... The particular occasions of experience are thus the most fundamentally concrete parts of the world, and everything else that we postulate the existence of, including things as elementary as matter, is some abstraction that's only real inasmuch as postulating its existence helps explain the particular occasions of experience that we have.
Some of these abstract things are so fundamental that we could scarcely conceive of any intelligent beings comprehending reality without the use of them. Immanuel Kant called these kinds of things, things we cannot exactly observe but which we cannot help but use to structure the things that we do observe, "categories". The ones that I will describe here are not exactly the ones that he describes, though there is significant overlap. The first thing we need to do to structure our experiences is to identify patterns in them. To do that, we need a pair of concepts that I call "quality" and "quantity", which allow us to think of there being several things that are nevertheless the same, without them being just one thing: they can be qualitatively the same, while being quantitatively different. Any two electrons, for instance, are identical inasmuch as they are indistinguishable from each other, because every electron is alike, but they are nevertheless two separate electrons, not one electron. In contrast, the fictional character Clark Kent is, in his fictional universe, identical to the character of Superman in a quantitative way, not just a qualitative way: though they seem vastly different to casual observers, they are in fact the same single person. If two people are said to drive "the same car", there are two things that that might mean: it could mean that they drive qualitatively identical cars (or as close to it as realistically possible, e.g. the same year, make, and model), or it could mean that they drive the same, single, quantitatively identical car, one car shared between both of them. With these concepts of quality and quantity, we can describe patterns in our experience as quantitatively different instances or tokens of qualitatively the same tropes or types. Out of this arise the notion of several different things being members of the same set of things ("qualities" as I mean them here mapping roughly to the mathematical concept of "classes", an abstraction away from sets, and "quantities" as I mean them here mapping roughly to the mathematical concept of "cardinality", an abstraction away from the measure of a set or class). And with that can be conducted all of the construction of increasingly complex abstract objects built from sets as detailed in my previous essay on logic and mathematics... — “The Codex Quaerentis: On Ontology, Being, and the Objects of Reality”
I was wondering if anyone had any arguments that patterns are objective — Gregory
Hm. How does a pattern differ from Shanon Entropy? — Banno
the world is contingent so it's the movement of time which makes these patterns. — Gregory
Open this door a bit more?Hm. How does a pattern differ from Shannon Entropy? — Banno
That's how I look at patterns, entities spontaneously impinging upon our consciousness from out of nowhere, but in orderly ways provisional of a baseline objectivity. — Enrique
I'd say that objective patterns (interrelationships) are all we see in the world. The personal meaning of those patterns is subjective. We perceive abstract patterns out there, then conceive them as-if concrete objects in the mind. For example, a sinuous movement on the ground is quickly interpreted as a snake, even it is a dragging hose. :smile:I was wondering if anyone had any arguments that patterns are objective — Gregory
I was wondering if anyone had any arguments that patterns are objective — Gregory
I'd say that objective patterns (interrelationships) are all we see in the world. — Gnomon
Hence patterns are "objective", their degree of repetition indicated by the Shanon Entropy of their encoding. — Banno
If you have all the fractions from 1/2 to the infinitesimals (what are they?), you can add them up to make 1 — Gregory
I took the most basic example I could above. Take a blank white piece of paper. Does it have pattern? When exactly, once one starts drawing, does patterns start? — Gregory
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