Re: Computational Monadology

Antti Karttunen sent notice of a blog posting,
"The Definition of a Function", by Qiaochu Yuan:

http://qchu.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/the-definition-of-a-function/

James Ingram sent his thoughts on associated themes
of consciousness, determinism, and the arrow of time.

My reflections:

The issue of determinism comes up a lot in trying to understand Peirce,
partly because he invokes one sense of determination in his definition
of the sign relation:

http://mywikibiz.com/Sign_relation#Definition

Some people read this as a causal determination,
but I think a careful reading of his many uses
proves it to be a more general type of formal
or informational determination, much as the
term is used in mathematics.

I collected a few pertinent excerpts,
mostly from Peirce, at this location:

http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-December/thread.html#2197

Ciao,

Jon

-- 

inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey
knol: http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/3fkwvf69kridz/1
oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey