Re: The reality of entity

brodix <brodix@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On May 9, 6:27 am, Haines Brown <bro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

I plan to tackle the issue of the reality of an "entity", and here
offer some preliminary notes, for which I'd appreciate criticism.

The basic issue is the appropriateness of "entity" as our basic way
to apprehend the world scientifically, or whether it should instead
be "process". However, I here primarily offer a critical inspection
of entity, leaving the subject of process largely aside.  

I think your mistake is trying to leave out "process."

Not sure I quite follow you here. It seems you could mean one of two
things: a) "process" should somehow be incorporated into our notion of
"entity", or b) I should have gone on to discuss process more fully
rather than put it aside.

If (a), I suggested, whether correctly or not, that "entity" is
inherently empiricist and therefore hostile any incorporation of causal
potency or relations into the essence of things. For example, a fired
bullet has kinetic energy, but that energy is represented as a property
that is external to the definition of "bullet"; it is an "accidental"
rather than essential property.

If (b), my aim was to suggest that "entity" is a one-sided
representation of things that is inadequate for any problematic that is
broad in time or space. If you are suggesting that a critique of entity
can't proceed very far without developing a notion of process, I'd be
interested in your reasons.

If there is no motion, you have a temperature of absolute zero. I
think the conceptual mistake is trying to model time as a fundamental
dimension, but it makes more sense as a consequence of motion, rather
than the basis for it. Consider;

Time does go both directions.

While physical reality goes from past events to future ones, the
information of these events goes the other way.

Yes. You bring up a hairy and much discussed issue. I believe I'm in
agreement with you here. It is often pointed out that the past no longer
exists and the future does not yet exist. In a (rather technical) sense
one can even cast doubt on the present.

My own take on this, for whatever it's worth, is to look at the
empirical dimension of the present as the effect in the present of what
once occurred; and the probability distribution of possible outcomes is
the existence of the future in the present. In other words, I'm agreeing
with you that there is no time dimension outside consciousness. We have
an intuitive sense of the passage of time because memory is the
empirical effect of the past. Because we are aware of a sequence of past
states, we represent that in thought as time's arrow or the flow of
time. In a way, we can "see" a process, such as the setting sun, but
have difficulty describing what we have just seen for someone else
(St. Augustine's point).

It isn't presentism because time as a point would be meaningless as a
measure of motion.

Yes, technically correct. On the other hand, the "present" can perhaps
not be defined in temporal terms, but as a condition. Would you be
inclined to agree with this?

... so while any and all of them go from past events to future ones,
the medium against which any point is being judged is the overall
context, which once created, is displaced by the next, as all these
individual points move around, so the events go from future potential
to past circumstance. The illusion of direction is created because the
reference point moves through the series of circumstances, though
these events go the other way.

If I understand correctly, you are suggesting that time is a relation of
events, and no event is privileged as the time keeper. But often it is
pointed out that decreasing entropy gives direction to time and cosmic
dissipation is a reference for all else. True, this is only direction,
not a time dimension, so your basic point holds, I believe.

However, I'm therefor uncertain about your statement that "...or strings
and their vibrations, conserved energy goes toward the future, as the
information defining it recedes into the past". It seems you here
implicitly allow back in the time dimension that you had wanted to
exclude. For example, information can't "recede" into the past, for the
past no longer exists; all information must exist in the present. This
includes consciousness, for our mental information (memories) about the
past exists only in our present consciousness.

Think of the relationship between object and process as that between
a production line and product. The object/product describes a
narrative unit of time that goes from start to finish, while the
production line/process faces the other way, consuming raw material
and expelling finished product. The process of life goes from one
generation to the next, as individual lives go from being in the
future to being in the past.

But if there is no time dimension, then you can't "be" in either the
past or the future. A narrative is our subjective story about the
temporal relation of the states we hold in consciousness.

Of course this point is worthless in terms of modern physics, which
describes time as an actual dimension and all information subjectively
exists on it, rather than being destroyed as new information is
created.

But here you seem to slip from the issue of the ontological un-reality
of a time dimension to the practical utility for presuming such a time
dimension. Einstein argued that there is no ontological dimension
clocking events, and that even synchrony is relativistic.

Much of this ties into the Complexity dichotomy of top down structure
and bottom up process(Organism and eco-system). It also describes the
logical flaw with monotheism, since absolute is basis, not apex, so
the spiritual absolute would be the essence from which we rise, not an
ideal from which we fell. Essential we have always confused unity with
unit, but unity is a neutral state and unit is a singular. Zero,
vs. one. The problem with assigning entropy to the universe is
assuming it is a closed set, but a unit isn't unitary, as there is
inside and outside, while a unitary state trades energy around rather
than losing it.

John, I'm not sure I follow these interesting comments. Yes, there are
systems we speak of as organic in which the part is shaped by the whole
so as to be functional in relation to the behavior of the whole. And (if
I understand your reference to eco-system correctly), there are systems
in which the properties of the whole emerge from the interaction of its
parts. This may be a conventional distinction, but the more I think
about it, the less I understand it.

For example, I'm such an organism, and my organs function to sustain the
whole of my being, and my whole acts in a way to sustain my
parts. However, my parts originated in my genetic code, and my whole
being emerged from the nascent organs while still in the womb. I don't
know that there is any priority implied here, and the conventional
dichotomy might be meaningless. My genetic code is the product of
evolutionary history, and that history necessarily engaged the
eco-system. In other words, I'm an organism now, but only as a result of
a past in which I did not exist as an organism.

You loose me entirely on monotheism. I would see monotheism as a social
construct, not a reference to an independent ontological level of
existence that is outside consciousness. In my view, Okham's razor is
handy for this issue.

I believe I understand your distinction of unity and unit, and "unit"
would seem to be close to what I discussed as an "entity". The term
"unity" on the other hand seems to beg the question. To be speicific, we
have different kinds of unities that are quite different things. For
example, Gestalt theory, general systems theory, a system with
decreasing entropy, conceptual general categories, etc. But I'm not sure
such unities are not always in part our mental constructions. Even
something having decreasing entropy and therefore bounded, depends on
its relation with its surroundings and therefore is not a closed system;
it seems to fall short of being an objective unity. This, I suspect, is
your point about the universe not being dissipative, since entropy is
always a relative measure, and there's nothing else against which we
might measure the universe as a whole. However, didn't Boltzmann provide
a solution to this problem? (discussed nicely in Lawrence Sklar, Physics
and Chance (Cambridge, 1993).

--

Haines Brown, KB1GRM



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