describing the "collaboration" of parts; thoughts on spacetime
May 19, 2014 at 11:18 pm
(This post was last modified: May 19, 2014 at 11:24 pm by Coffee Jesus.)
Here are some thoughts I just came up with and typed out. I will appreciate any criticism of the content of this essay or its choice of words.
The purpose of this essay is to describe different types of "collaboration", but I will use this first paragraph to explain why I want to discuss this. There are different ways to think of causality. You can imagine that causality is just the pattern by which events or objects are arranged on a timeline, or you can imagine it as a set of relationships between objects. I think the former is problematic because it assumes that there is an objective thing we can call "the timeline". There was a similar concept for space, which we called "the ether", but it turned out to be just an unsupported assertion. This leads to an interesting question: if there is no single reference that's common to all objects, then how do they cooperate as they do? An object will never change its relationship to another object without also changing all of its other relationships in corresponding ways, and the system that emerges from this collaborative behavior is what we call "spacetime". I think we might gain some perspective if we think about some common examples of collaboration that we can readily understand.
In this thread, "collaboration" describes any system emerging from the tendency of the parts to behave in a similar fashion. I have identified and named some types.
edit: aggh, I shouldn't have picked a word (referential) that already has a well established meaning in philosophy.
nonreferential collaboration
The parts exhibit similar behavior merely because they are similar. Some examples are identical marbles rolling parallel to one another, or women promoting equal rights. Women want equal rights for women because they are women.
coreferential collaboration
The parts exhibit similar behavior because they all utilize a common reference. Some examples are cathodes sending their cathode rays toward the same anode, or Catholics obeying the vatican. This could also be applied to the "timeline model" mentioned above, in which objects can interact because they're all utilizing the same timeline.
inter-referential collaboration
The parts exhibit similar behavior because they inform eachother about how to behave. Some examples are marbles bouncing off one another, or people who inform eachother about their culture traditions. If the information is transmitted completely unchanged, this may be mistaken for coreferential cllaboration.
The purpose of this essay is to describe different types of "collaboration", but I will use this first paragraph to explain why I want to discuss this. There are different ways to think of causality. You can imagine that causality is just the pattern by which events or objects are arranged on a timeline, or you can imagine it as a set of relationships between objects. I think the former is problematic because it assumes that there is an objective thing we can call "the timeline". There was a similar concept for space, which we called "the ether", but it turned out to be just an unsupported assertion. This leads to an interesting question: if there is no single reference that's common to all objects, then how do they cooperate as they do? An object will never change its relationship to another object without also changing all of its other relationships in corresponding ways, and the system that emerges from this collaborative behavior is what we call "spacetime". I think we might gain some perspective if we think about some common examples of collaboration that we can readily understand.
In this thread, "collaboration" describes any system emerging from the tendency of the parts to behave in a similar fashion. I have identified and named some types.
edit: aggh, I shouldn't have picked a word (referential) that already has a well established meaning in philosophy.
nonreferential collaboration
The parts exhibit similar behavior merely because they are similar. Some examples are identical marbles rolling parallel to one another, or women promoting equal rights. Women want equal rights for women because they are women.
coreferential collaboration
The parts exhibit similar behavior because they all utilize a common reference. Some examples are cathodes sending their cathode rays toward the same anode, or Catholics obeying the vatican. This could also be applied to the "timeline model" mentioned above, in which objects can interact because they're all utilizing the same timeline.
inter-referential collaboration
The parts exhibit similar behavior because they inform eachother about how to behave. Some examples are marbles bouncing off one another, or people who inform eachother about their culture traditions. If the information is transmitted completely unchanged, this may be mistaken for coreferential cllaboration.
