SUO: Re: Discussion Period on Motion by Matthew West
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JA = Jon Awbrey
MW = Matthew West
JA: So I think I have a way of understanding the statement that
a state is just a complex property of a system. Some people
will call that system-thing the "reified system".
MW: It is that which takes on the state.
JA: Yes, the picky point that I think some people are trying
to make is that the data of experience or the results of
measurement are what we really have on hand, whereas the
system-thing is in the bush, as it were, at some remove
from immediate impressions, the object of possibly many
competing hypotheses that we form to explain why the
data are as they are.
MW: I'm not one of them, as you have probably guessed.
As noted below you can have any individual object
you want as long as you can demonstrate it has
a spatio-temporal extent.
Yes, I have no qualms about pretending a hypothesis here and there,
but the question is whether the specifics of a given hypothesis
explain the data better than the many competing alternatives.
This is a stricter test than demonstrating mere consistency
or the projection of a possible extension in space and time.
Morever, data can vary widely with changes among different bases
or frames of reference, whereas real objects are associated with
functions that remain invariant through transformations from one
frame to another, so it is a non-trivial step to relate the data
to the object.
MW: I have just generated a PDF V1.3 version of the document,
complete with bookmarks for the TOC. Try that. If it
still doesn't work I can e-mail it or a Word document.
Even when I save the pdf file to disk, the reader says it is corrupted.
If you could send a Word doc, I could probably read that. Thanks, Jon.
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