SUO: Ever Ending Stories
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John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> Pat,
>
> There are several separate issues here:
>
> 1. 3D vs. 4D coordinate systems.
>
> 2. Role of identity and identity conditions in ontology.
>
> 3. Process or object as the more fundamental kind of entity.
>
> It is possible to take different positions on each of these
> questions, and of the three, I consider either choice on #1
> to be less of an obstacle to translation than one's choice
> on questions #2 and #3.
>
> > Statue = clay makes a kind of sense, in 3-d or 4-d; but
> > it goes further than that. Imagine the clay being fired
> > in the kiln, and then it is both statue and clay and firing;
> > the thing is identical to the event. Many people find that
> > much harder to swallow.
>
> I would say that firing is a larger situation that includes
> more than just the statue or the clay. It also includes the
> fire, the oven, and surrounding circumstances. So I would not
> equate the firing with just the statue or the clay, but I would
> say that the entity that is clay-becoming-statue remains the
> "same thing" during that process.
>
> > > Yes, that is the point of view that Whitehead would take,
> > > it is the point of view that Peirce would take, and it
> > > is also the point of view that Aristotle would take.
> > > I don't know anybody, except perhaps Nicola, who
> > > would seriously consider any other position.
> >
> > I really doubt that Aristotle thought about 4-d,
>
> The question of the statue or the clay belongs to a class
> of issues on which A. did take a position. I don't want
> to dig out the exact passages right this minute, but the
> basic point is that he did not consider multiple "entities"
> residing in the same thing at the same time, but just one
> thing that was being described in different ways.
John,
What you are saying here clicks in with the major shift that took
place in my own thinking -- at the time I was just going with the
flow of a whole crowd of people, but now I have started to wonder
what happened to all of these people, anyway -- when it first hit
me to try to take computation, control, and information seriously --
and yes, it was explicitly recognized at the time -- in my sample
of experience there were two programs of study at MSU and UM, for
example, whose syllabi blazoned this very fact -- that this whole
turn was analogous to the paradign shift that Aristotle motivated
when he rephrased the "Big Question", just by way of getting some
handle on it, to ask, not so much what things are, which we could
not get directly at, as it was already becoming rather tiresomely
clear even way back then, but what are all of us saying about the
way things are, and what would it take to have any hope of making
any of this jibe? And so what I took the "Information Revolution"
to be all about was just this, the attitude of mind that it takes
to stop and take a look at the actual information that all of our
multifarious expressions convey about the classes of partly known,
partly unknown, not unknowable objects of our aims, ends, & hopes.
To me, this insight, though recurring, was of very different sort
than every other option of which I had personally encountered the
utter vicious viscosity and been convinced of the abject futility.
There's nobody in this kiln but us lumps of clay ...
Jon Awbrey
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