Re: Time, Causality and Demand-Pull
Chris, I think you will get more into the flow of my argument if you
understand it terms of the past few years of discussions and difficulties
in producing an upper level ontology that can accommodate both axiomatized
and looser, natural language artifacts, the latter of which typically draw
upon what you call "the dark realm of intentionality". If we don't have
lenses to see into the "dark realm", we shall have a conceptual blockage
in dealing with NL artifacts.
A few more comments below (flagged as 'new responses'):
> On Mon, Jun 12, 2000 at 10:20:33AM -0400, Josiah Lee Auspitz wrote:
> >
> > You've certainly got me pegged wrong, Chris. I was not trying to trip you
> > up verbally but to suggest on your own terms, which do not happen to be my
> > own, that in the exchange with Chris Partridge you are falling into a
> > temporal version of Zeno's paradox, by neglecting the purposive principle,
> > usually called an entelechy, that provides the thread of continuity and
> > intelligibility which enables us to recognize a series of purposive acts
> > as belonging to an activity.
>
> Not sure I follow you here, Lee -- if I have neglected some principle
> and my views are inconsistent, they will certainly remain inconsistent
> if I add the principle (assuming, as I do, classical logic). Perhaps
> all you are saying is that this idea of an entelechy is important for
> representing certain processes adequately. Maybe so. There has been a
> lot of discussion in PSL about process intent, which perhaps captures
> some of what you have in mind. Problem is, things like purpose and
> intent lead us into the Dark Realm of Intentionality, to be entered only
> with the greatest care and trepidation.
>
new responses:
The reference to Zeno's paradox is meant to suggest that the error lies
in the *consistent* application of a discretizing view that will lead to
anomalies when over-extended into an upper-level ontology.
On whether PSL adequately covers intent, it may simultaneously do so for
its own stated purposes but not for those of an upper level ontology. The
'participates in' relation in the PSL core would seem to cover a change of
state seen as produced *both* by one billiard ball striking another and by
the player intentionally deploying his cue to produce this effect. For a
manufacturing process viewed logistically this can be tenable (and indeed,
the minimalism at least has the advantage of not imposing any view of
causation), but elsewhere one would wish to have a more differentiated
view of causation. The 'nondeterministic activity' extension of PSL would
seem to me to be an attempt to introduce a more differentiated view within
the overall limits of PSL and its underlying situation logic.
> Of course, for any translation, there is always the question of what is
> > lost. John Sowa's suggestion seems hard to rebut: that a view of process
> > in which a space-time continuum is a primitive or even a prominent feature
> > will "lose" something crucial in translation into a language like PSL
> > grounded in timepoints and discrete occurrents.
>
> Why do you think occurrences are discrete in PSL? PSL is silent on the
> matter. And you seem to think that timepoints are inconsistent with the
> idea of a s/t continuum, but timepoints can be given a continuous
> topology. Certainly it was not timepoints per se that John was
> questioning (though he did question taking them as primitive), but
> rather PSL's assumption of linearity.
new responses:
Taking timepoints as the systemic *primitive* seems to me to make all
occurrences discretizable into timepoint-specific occurrents, as a
*systemic* consequence. The axioms on duration in PSL seem to me to
confirm rather than deny this conclusion.
Discrete points are not necessarily inconsistent with a continuous view
(one possible definition of a continuum being in terms of points) but a
view of a continuum in terms of points unduly limits the concept of a
continuum. Compare waves and particles in physics. The view that waves
can be represented as reducible to particles will take us only so far.
Lee