Re: Single atom universes, etc.

["Judith Rosen" <***>]

It's interesting to compare the observations that unity or wholeness is a
sum and nothingness is the lack of anything that makes up unity. In
mathematics, zero is a number. A singularity. An entity. A set with zero in
it isn't the same thing as an empty set, mathematically speaking. When
mathematicians try to divorce mathematics from any "referents" (as my father
referred to them), they wind up with weird, unresolveable paradoxes. It was
my father's contention that there are no such thing as paradoxes in the
material world.

It was the lack of referents in the theoretical "universe with a single atom
in it" that my resistance was about, by the way. Anything we think we can
infer about such a universe is likely to be an "optical illusion" of the
mind's eye, much like mathematics creates under specialized and artificial
circumstances.

Similarly, when studying a dynamical system,  it is common sense that any
relationship between two parts-- that has observable effects-- means that
the relationship is an integral "part" of the system. It has to be given the
same weight in study as the two parts themselves or there is little hope of
true understanding. Is it just because I was raised by Robert Rosen that all
this seems OBVIOUS to me? Why does science have such constipation over it???

Judith


----- Original Message -----
From: "John Kineman" <***>
Even nothing-something must include
> the dash, which is the relationship, so the most basic percept actually
> involves 3 aspects; the two aspects being related, and the relationship
> itself. Western science threw the relationship out of the model and kept
> the idea of things. Then the only models you can create are dynamical
> ones, i.e., models that relate the things. But we need models that can
> relate relationships too, so they have to be put back into the system.
>
> JJK
>