/lit/ - Literature

>>22631058
Process is change. Substance is long term stabilities in process, e.g. atoms, protons, quarks. There is a process by which these come into and go out of existence.

It's a question of what accounts for the stabilities and variations we see in the world.

Process isn't reducible in the way substance is. Computation would be a good example of process.

You can decompose elements in a computation, e.g. nested functions, but composition in computation doesn't work like composition in superveniance substance metaphysics. Salt is salt because of how Na and Cl interact. 20 grains of salt is salt in the very same way that 1,000,000 grains of salt is salt. The output comes from the causal properties of fundamental units, which may (arguably) be unpredictable from the properties of these units themselves (classical emergence).

But 5 * 10 is not an output of 50 in the way that Na + Cl = NaCL. You can add grains of salt to salt and it remains salt. If you add more multiples of 5 or 10 to 50 you get a different number.More importantly, there are limitless ways to write an arithmetical function that will output 50 and so the output cannot be uniquely defined by the inputs in the way NaCl is defined by its component particles (bijective, surjective).

Now, chemical compounds are a good example of substance, as are atoms. When these were the most basic things we understood, it made sense to think that the world was "like these," all the way down. But what we seem to find is that there is no fundemental different types of substance that exist without beginning or end. Vacuum shows us a seething sea of virtual particles, continual process.

And this is why the pancomputationalism so popular in physics isn't compatible with superveniance substance views.

Pancomputationalism might be wrong, but I would wager that if it is wrong, it is wrong because reality actually does require real numbers to describe (and computation can't use real numbers since it is definitionally finite as define by Church-Turing)

>The whole point of information theory is to study information on it's own and not as something relational

Yeah, of course. The relation comes down to difference between, see Floridi The Philosophy of Information, Rovelli Helgoland, or pic related. Pic related is probably the most accessible.

Also a really good one. Great intro to information theory even before getting into the main thesis.

>>21366426
For example, if you follow the reasoning in the prior pic related and this one, you can see an obvious connection between the dialectical as an ontological engine of creation through contradiction and the creation of new information through progressive hierarchies of asymmetry. But crucially, said information can't exist "of itself," as seen from a view from nowhere. Rather, it exists relationally. There is a passing back and forth, as described by the dialectical. Interesting stuff.

My book shelf is fine. I have the Story of Civilization actually. It's when they open my Kindle or computer and see gigabyte after gigabyte of Springer mathematics texts, abstract math, logic, and every Springer Frontiers physics and information theory book, along with all the Hegel that they begin to flee.