Re: [ontolog-forum] Endurantism and Perdurantism - Re: Some Comments on

[Ravi Sharma <drravisharma@xxxxxxxxx>]

John

Appreciate your reply, I lack the abstraction or math to comprehend what Pat says often as he is very math oriented and also obviously very good.

I see after looking at the content of your links that the matter (processes) has been pondered in detail by both scientist/engineers and philosophers/mathematicians (logicians).

Take away is that seeing that laws work is more relevant than queries about causality. I recall topics such as action at a distance and Feynman's work made causality less mentioned in physics, I wonder what Max Born would have said today, my thesis used his elastic scattering approximation.

In the end I take it that CL would take care of mapping among different processes / events (2k+) mentioned in your links.

A curiosity: Branching, ramification, why mostly these are stochastic (as in probabilistic events or data measured) and why are not other processes also having statistical correlations, What do ontologies say about handling probabilities? (only work I know about is Katherine Lasky's group at GMU).

Regards,

Ravi

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 6:45 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Pat, Ravi, and Robert,

PH
> In traditional logical syntax these ways of talking are mutually
> incommensurable... They are eliminated in ISO Common Logic (and,
> by the way, in RDF) so now we can all stop arguing about the true
> nature of such things as flows in pipes, glaciers and ripening
> bananas...

I agree.

RS
> If we describe an object in 4D (time being integral - especially
> where processes impact the object during time of consideration)
> does that take care of dynamic aspects and how would then 4D
> ontologies be constructed? Just like the implicit 3D or not?

As Pat said and I agreed, these are different ways of talking.
If you use a typeless logic, such as CL, these ways of talking
can be mapped to and from one another.  The choice of which one
to adopt is a matter of convenience in computation, database
design, or ease of mapping to and from ordinary language.

But there are also semantic issues.  In _Features and Fluents_,
Eric Sandewall listed options that require different axioms for
distinct theories.  If you multiply the options, you get a total
of 2,304 different theories about processes.  For a summary, see
http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/process.htm

When you introduce causality and its interactions with time, you get
even more semantic issues.  See http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/causal.htm

RR
> These entities--from glaciers to the coffee mug--however, exhibit
> a stability (structural, compositional, material, persistence, etc.)
> that, in part, presumably is what makes them easily classifiable as
> objects.

All those criteria have fuzzy borders.  A waterfall is constantly
changing its material, but so are living things.  Some living things
-- octopus or amoeba -- change structure quite rapidly.  And there
are things like bacterial colonies and slime molds on the border
between single-celled and multi-celled organisms.

Whitehead stated a useful criterion:  an object is sufficiently
stable to be recognized at repeated encounters.  Waterfalls have
that property.  The Great Red Spot in the atmosphere of Jupiter
is a storm that has been recognized for over 300 years.

John

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Thanks.
Ravi
(Dr. Ravi Sharma)
313 204 1740 Mobile

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