Re: [ontolog-forum] Scientific American: What is Real? Ontology, Physics

[Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 26 July 2013 14:50, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Leo,

That is an important question, which Kant raised two centuries ago.
Peirce answered it one century ago, and Whitehead provided the best
available foundation for an ontology that is compatible with what we
think we know and with the many wonders that physicists discovered.

Leo

> A very interesting article by Meinard Kuhlmann this month: “What is
> Real?” Intersection of physics and metaphysics, with of course ontology
> along for the defining ride. You may or may not be able to access it at:
> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=physicists-debate-whether-world-made-of-particles-fields-or-something-else.

I subscribe to the paper version, but this pointer only links to a short
excerpt for nonsubscribers.  In any case, the following quotation is
a good summary of the issues:

Meinard K.
> Many physicists think that particles are not things at all but
> excitations in a quantum field, the modern successor of classical
> fields such as the magnetic field. But fields, too, are paradoxical.
>
> If neither particles nor fields are fundamental, then what is?

Kant claimed that the only things we can know are the phenomena
that are revealed through our sense organs.  He called whatever
"reality" lies beneath those phenomena the *noumena*, which are
forever unknowable.

Kant understood Newtonian mechanics, he taught it at Königsberg,
and he even made some important contributions.  Kant realized that
a rotating sphere of gas and dust would be unstable.  Therefore,
he proposed the hypothesis that such a sphere would collapse
into a rotating disk with a large lump in the middle and smaller
lumps revolvting around it -- i.e., the solar system.

I recorded this some time ago:

http://soundcloud.com/user2324628/joseph-campbell-on-joyce

We have predicates and we assign subjects to them.  So they are bnodes until given an identifier.  Is this a clue that bnodes are perhaps fundamental?

RDF is a description language -- this reminds me of space -- the ineluctable modality of the visible.

RDF doesnt handle change well, this is where you need read/write editing, change -- time -- the ineluctable modality of the audible.  Something tells me sound and (changing) colour are important here.  The octopus can communicate by changing colour.

OWL / RIF -- maybe this reminds me of causality -- I dont know too much on this area. 

So it seems to me that kant's categories of though have some analogies with modern description languages.

I appreciate much of the above is "hand wavy" -- mainly thinking out loud...

 

A century later, science advanced quite a bit, and Peirce was
in the forefront of that research.  Among other things, he was
the director of the Harvard observatory, and the only book he
published in his lifetime was based on his observations there.

He was also the first American to be invited to an international
congress in Europe -- and that was for his R & D on very precise
methods for measuring gravity.  He also proposed a research
project to determine whether the universe was non-Euclidean,
but he didn't get the funding.

Peirce maintained that what we perceive are signs and patterns
of signs.  By an iterative process of perception, interpretation,
testing, and action, we construct patterns of signs in our minds
that constitute everything we know about the world, everything
in it, and all their possible interactions.

Peirce was a realist in maintaining that most of what we think we
know is actually true.  But he was a fallible realist in recognizing
that any particular fact we believe might turn out to be only an
approximation.

His answer to Kant is that there is nothing in reality that is,
in principle, unknowable.  His experience in experimental physics
and astronomy convinced him that any underlying "reality" that
is causally connected with the observable phenomena could be
detected by some method.

As an example of Peirce's engineering skills, he was the first person
to propose the use of a wavelength of light as a standard for length.
And he actually designed and built the equipment to *use* a wavelength
of light to measure the length of the pendulums he used to measure
gravity.

In short, Peirce was aware of many more levels of "reality" than
Kant had suspected.  He believed that there might be many more
levels yet to be discovered.  But he maintained that every level
was just as real as any other, all the levels could be "known"
by patterns of patterns based on perception aided with various
kinds of instruments.

But he also maintained Popper's principle of falsifiability long
before Popper:  Any scientific hypothesis must be stated with
enough precision to be falsifiable, and it must be tested by
checking its predictions against experimental evidence.  Any
hypothesis that repeatedly makes correct predictions is evidence
that it says something true about some level of reality.

Like Kant, Whitehead taught mathematical physics.  He knew
relativity very well, and he was aware of the new developments
in quantum mechanics.  In his magnum opus _Process and Reality_,
he proposed a process ontology that is compatible with both.

A lot more detail is required, but Whitehead's process view is
still the best foundation for ontology:  Process is fundamental.
What we call "things" are slow-moving processes.  In ANW's terms,
physical objects that are sufficiently stable that we can recognize
them at repeated occurrences are "permanences amidst the flux".

The metaphysical principles of Peirce and Whitehead are completely
compatible with everything in the article by Meinard Kuhlmann.

Summary:  Process is fundamental.  We interpret what we perceive
in terms of signs.  We make predictions that we test by action.
Things are slowly moving processes that we can recognize and
test on repeated occasions.

All processes we see are based on other processes that we can only
detect by finer and finer instruments.  We have no way of knowing
how many levels of processes are beneath what we see, but nothing
that is causally related to what we perceive is unknowable.

John

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