Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Participants:
Arthur Protin
Bob LeChevalier
Carl Burke
Doug Landauer
Guy Steele
Jack Waugh
Jeff Prothero
Jim Carter
Robert Chassell
If you grow up in, say, North America, you're likely to get used to
seeing the Sun rise once a day in the East, and be tempted to assume
that it does this all over the planet. If you're into science or
science fiction, you might add a mental caveat that it is actually the
horizon moving, not old Sol. Because our daily experience is so
uniform, it's hard to remember that at the North Pole the Sun rises in
the South, and does so only once per year... and that if most humans
happened to live there, "the Sun rises in the South, once a year"
would be the common wisdom. If it seems ridiculous to you that any
human community could possibly be so parochial as to suppose that the
Sun behaves over the entire planet as it does at the North Pole, I
invite you to consider the concept "simultaneous".
Again, suppose you are wondering who murdered Ishtar. If you are told
that one month prior to the murder, Thshpck broadcast an offer of
three megacredits to anyone who'd kill Ishtar, you might decide to
check out the local guns for hire. But if you were also told that the
broadcast took place a light-year away from the murder, you could
immediately dismiss the broadcast as causally irrelevant to the
murder.
The bottom line is, any time you are interested in reasoning about the
universe we actually live in, the event-relationship categories 1-4
above are the ones useful for deriving valid deductions.
2 2 2 0.5
( (Ax-Bx) + (Ay-By) + (Az-Bz) )
and the elapsed time is independently
2 0.5
( (At-Bt) )
2 2 2 2 0.5
( (Ax-Bx) + (Ay-By) + (Az-Bz) - (At-Bt) )
For two events which are distant in space and close in time, the
above square root will be of a positive quantity, the result will
be real, the interval will be "space-like", and causal interaction
between the two events is impossible.
For two events which are close in space and distant in time, the above
square root will be of a negative quantity, the result will be
imaginary, the interval will be "time-like", and causal interaction
between the two events is possible. (So now you know what an
imaginary distance is :-)
Note that two events which happen at the same time and place are
separated by a zero interval, but the converse is not true: Two events
can be seperated considerably in time and space and still be separated
by a zero interval. In the latter case, it is exactly possible to
send a photon from A to B, with no time left over. What the two cases
have in common is that there is no time for thought between the two
events: any observer present at both events will perceive them as
simultaneous and co-incident... and in fact, the distinction between
the two cases is in the eye of the beholder, and won't appear in
a physically sensible tense system.
A quantitatively oriented language might relate the names for its four
tenses to the above arithmetic properties of the interval measure:
past: -imaginary
future: +imaginary
here-and-now: zero
distant: real
My first reading of Jeff P.'s tense commentary gives this (I may say more
upon further reflection):
Tense structures must be simplistic, and can take only 1 sumti as incidental
information without horrendously complex grammar, or expanding into
multiple sentences as in the example. You can call this a grammar
limitation; it is usually acceptable.
4. If you expand the tense into a separate predicate, then relativity is
implicit in Lojban, and in fact is NOT limited to tense. EVERY predicate
has the capability of adding, via sumti tcita, extra places, which can
include expression of causality and observer. The latter two can also be
expressed separately in a 3rd and 4th predicate, if the sumti tcita
structure is too limited.
thus
ko'a broda ko'e .i la'edi'u balvi ti ga'a ko'i ri'anaiku
x razzlefratzes y, and this is in the future of here-and-now to observer z,
non-causally.
5. Note that Lojban separates causality from tense entirely. THis is
partly because Lojban has several kinds of causality, and you'd have to
complicate Jeff's description by an indication of what kind did or did not
apply. The example I gave used physical causality.
The specific proposal was just that Loglan should provide for all four
tenses, and adopt the physically significant definitions for "before"
and "after"... which coincide with the Newtonian definitions in the
Newtonian limit. Should be at least as clear and non-awful as the
approach Loglan actually has, does, and will continue to take :-).
(As I stated in my original tense post, this is a personal pet peeve
which I bring up every few years.)
I would expect than that it also makes sense to tie any notion of
causality to someone infering that relation, usually the speaker.
Sure, but there are a great many ways that a report can be observer
dependent without reflecting what was apparent to the observer.
You don't have to "observe your own height" to notice that the rock is
twice as big as you, do you? (It's only the poor auditor who must
scurry around doing extra work because of your laziness...)
You most definitely do. You can only crudely approximate the comparison
of anything else to your own height, but you can do much better at comparing
the height of something with the height of something else placed near by.
My use of rulers (in either feet+inches or meters) is not dependent on
my desire to communicate those measurements to someone else. I also use
measurement devices where their sole benefits are precision, accuracy, and
repeatability.
Thus a chair is a chair not because it has the soul of a chair but
because it appears that it can function as a chair. Recognizing it
as a chair is the act of the observer. I have had the experience
of not recognizing a chair as a chair because it accomplished its
function in a manner that I had not seen prior. It became a chair
(something I could sit on) only when the observer (myself) could
visualize how it could function as a chair. My friend's chair is
not necessarily a chair to me.
