Multidisciplinary studies/Categories

From: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Genezistan/Synchronization_of_thoughts/lecture_1

Lecture 2

In lecture one I have asserted that verbs indicate relations and carry the meaning of verbal knowledge representations that we either understand based on our previous knowledge or we do not. Understanding is the capability of seeing a whole, an object in terms of its form and content while maintaining continuity and identify. Such generic terms (object, existence, life, universe, etc.) that indicate one need to be made specific and the frist step of making them specific is isolation. As a result of isolation you get the next level of generality with the ensuing quantity of two. With regard to concepts you get form and content, quality and quantity. These are properties of objects, just as relations.

In Lecture 2 I am discussing the most generic categories of our thinking such as space and time, form and content, quality and quantity. Also, the concepts of dichotomies, such as existence, life, universe, body and soul. I will discuss in details the semantic primitives called relation, object and property. The concepts of finite and infinite and the concept of movement. I will also address the issue of personality, mind, spirit, emotion, reason and will. I will cover some human capabilities, namely perception and senses leading to the issue of creation versus production. I will also address the issue of Grammar persons, and the aspects of Time: present, past and future.

What exists?

The concept of existence, life, universe, the concept of one are the most generic terms or names of what exist. Clearly, existence is a personal experience and by the way of analogy we attribute existence to other objects that we do not identify with. Moreover, we also atribute existence to our creations including our thoughts and ideas, or objects that we cannot perceive or have direct experience of. We are aware of the fact that we have a limited knowledge of the world and we tend to keep in mind as see as existing what is visible or near us and assume that what is beyond that known horizon is built up in a simlar fashion.

We have direct experience of non existence too, either when objects seem to be emerging from nothing or when they vanish into oblivion. Such changes may be fast and observable or very slow and therefore inferenced. Therefore all the changes in the properties of objects are relative to the observer and the elements of the model to describe the situation must include the verb to indicate specific changes, the number of participants, such as any objects causing the change and the person observing and/or reporting the change and the concepts of time and space as the properties of any change. As a part of this process we have critical values identified by time and space to signiify the begining and the end (the definition of the boundaries) of a life or existence of an object.

As far as humans are concerned life ends when Oxygen is no longer supplied to the brain and/or when a certain enzym fails to be working in the blood. Human life starts with the fertilization of an egg and/or nine months later subject to chunking. Chunking is a way to divide time and space in a fashion that best suits the observer and/or actor acting in the belief that his/her chunking is right. Notice that not "real" or "true", but right, in other words defendable through opposing power conditions prevailing.

Power conditions are relevant in situations where division is sought instead of unification. Where repulsion and attraction are simultaneously in effect. Or in other words where controversy is seen as more appropriate than resolution. With respect to ideas or though harmonization is necessary where cooperation is preferred to competition. Construction is based on cooperation, demolition may not need cooperation at all. In fact, demolition occurs spontaneously, in chaos, in disorganisation, where objects are left on their own.

Decomposition, degradation and decay are natural, entropy is a law of nature. Working against the forces that cause disappearence and expiry is human to the extent of illusion, misjudgement and false beliefs concerning existence. The end is emotionally not acceptable and will to survive and prolong life is programmed in humans at a visceral level and has little to do with reason or logic available to consciousness. Of the changes visible or otherwise those taking place at a very fast speed either to unite objects or dissect an object have special importance. Objects fused into one or blown apart into many due to the use of an external force to break existing symmetry are thought to be different (non identical) after or before such events. While humans can analyze and disassemble objects with ease, putting them together and assembling them creates a difficulty. In particular, breaking down a living organism and eliminating synergy seems to be a direction that seems impossible to reverse, hence a challenge ever since we are about.

But it is certainly true that manufacturing is a proven technology for assembling complex objects, and in may ways biological engineering is an effort to apply such technologies. As a precondition of the successful application of the technology of precision targeting and delivering needs to be developed at a nano level too, just as it has been developed at cosmo level for space research. In fact, the whole story of humankind is focused on the development of targeting and reaching targets called objectives, physical or otherwise.

In the field of looking for objects that have a verbal form such an exercise is subjected to finding content associated with forms. The explicit content of a form is not necessarily displayed in the vicinity of the forms, rather such content is associated in the directly inaccessible mind of humans with a high degree of variation that need to be aligned and validated. Thus in thinking humans are in a constant search of content, which may result in a hit, in other words in finding two forms or patterns that are similar or identical. But the real purpose of the mental search is a match, a content associated with a form that altogether may be found to cause content, i.e. the end of the search for another form with a matching content.

Thus in case of meeting anything new we look for anything similar that has left a mark in our memory and we try to find a hit in the repertory of ours of anything existing. If we fail to do so, we may find that we have met something not existing, a miracle or another category of unfounded experience, such as a dream, illusion, etc. We know that the mind makes a distinction between the two states (dreaming and awaking) and we are normally aware of what is real and what is not. But we also know that our brain works to make up for any losses or incompleteness whether visual or auditory and in that sense we are all prone to self-deception.

The concept of space time, motion, speed and directions, dimensions

Well before we learn to speak we are already aware of space and time and are also capable of orienteering at least in space. We have a mental frame of reference of the world closely related to the space we are born to and living in. That frame of reference refers to the outside world, to some disctinctive points or significant persons to which or whom we relate our actions, including mental ones as thinking, emotions and feelings. It is a way of life or the most basic practice of living organisms to control the distance between themselves and the objects in the world around them subject to their fears and attractions, which are in parallel with the strangeness and familiarity of the objects perceived. Such emotions make us humans move either closer to or farther away an object in our focus that we perceive or attend to. Besides this instinctive reaction our intellect and will also control such decisions and we cannot always be sure which is in control at any moment of time.

