For Wol: models of physical reality - newton, AE, Cahill

From: mountain man <hobbit_at_southern_seaweed.com.op>
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2004 03:38:17 GMT
Message-ID: <J2xvc.3384$rz4.3110_at_news-server.bigpond.net.au>



Hi Wol,

If you have not already reviewed any of his work there are a fair number of papers published by Reg Cahill (Flinders Uni, Australia) under the banner of process physics, which appears to be taking the same relationship with physics, that process philosophy makes with regard to philosophy. (Whitehead et al)

Here is short quote from one of the papers that sets the philosophical ground:

=========[quoted stuff]=====================
"Western science and philosophy has always been dominated by non-process thought. This 'historical record' or being model of reality has been with us since Parmenides, and his student Zeno, of Elea, and is known as the Eleatic model (c500 BCE). However, nevertheless, and for the dubious reason of generating support for his supervisors being model of reality, Zeno gave us the first insights into the inherent problems of comprehending motion, a problem long forgotten by conventional non-process physics, but finally explained by process physics.

The becoming or processing model of reality dates back to Heraclitus of Ephesus (540-480 BCE) who argued that common sense is mistaken in thinking that the world consists of stable things; rather the world is in a state of flux. The appearance of 'things' depend upon the flux for their continuity and identity. What needs to be explained, Heraclitus argued, is not change, but the appearance of stability. With process physics western science and philosophy is now able to move beyond the moribund non-process mindset.

While it was the work of Godel who demonstrated beyond any doubt that the non-process system of thought had fundamental limitations; implicit in his work is that the whole reductionist mindset that goes back to Thales of Miletus could not offer, in the end, an effective account of reality. However the notion that there were limits to syntactical or symbolic encoding is actually very old. Priest [12] has given an account of that history. However in the East the Buddhists in particular were amazingly advanced in their analysis and comprehension of reality.

Stcherbatsky [13], writing about the extraordinary achievements of Buddhist logic in the C6 and C7 CE, noted that;

Reality according to Buddhists is kinetic, not static; but logic, on the other hand, imagines a reality stabilized in concepts and names.
The ultimate aim of Buddhist logic
is to explain the relation between
a moving reality and the static constructions of logic.

=========[end quoted stuff]=====================

Some of this stuff is emminently application to the efficacy of the Relational Theory (and Model) of data.

Here is an index to a few weeks worth of reading: http://www.mountainman.com.au/process_physics/

Hope you find it interesting.
Best wishes,

Pete Brown
Falls Creek
Oz
http://www.mountainman.com.au Received on Thu Jun 03 2004 - 05:38:17 CEST

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