Dear Loet, Joseph and All,
Let me just clarify the difference making a difference between both of you
and me.
First, to Loet;
> In other words: time is a construct of language?
The answer will be yes if the physicist accepts time when preparing an
authentic user’s manual on how to set up and read each clock. But, the answer
will be no if somebody claims that time exists prior to the existence of our
languages. These two attitudes are necessarily mixed up in our practice of
doing empirical sciences as revealed in the contrast between evolutionary and
developmental biology. That is the strength of empirical sciences.
> The “various conservation laws” are not a construct of language but
> constraints on constructions in language?
Any empirical law, once established and framed in human languages, is very
peculiar compared to the case of nomological laws in general in claiming its
validity whenever or wherever in the empirical world unless our faith on the
empirical regularity perceivable in the record is lost. Needless to say, some
empirical laws mingled with something going beyond our experiences such as a
wishful thinking might turn out to be wrong as in the case of Einstein’s big
blunder.
> The original cyclic motions predate the reading. They are given? By whom and
> in which language?
Some of our remote ancestors full of curiosity may have happened to notice
the look-alike cyclic stellar movement as looking up into the sky every night
and to report the astonishing observations to the folks in the neighborhood.
This must have been the beginning of the whole story.
> Is the dative of a message different from the third case in the declension?
The dative as the indirect object of a verb corresponds to the third case in
the declension of a noun in German. Suppose the sentence like “He gives her a
ring.” Of course, the “her” is the dative of the direct object “a ring”.
Nonetheless, a proper interpretation of the sentence framed in the present
tense is pretty difficult. “He” might want to make “a ring” to be a message of
something else, while “she” might refuse to accept it. The dative is reactively
active or passively synthetic and is by no means reactively passive. The dative
can metamorphose into a subject in the next round. Moreover, the actual
exchange of giving and refusing can be revealed as referring to the update of
the perfect tense in the progressive tense.
> If “information” can be defined in terms of a probability distribution, would
> “time” be definable as a frequency distribution?
This is really a Big “If”. If both the distributions are available, I could
follow the argument. If such distributions are not available in advance for
whatever reasons, the second best would be to rely upon conditional
probabilities as the distributions further qualified by the explicit
participation of measurement. In the latter, the relationship between
information and time is more convoluted and interwoven. Bob Ulanowicz knows it
better.
Then, to Joseph;
>In my extension of logic to complex systems, reality and appearance are
>related contradictorially:
Your distinction between reality and appearance reminds me of the notorious
distinction between things-in-themselves and their phenomenology. I wish I
could grasp the distinction. What I cannot speak about I have to pass over in
silence.
>Perception is a real energetic process that is driven by our underlying
>dynamics,… not by verbs and their objects.
Perhaps, this must be the take-home message you gave me. At issue is how to
verbally respond to the question of what does “a real energetic process” look
like. We are then required to employ some verbs to meet the assignment. (I do
know the situation would be far more eased in the wet lab., less
confrontational.) In fact, you have already provided us with a sound response
to this question as saying “ … is driven by our underlying dynamics”. In short,
perception of a perception of the flow of time ad infinitum eventually
precipitates the construction of the flow of time.
>I think behind Loet’s reference to time as possibly a frequency distribution
>is a similar desire to move away from linguistic structures to real structures.
Referring to and relying upon linguistic vehicles is unavoidable. Otherwise,
we have to shut our mouths. The next big hurdle to jump over must be how to
secure a passable correspondence between the linguistic vehicles and the object
in the target as Jerry Chandler repeatedly emphasized on this list.
Third, to Ted;
>We bridge that today with the two paradigms on which we build science:
>measurement and theories of cause. The notion of tense touches on both, one
>from one world, the other from the second. I ask your opinions on this "third
>flow."
The third flow is for the binding agency of a novel type. The cohesion
acting between the perfect and the progressive tense looks really strange
compared to the known cohesions available in physics so far. Each tense pulls
in the other for the start-up of the latter, but cannot coexist. Despite that,
it would be an impossible dream to rationally decipher what happens right in
the middle of the reshuffling of the incumbents.
>we can use the difference between what is observed and what is cleanly modeled
>in that world as a measure of dissonance between the two systems. Anything we
>can measure, even apparently non-rational behavior is information of this
>third type, right?
Surely. Living with the dissonance may look non-rational, but the
inhabitants in the empirical world including us do not make a big fuss out of
it every time. The most intriguing aspect here is that living with the
dissonance would make each party robust enough through the participation of the
other party, though not necessarily welcome at first. The difficult part of
this enterprise might however arise from the lack of the willingness of
revising the clean model on the part of the modeler.
>Would you suppose that this analytical tool [picking up tense in place of
>time] can leverage a distinction of cause from temporal sequence?
That is my guess at this moment. In fact, I applied this idea to the
monetary economy some years ago. The dissonance is equated to monetary flow
disequilibrium whose occurrence is vital to the growth of the economy. However,
the intensity of monetary flow disequilibrium can easily be entrapped by the
runaway explosion because of the built-in trick of leverage. People in the
financial market know this very well through their day-to-day business while
nobody has claimed to have a clean model on when and how the next market crash
will come.
Best,
Koichiro
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