I think you interpret this opposite to JCB! I think JCB was trying to
come up with an observer-independent description of chairness
dependent only on the publicly-available properties of the chair
itself, whereas you seem to be headed for a private notion of the
predicate which is uninterpretable execept with respect, not just to a
particular speaker frame of reference, but in fact to a particular
speaker. Now Loglan is descending into a Babel of private languages!
Rather than try to perfect the model of the universe before defining
how to talk about it, I back the approach of defining the language to
be as free of the model as possible and to make the role of the model
explicit such that evolving and conflicting models can coexist for
a sufficient length of time for the better one to prevail.
I don't have a problem with providing for the additional tenses needed
for relativity, but will the expansion exhaust the pool of available
tenses. How will we provide for the many strange ones that are required
for discussing time travel?
* Since they are pure fantasy, there are as nearly as many models of time
travel as there are writers about it. Hard to cover them all.
* I once proposed, and RLC agreed (a unique occurrence ? :-) that Loglan
should reserve a "do not define" bank of LittleWords for experimentation.
These can be used for local-to-a-story tenses. E.g., you might have
separate tenses for separate parallel worlds, or for self-created
causal loops ("All You Zombies..."). (To the folks who will immediately
note that English time-travel SF gets by fine without extra tenses:
Maybe the stories that really need them don't get written.)
We already allow for 4-dimensions in the spatial tenses. Does this mean
that we've covered your relativistic problems?
4 dimensions? How did you justify LWs for that? Not really, the
limit is a long way away. In the limit, a circle becomes either a
line or a point, but it's still nice to have a word for circle :-) But
it does count as a point against time travel.
Can anyone come up with a REAL example of a sentence that would use this
hypothetical 4th tense, including sufficient context as who is saying it
to whom, and why none of the other tenses are correct, provided that
the tags 'to observer ...' and 'in reference frame ...' (ga'a and ma'i)
are specified. Can you argue that the examples of such usage are numerous
enough to justify use of a cmavo or in a very limited
list of available words left? Can this '4th tense' be predicated instead
of abbreviated with a cmavo (all tenses are considered to be abbreviations
of some subordinate predication, as jimc is oft wont to point out)?
The argument for 4th tense as LW comes more from symmetry and elegance
than Zipf. If you are heavily using a set (simple tenses) with exactly four
members, it is inelegant (and potentially misleading) to have names
for only three of them.
The fixed size is based on a limited word space for the cmavo. The predicate
word and borrowing word spaces are infinite. It is arguable that far more
than half the cmavo we have now, including ALL of the tenses, are Zipfean
abbreviations for predicates. A limit on abbreviations seems much less
offensive than Jeff's accusation, now, doesn;t it?
Yet we are fully prepared to add to certain lexemes, and some lexemes have
equivalents that may be concocted ad hoc from the predicat words (including
tenses. So if you can express the relativistic and/or time travel concepts
as predicates, we can always use this method to cover them for tenses). Thus
even some of our cmavo lexemes are effectively open-ended.
This sounds like an argument for making the language some kind of
perfectionist
ideal TOTALLY DIVESTED FROM THE BASIC PURPOSE OF LANGUAGE, which is human
communication. If human vocal tracts (and hearing and multi-track processing
and other limits caused by our being human) are not allowed for in the
language
design, it is NOT a human language. Or do I misunderstand your argument,
Jeff?
My basic point was just that Loglan's word morphology means that we
are forever in danger of painting ourselves into a corner somewhere in
LittleWord space. It is always possible to get out of such a corner,
at the cost of a few footprints, but a better initial plan could have
eliminated the problem once and for all, no? Language prototypers
take note. (This belongs on a Language-Design mailing list, but
there's not enough traffic to justify one yet, and lojban-list seems
the closest current approximation.)
In short, I haven't seen why this is needed, and the discussion doesn't seem
to provide enough information on how it would be used in order for any
teacher to teach it.
Well, I think Jim considers this topic just short of too trivial to
discuss, Art thinks I'm probably but not yet provably daft, and you
think this is a waste of valuable time. Maybe if I can convince Art a
fourth tense is worthwhile, we can hammer out something specific
enough to satisfy you... :-)
(This is not to say that all possible Loglan expressions have to have a
pre-defined semantics. It means that we have to present enough information
in our prescription of the language that someone who wants to figure out the
semantics for themselves, can do so.)
(Um, we're wandering from relativity to quantum...) I'm not sure this
has anything to do with observer-dependence. The fashion and degree
to which the observed system are randomized depend on the system and
the probe, not on any characteristic of the observer who launched the
probe. It means you have are guaranteed a certain minimum amount of
problem reconciling successive observations of a system, but this
isn't observer-dependent: you have exactly the same problems whether
the successive observations are collected by different folks or the
same observer.
In talking about emotion, we're all aware that people perceive the same
event differently and so many (all?) of the Lojban root words about
emotions include an explicit case for the experiencer; you don't even
have to use a modal phrase ("sumti tcita", yucky terminology).
Your interpretation is defensible, but not the only one and (to my
eye) not the most natural. In English, at least, when one says that
a person (or thingie) is "present", we mean precisely that it is
practical to interact with that person (or thingie). Your definition
reverses this, and defines the "present" to be that portion of spacetime
with which we *cannot* interact!