The main lesson on the subject of spacetime is that we need to be orienteering in it, and we shoud be aware of the existence of a frame of reference of the observation and the statements that we make. It should not be stressed enough that you should always be aware of your own position (and the horizon) in space and time, and should not try to look at or describe the world in a timeless and dislocated fashion. Time and space are our widest parameters of Context and therefore they are a condition that you should always be aware of. The reason is that linguistically speaking a frame of reference is not limited to the means that are provided in any human language to make distinctions between the objects referenced. So the speakers of a language tend to forget about space and time and context in general, unless expressly stated. But that does not mean that your context would have disappeared. It may be in the background, but it is always there and will be expanded or collapsed as necessary for understanding by using either verbal or other means.

The lesser lesson is that we see objects closer to us bigger and those farther away from us smaller than their actual size as related to other objects in our view. This change of size subject to distance has psychological importance as well. Child drawing are a good example and personal comfort zone (proximity) control is another.

The spatial relations described in speech usually refer to an object in space in relation to another object in space either independently of the position of the speaker, or observer, or subject to it. Therefore in most cases you deal with relative frames of reference where the location of an object is expressed in relation to both the viewpoint of the perceiver and the position of another object. Or, more importantly, where the location of the object with respect to the observer is expressed by a verb that defines the relation itself. Yet we still work with concepts of relation that are directly derived from our concept of space. (Remember that when you observe or perceive space, you look for a change, and change is created by motion whether of your own or that of an object in some relation to you.) In a sense, perception and movement are two sides of the same coin, and the coin is action. Non action under certain circumstances may mean death.

Space is observed in a relation between a part and a whole, a member and a class, or another spatial arrangement, such as in a hierarchy, a circle, something in a plane, most of the time in two dimensions or on a plane.

Existence or life is about moving and changing, so the essential relations to be discovered between objects are visible and therefore spatial, not causal (causative), which are not visual anyway. Casual relations are usually impossible to identify because of the multitude of simultaneous causes and the long-long chain of casuality (see Butterfly–effect) and because drawing the boundaries in the chain of casuality is quite arbitrary, hence not justified. In contrast, the relation between objects that are created by action, and which results in another object is a lot easier to grasp or to see. You may also called it creation or evolution as you like. The point is that such a process takes place not just in the physical reality, but in your mind too, where you create secondary objects or concepts to reflect chunks of reality taken from the outside world.

Therefore movement in space is identified in a relation, that of opposites (direction), or negation (of identity) (or a change of a former state, existence itself) and its results, as we shall see it later. In fact, relations and operations are the two sides of the same event. (Mind you, even the properties of the basic operations in arithmetics are relations.)

As you will have known both additon and multiplication are commutative, associative and may be inverted, where the commutative property shows that the two sides of an expression between the equal sign may be swapped, and also that within one side of the sequence of operations the elements may be swapped, or that the two sides of the expression may be mirrored by breaking the symmetry and changing the direction or the sign of the operation between the elements. This suggests that reflection, mirroring and transposing objects in real and mental space are crucial operations in thinking and producing concepts of which the most generic is an object.

Inclusive spatial relations

All relations are in fact inclusive of space and there are no relations exclusive of space. If something is defined as being outside space and time, then it cannot be described in terms of finite objects existing in space and time. And if something in space has no extension (finite dimensions) then it cannot be located, therefore it is not included in space and time either. But the relations used in our definitons are usually originated in our spacetime concepts. Part-whole, Class-member, Upper and Lower for example can all visualized in a two-dimensional space, becaus they are finite and a part of a closed system.

On the other hand any attempt to measure infitinity with finite units of measurements results in a fiasco, because you cannot divide infinity (totality, wholeness, one) into separate finite chunks. (It appears as if wholeness can not be separated to result in other wholenesses, without a remainder or a fraction.) There is always an imponderable quantity or remainder that we miss in trying to identify, or to close the boundaries between any two separate elements in space and time. Thus the boundary is also a component to count with whether we see it or not, like in case of the force acting on the surfaces between two adjacent bodies or objects, between a cell and the core, etc. causing tension on the surface.

It is very likely that all our concepts of relations are derived from our concept of spacetime, that is worth recapitulating again by giving a defintion and some more details next.

We have direct experience of space from before birth, the experience of time comes later in mental development. Time does not exist without movement, so we create our concept of time in relation to movement in space that we have direct evidence of, whether it is our own movement or that of the celestial bodies, for instance. Now movement is an action as we have seen and it is also a relation usually between a fixed point of space (point of reference, usually that of the observer) and another point of space where an objects moves to. This leads to the creation/conception of a couple of other concepts such as path and speed and mass and energy. But all those concepts come later in the development of knowledge about the world and ourselves. (interestingly enough, the forces of Nature come in families of three, just as many ancient signs and symbols have just three or four elements. Examples: yin yang and the two triangles turned into hexagon.)

In conceptualization we use our perception of spacetime by "freezing" objects individually as whole or complete entities separated from their environment, hence in a "contained in" relation. Such related objects are then chained into a hierarchy with varying number of members and with one at the top. This is reflected in our thinking and categories, such as universe, one life, etc. This process of division is also told as ancient knowledge in the story of Genezis, whichis very similar to what science has found: the growth and development of living organisms from one cell, etc. The process of reproduction normaly takes place by a split of some level and a recombination of elements at another. The very fundamental change is however a kind of conversion of energy into mass or vice versa, from visible into invisible, etc.

Representation of spacetime in 2D

The changes of forms, the appearance and disapearance of objects taking place at very high speed