SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema :> Abstract & Physical
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LIS. Discussion Note 89
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JA = Jon Awbrey
JS = John Sowa
PJ = Phil Jackson
John,
There are number of confusions about the type/token distinction
that you verge on propagating here -- at the speed of light or
more tardily doesn't really matter all that much. Inasmuch as
we have been through this before, I can dig up the old links
to Peirce's 3-fold conception of tone/token/type later on,
as I can't say that it always sticks in my mind all that
well either. But just by way of speaking without notes,
it seems very important to tease apart two different
ways of speaking of abstraction that I am hearing
get confounded in recent discussions. As always
when it comes to abstractions, it will help if
we can be just as concrete as we possibly can.
There are four (4) potatoes in the vegetable bin of our fridge.
I just ran downstairs to verify that statement, and so that is
a very concrete fact. When I counted the potatoes in order to
verify that statement, common accounts of the counting process
would say that I somehow other put that concrete collection of
potatoes into a bijective correspondence with a standard ideal
of the platonic scholastic reality that is generally accounted
to be the number four (4), an abstract object if ever there be
such a thing. That is one kind of abstraction action, treated
as a mapping or a passing from the concrete lot of respectable
vegetables to the nominally more abstract, general, ideal, and
therefore suspect condition of the idea, form, number four (4).
But there is another kind of abstraction action, together with
another way of using the corresponding token/type distinctions,
and it critically important that these two uses of abstraction
not be confused in our conduct, speech, or thought. The other
mode of abstraction comes into play when we observe that there
are three (3) tokens of the word "four", plus three (3) tokens
of the numeral "4" in the above text preceeding this paragraph.
So watch out for that.
Jon Awbrey
JA: What you are doing here is telling a story about certain imaginary beasts
called "atoms", "photons", and "other subatomic particles", of which the
creatures called "quarks" have most recently occupied our imaginations.
When this genre of folktales is told by folks who really know how to
tell it well, well, its makes the sort of story on which our very
lives depend. But the concepts -- or the "constructs", as they
are often called -- of <atom>, <baryon>, <boson>, <electron>,
<fermion>, <hadron>, <lepton>, <meson>, <muon, <neutrino>,
<omega minus particle>, <photon>, <pion>, <positron>,
<quark>, and that whole imaginary bestiary, remain
the phyla of fauna and flora whose taxons are spun
into being solely in the wilds or in the zoos of
a narrative that may just as easily pass away
tomorrow aftenoon if they do not continue to
receive the sustenance they derive from
our imaginations of helping us to live
in reality. This is the phenomenon
that is due to be explained here.
Previously:
JS: Yes. Photons are physical, according to the
first criterion: you can see them directly
if they are in the visible range, feel them
if they are in the infrared range, or detect
them indirectly by various instruments.
JS: But as I said, the criteria for being abstract include
not being physical. Therefore, photons are eliminated.
Then I added some positive criteria, such as being able
to be transmitted at the speed of light.
JS: Negroponte had a good "sound bite" for making the distinction:
atoms vs. bits. If it's made up of atoms, it's physical; if it's
made up of bits, it's abstract. However, he should have generalized
the term "atom" to include photons and other subatomic particles.
JS: But as I said before, I am not claiming that my definition
(or Negroponte's) exactly covers all the cases that people
commonly use in ordinary language. That is why I put the
caveat in my KR book that the labels Physical and Abstract
are just mnemonic aids for my technical categories P and A.
More Previously:
JS: Besides not being physical (i.e., having negative
answers to the above questions), abstract entities
have affirmative answers to the following questions:
JS: 1. Can it have physical replicas, embodiments,
instances, encodings, or whatever similar
term you would prefer to use?
JS: 2. If you are given a physical replica of an abstraction at
one place and time, can you transmit it (the abstraction,
not the replica) at the speed of light to another place
and time where another physical replica, sufficiently
similar to the original by whatever criteria you choose,
can be reconstructed?
PJ: The second criteria seems incorrectly worded, since only
physical things (i.e. photons) can be transmitted at the
speed of light from one place to another.
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