Monday, November 05, 2007

Ade's musings on reality

Some thoughts I was having on the train earlier:

Ignoring uncertainties, it occurred to me that reality consists primarily of objects or, more simply, 'things that exist in some physical form'. And secondarily, reality contains events, or occurrences.

Logically, we can say that some objects exist and some objects do not exist. And, likewise, some events occur, and some events do not occur.*

So in this objects and events model, ignoring uncertainties, there are four logical combinations:

1. Events that occur involving objects that exist
2. Events that do not occur involving objects that exist
3. Events that do not occur involving objects that do not exist
4. Events that occur involving objects that do not exist

This can be represented by the following diagram:



Interestingly (perhaps) it would seem that events require objects, yet objects do not require events. Therefore three out of the four logical combinations are allowed. This, it occurred to me, was a strangely asymmetrical system. Or perhaps it only appears that way because of our blinkered three dimensional perception of time and causality.

That was about it really.


*Obviously, some objects are created by events and others are destroyed or modified by events.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

P.S.

I'm sure these ideas were cleared up thousands of years ago by some bearded Greek man, but I never studied philosophy and it just occurred to me this morning, after slightly too much coffee.

Peter Gasston said...

I don't tend to catch the train any more; perhaps I am missing out on having big thoughts like this.