[Wittrs] [C] Re: Philosophers, dodgeball and the "drawing game," and TIME
- From: "c.moeller1" <cmoel888@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:16:25 -0000
CJ, I sympathize with your feeling that, "in general we don't
know, in science, or social science, or philosophy for that matter how
to properly talk about "time."" I have done something to help
solve that problem.
I hold that the static systems of logic?descended from Aristotle
through Boole [1], Frege, Pnueli, Prior, and all modern logicists and
natural philosophers?are lacking in several respects. These many
models of logical specification [2] are unable to describe or to create
any more than was given (sum of the parts); or directly express
causation (which instead must be divined from the static
representations); and they can't be used to express or treat dynamic
or changing scenarios, thus they can't deal directly with ongoing
time or processes which evolve with time. Now these observable
attributes, including synergy or emergent behavior, cause and effect,
dynamic activities and ongoing time, are very evident in the real world.
The simple process of combustion, which takes place many times per
second in billions of engines worldwide, could not be directly and
completely specified in any of those existing systems of logic without
describing a succession of frozen states, frame-by-frame. This failing,
of course, justifies the existence of the hard sciences in order to
"take up the slack." Chemistry, for instance, has means with
which to describe and explain combustion.
1. George Boole's An Investigation of the Laws of Thought.
2. About thirty "non-standard" logics (aside from predicate
calculus and propositional logic) are listed in
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/logsys/nonstbib.htm
<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/logsys/nonstbib.htm>
In my perception, one of the troubles with philosophy, logic,
computational "intelligence," etc. is that the formal logic used to
specify, explicate, deduce, and substantiate or support concepts and
systems, is confined to frames in the space-domain. All temporal
references, therefore, must be referred to tokens and labels situated in
space. The ancients played with concepts by writing them down and by
thinking of them in fixed format. We can now do the same using
computers, but the operators have not expanded with the passing of
millennia. We are thus limited to combinations and sequences of AND
(conjunction), NOT (negation), and STORE (memorize). The whole of
computer science is founded on not much more than those operators.
First-order and modal logics are fundamentally static means through
which actions are reckoned from fixed statements or frames, evaluated
after-the-fact. Such static treatment, even aided by super-fast
computers, often fails to produce results appropriate for dynamic
processes.
Using static and fixed labels, formal logic discourse admits only of
existence, non-existence, and conjunction in both space and time. This
package of restrictions in thought exempts dynamics from that frozen
arena. But life exhibits self-motivated activities. How can such
functions be specified or even explored by using formal logic that
admits only static states or static labels about dynamic states? Aside
from how an item, or a condition, is and how it relates to other things
in tableaux, I want to know or be able to precisely and concisely
specify how it came to be, what caused it, and how it acts. There
doesn't seem to be any such treatment in formal logic, although in
ordinary language we routinely express dynamics in a way that most
understand our meaning.
My question was, and is, "How do you properly treat dynamical situations
with only static tools such as Turing machines and Boolean logic?" The
accepted answer is, "frame by frame." That acceptance, in my
estimation, is insufficient. As Bergson put it, in Time and Free Will,
"Where is the becoming?" As Dr. Lee Smolin (in The Trouble With Physics)
asked, "How can we represent time without turning it into space?" I have
answered all of those questions with a new system of logic that includes
verbs as dynamic operators and which allows causative forces and the
changes they make to be recognized, specified, documented, and analyzed;
and (in control systems) to have direct and instantaneous effects on
physical processes.
In my non-computational, non-Turing method of reckoning, Natural Logic
(NL), I have greatly expanded the vocabulary of logic. In NL there are
many more logic functions (permutations of logic operators) and
corresponding logic elements than are available in the combinations of
AND, NOT, and STORE of purely conventional means. The new operators and
elements operate natively in the time and space-time domains on the
natural flow of events and condition changes in dynamic processes.
The ancients held that the logical forms, especially premises, were to
be held unchanged (otherwise how could conclusions be valid?). It has
been held so even in modern times, although now we can see that change
is the only constant. There is, however, no "logic of change" currently
accepted. I invented one that is useful in the world of automation. It
may also be useful to logicists in general and to philosophers.
Best regards,
Charlie
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