RE: ONT Re: Differential Logic A -- Discussion

Jon,

On a different plane I am flying. Flight, whether of a bird or airplane,
is an often mentioned emergent property. So if I assign flight's reality
to x, which assignments to the components of y might yield the emergence
of flight? 

Cheers,
Richard


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jon Awbrey
Sent: Monday, February 16, 2004 12:23 AM
To: Ontology
Subject: ONT Re: Differential Logic A -- Discussion


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DLOG A.  Discussion Note 12

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I return to my picture of the relation between a reality x
and a representation y whose components are y_1, y_2, y_3.

JA: The way I see it, we have a reality, say x, and then we have a
representation
    of that reality, say y.  If the representation y is "analytic" or
"articulate"
    in any sense of those words, then it will analyze or articulate the
reality x
    in terms of y's components, say, for example, y_1, y_2, y_3, just
for a start.
    So we have a picture like this:

                         x              y
                         o------------->o
                                       /|\
                                      / | \
                                     /  |  \
                                    /   |   \
                                   o    o    o
                                  y_1  y_2  y_3

Let me now draw what I consider to be a critical distinction with
respect
to the question of emergence, that is, to put it in the roughest
possible
terms, the issue of whether "the whole is more than the sum of its
parts".

If by "whole" we mean the object reality x, and if by "parts" we mean
the
parts of speech, so to speak, of the representation y, then the
emergence
of x beyond the y_j is hardly surprising, indeed, it's a corollary of
the
fact that the representation y is approximate, and thus it proves
nothing
about the potential emergence of y beyond its own components on the
plane
of the given representation.  Of course, this issue will only be
confused
even further by the unflective reification of representational
components.

On the representational plane, however, the utility of the
representation
generally depends on each representation being determined by its
components.
What results from this requirement of useful representations is an
obligation
to render more explicit what we mean by "parts" and by "sum" in a given
setting.
For example, if y is simply the set {y_1, y_2, y_3}, then y is something
that can
be said to exist "over and above" its elements, at least, in some sense,
even in
the case of a singleton set, say, z = {z_1}.  But any claim of
"emergence" for
the relationship of a set to its elements would most likely be
discounted as
trivial, since the set is defined to be a thing that is fully determined
by
its elements.

Jon Awbrey

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http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/mighty/history.html
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