D+1 view of talking and reasoning about
>> subsets, I would define situations as 3D chunks mapped to the
>> 4D domain, augmented with the mathematical domain as needed.
>>
>> For a way of carving up and classifying both the 4D domain and
>> the VR extensions, I prefer a process ontology, along the lines
>> of Whitehead's _Process and Reality_. But for my talk about
>> situations for particular purposes, I would allow "approximate"
>> mappings that are more conventionally object-like or event-like.
>>
>> John
>
> =============================================================
> doug foxvog doug@xxxxxxxxxx http://ProgressiveAustin.org
>
> "I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great
> initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
> - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
> =============================================================
>
>
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> (013)
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