RE: SUO: Proposed Changes to Merged Ontology
Chris P. wrote:
>>There are two possible theses here (as I mentioned in my earlier attachment
>>on ontological architecture http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg03131.html ).
>>A strong thesis - that every occurrent has a unique continuant of which it
>>is the life. This seems to lead to an ontology with a built-in redundancy,
>>and if you think parsimony is a sensible goal, then there is an opportunity
>>to perform an ontological reduction.
>>A weak thesis - that every occurrent is composed of the continuants that
>>participate in it.
Pat Hayes replied:
>I know people who would reject both of these, I think, but...
I very strongly reject both of those hypotheses. On this point,
I agree with Whithead that the ultimate reality is process-like,
not thing-like. His most basic type of "actual entity" is the
event, and objects are emergent properties that result from
various conservation principles or as he called them "forms
of definiteness".
Objects, in Whitehead's sense, are recognized as "recurring
event types" -- i.e., when attending AI conferences we
frequently encounter an event type we call "seeing Pat Hayes".
To unify those events, we postulate a continuant type, which
we call "Pat Hayes", and we hypothesize his continued
existence as the underlying cause of those multiple encounters.
This way of talking may sound strange, but it is actually
closer to modern physics than the typical "thing-language".
In physics, the conservation principles (of energy, momentum,
charge, spin, etc.) are considered the "explanations" of the
continued existence things ranging from the elementary particles
to whirlpools and the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.
If anyone considers "ontological parsimony" to be "a good thing"
then you are much more likely to find it by taking processes or
occurrents as primitive and treating objects (or continuants)
as the manifestation of various conservation principles that
constrain the evolution of processes.
John Sowa