Events as a basis
I wanted to record a semi-original thought that I had in regards to qualia research. This is, in a way, extension of Death of functions? article.
Good thing is that if you come up with a new Idea, you can still use mappings, but only to partially describe Idea. To fully describe Idea, you'd still need Idea. That is what we're trying to achieve - a superset of capabilities that mappings offer.
With functions/mappings, you use words (or at least some sort of symbols) to describe them. But words are mappings as well, from the encoding to it's properties and information, i.e. semantical meaning. So with mappings, when themselves are being described, you reuse them to explain them. This kind of self-reference is a very interesting property, and one to completely escape it you need something at a higher, or at least a different level, that we reuse itself to describe itself, instead of completely relying on functions.
If you're trying to avoid mappings as fundamental structure, you have to give up on many things. You give up on properties for the most part. You give up on the mapping transformation, so, you somewhat give up on transformations, i.e. a computational part of it. You give up on regular words, nouns and adjectives. And you need a concept independent enough so it can reference itself.
My current thinking leads to a conclusion that there is at least one concept that could possibly satisfy those constraints - an event.
- An event doesn't have any property. One could try to argue that event has either happened or not, but I'm fine with thinking that then the event is not realized, event hasn't happened, doesn't exist, is just not. It's something with one state and one state only (and not two).
- An event doesn't depend on what caused it or what comes after it. Event is either recorded or not, it knows nothing about how it came to be, what its purpose is or anything similar.
- An event is a transformation. It's a record of a finished transformation, a new state achieved, a transformation that has happened.
- An event doesn't have a particular semantics, unless you give it to it.
- An event doesn't have causal mechanics embedded in or around it, unless you force an ordering upon it or its environment.
- An event doesn't have any structure.
- An event can self-reference, because it behaves like an identity function that returns itself, nothing else can derive it except itself. This is due to its independence.
A fair question might be how do we get from events to regular objects?
My proposal (i.e. currently best guess) is to order events. You take events, add extra layer on top of them, and only then you are able to generate objects. Something along the lines: "event 1" and "event 2" are recorded, and "event 1" < "event2". We can call that "a mapping". As you can see, we have completely forgone the structure of events or of that ordering (i.e. mapping); we don't care about those, because we gave that event history a semantics, a meaning; we decided to impose a structure over it and to reason about that structure further. Events themselves don't have the structure.
A more complicated example would be something like: "event1" and "event2", and "event3" and "event4". As long as "event1 < event3" and "event2 < event4", one might couple "event1" and "event3", and also couple "event2" and "event4" and say something like that whatever structure correlated "event1" and "event3" transformed into a combo of "event2" and "event4".
What is an event? A coordinate in some weird vector-space, a space-time coordinate, or vector with all components for each of fundamental, non-decomposable properties? A unique state of the entire Universe? Don't we, in either of these cases, rollback ourselves to mappings? I don't know.
Some of the interesting observations:
- Event's are without semantic. We force a meaning upon them.
- Computation through events is more independent.
- David Bohm was writing "all is flux", "verbs, not nouns" etc. It seems that thinking in terms of events fits well into that kind of thinking.