Re: Form

[John M <***>]

Howard,
would it be of any use to call 'form' (as you said: as you use it mostly),
 like an instant flash, a snapshot, in the ever changing (dynamism?) world -
as reduced to its quantizable aspects? A form can be identified (limited?)
by its parameters and when dynamics 'change' the shape: - well it becomes
ANOTHER form. 1 form cannot be its dynamically changed "continuation".
You said "timeless, or eternal" - synonymous indeed.
That allows your: "any dynamics that maybe imposed on form" as well.
I consider 'form' a limited model, a momentary extract of any dynamism that
takes (and may change) shape.
In this sense I don't see so much difference in the positions argued on this
list recently.

John M

----- Original Message -----
From: "Howard Pattee" <***>
To: <***>
Sent: Friday, December 03, 2004 1:06 AM
Subject: Re: Form


> Steve,
>
> I normally use "form" in the sense of shape or configuration. However, the
essential aspect of form as used in physics, mathematics, and much
philosophy is that it can be conceived of as synchronic or timeless, and
consequently independent of any dynamics that maybe imposed on form.
Technically, physicists speak of "configuration space" in which forms are
defined independent of the dynamical laws. Logical and mathematical forms
are also considered as timeless structures. That is why they are called
"formal." This is somewhat like the Platonic concept of forms that were
considered as timeless or eternal.
>
> Synchronic and diachronic models are complementary. Physical laws can be
described by state-determined models that change in time, or equivalently by
synchronic forms like symmetry principles or extremum principles (least
action). In quantum theory there is the "sum over histories" approach that
is somewhere in between. The Ghorbanzadeh paper is interesting because his
model is also somewhere in between. I think he is chunking normal state
descriptions into "short-timeless" forms that he defines as a new kind of
state. (I haven't followed the math.)
>
> Relational models as described by Rosen are timeless forms. They do not
imply a dynamics. Rosen was well aware of the complementary nature of formal
and dynamical models. Here is a short discussion from the 70s when he was
using automata models. We were discussing von Neumann's point that formal
timeless systems can produce paradoxes whereas real systems that depend on
time cannot.
>
> Rosen: In physics you [usually] take the state description as primitive,
and what you are interested in is the way the system changes state. . . In
automata theory one of the things you can do is to define states in terms of
equivalence classes of histories. The state becomes an equivalence class of
all possible histories going back to minus infinity, as it were, which put
the system into the same state.
>
> Pattee: It eliminates time, the order in time of the system.
>
> Rosen: That's right. So you have an alternative way of describing what's
going on, either in terms of equivalence classes of histories . . . or the
state description which physics takes as primitive. Also, the fact that we
are dealing with complex systems which admit many descriptions, each of
which is only partially true, gets rid of many of the logical difficulties
that have been raised here, while at the same time raising still others.
> [A Question of Physics: Conversations in Physics and Biology, Paul Buckley
and David Peat, eds. Univ. of Toronto Press, 1979, p. 106]
>
>
> Howard
>
>