Re: SUO: Set/Class Distinction
Dear Matthew,
As I just said in a note to Chris Menzel, compromises are
inevitable if you want to reuse terms that have already
acquired long established uses in different fields.
Whitehead avoided compromises by coining totally new terms
that weren't being used by anyone else. As a result, his book,
Process and Reality, has acquired a terrible reputation for
being unreadable. It actually isn't bad, once you have read
and reread it enough to become familiar with his new words.
My attempt to convey some idea of what he was trying to say
might sound like a bad compromise because I was trying to avoid
too much Whiteheadian terminology all at once.
Some comments:
> It isn't that what you say below is wrong, but it seems to me
> a view of 4D starting from a 3D perspective.
I was trying to avoid introducing Whitehead's technical terms.
> I would say that there is a 4D "worm" that is John Sowa, and that
> this intersects with the 4D worms of other objects. For example,
> there is the 4D worm of an oxygen atom you breath in. It is
> incorporated into your body for a period, and is eventually
> exhaled as carbon dioxide. As result, there is a sub-state of the
> oxygen atom that is a part of you. Equally, there is a state of you
> of which the oxygen atom is a part.
Your usage is compatible, but with a common word 'worm'
transferred to a highly technical sense by means of a metaphor.
Whitehead's general term was nexus, which has many different
special cases, one of which is your worm.
> The difference in perspective is subtle. Your description reads like
> the frames in a film being sewn together. Mine emphasises the
> continuity of which there are parts.
I agree that a continuous worm is appropriate for many applications,
but a segmented caterpillar is also appropriate for others. The
nexus includes both variations. I was just describing one variation
that was appropriate to time-varying collections (which tend to
change by discontinuous jumps as members are added or deleted).
Bottom line: We're likely to run into many confusing terminological
conflicts as we try to explain these ideas to different people who
come from different perspectives with different choices of words.
John Sowa