In this treatment, the "past" and "future" are as you described, but
the "present" is the null cone, and (for non-pointlike events X)
includes that set of spacetime points which the event (potentially)
*interacts* with: both (potentially) influences, and (potentially) is
influenced by. (Your "present" becomes my "fourth tense".) To
modify your definition:
Per Prothero's comment on English meaning of 'present', I think that the word
has split into 2 (or more) meanings, and he seems to be jumping between
them. When, in English, "someone is present", this means indeed that
you can interact with them, but this is due to colocation in SPACE (and
only incidentally in time). The synonym is 'here'; i.e. "someone is here".
Well, as I see it, at least, the question is how to extend the English
"present" tense from the Newtonian limit into a more general setting.
Since humans, to date at least, haven't had to deal with relativistic
effects a lot in daily life, this is necessarily as much of a creative
act as a logical one...
Now I can recognize a whole bunch of arguable connotations about time that
can certainly support "present" in the sense of here matching "present"
in the sense of "present tense", but I for one don't think of them when
I use the term in the 'here' context. In Lojban, we have the two gismu
'zvati' x is present/'here' at
and
'cabna' x is simultaneous with
for the two meanings.
(I recognize that I may have totally misunderstood both Prothero and Carter in
your usages of 'present', but I never made it through relativistic physics,
which is why my degree in astrophysics has made me 'only' a computer-type.)
In any event, we have to teach the language, and relativistic effects are
a bit too tough for any textbook I'll ever write.
Do the flash and the bang occur at the same time? No, and we would not
describe them are simultanious, but we all
understand that they originate together.
(1) Should Loglan define the tenses *away* from the Newtonian limit? and
(2) Does the general Special-Relativistic case require additional
tenses?
Coincident-present
------------------
Interactive-present
-------------------
I'm afraid I'm not following you. Presumably we can treat ourselves
as being at rest, so your "when you start charging around at the speed
of light" can be treated equivalently as "when you start interacting
with objects travelling near lightspeed". (Our "Earthbound person" is
encountering photons, of course, but not commonly interacting with
them as enduring and individual objects.)
But I don't see how the volume which is neither past nor future can
"become the majority" (of spacetime, by "volume", I presume) unless
the extended event itself occupies the majority of space or time.
(Taking myself as an example: An extended event (should we make
"thing" a technical term? :-) a few feet (light-nanoseconds) by a few
decades (hundreds of megaseconds) across will have an
"interactive-present" a few light/decades in radius no matter how you
cut it... in a universe a light/giga-decade or so in radius. Since
any chord through this "present" is an observer-invariant interval, I
(naively?) presume the "volume" of this "present" is also
observer-invariant, and always much smaller than spacetime.
(Well, there was a time when they sang four part harmony with
different words, even in different languages, for each part! :-)
Well, my bits on the computer glitch and space murder were supposed to
have provided such examples. I'd have coded up some specific Loglan
phrases, but I don't even know what "pa na fa" have become these
days...
[3] "You're forgetting, this log had been running ten nanoseconds slow
for nearly a millisecond -- the module had been fluked for two
nanoseconds at this point."
Statement [1] notes that F was before G, using the past tense.
The unstated implication is that F might have caused G, hence
deserves further investigation.
Statement [2] protests that F was after G, using the future tense.
The unstated implication is that F couldn't possibly have caused
G, and might in fact have been a consequence of the general
collapse of the machine after G, hence isn't worth wasting any
time on.
Thank you for the example because it starts to provide evidence that
the "special" tense that you ask for may be unneeded.
I finally saw what you were asking for a distinction between present tense
interactable and present tense non-interactable. Thus, the all-important
fourth line of your example is not correctly represented in English.
It should be a compound of the past tense with the present non-interacting,
more like: "The module was independently fluking".
Maybe! I examined:
The pattern appears to be: "add a 'had' to reach past reference point",
with various operators added to refer to the past, present or future
of that reference point. So I extended the pattern with:
The problem is that English uses both suffixes and pre-positional auxiliaries.
I chose the "did" form so that everything could be consistently cast as
auxiliary operators in the same left-to-right order that Lojban uses.
[66] by Jeff Prothero (continuation of [64])
It's not clear to me that one can do the same sort of temporal
bank-shots quite as naturally with "did":
Hm. My next thought was that if one can compound a past tense with
tense-four, then such auxiliary verbs as "had" also ought to come in
four flavors (that would fall out naturally from the orthogonal
structure of Lojban, I hope, but it bears pointing out explicitly for
the English-pidgin version). So I ought to be able to say, e.g.,
"The module *tense-four* *tense-four* fluke"; in other words, the
module, in an event tense-four-related to the speaker, has a fluke
event tense-four-related to the event under discussion.
pa (past zone)
na (present zone)
fa (future zone)
qa (oblivious zone)
Actually, that was the very core of my observation: that you cannot
influence it at all.
(Ok, so maybe you want to banish the past tense to SF? :-) :-)
But you can extrapolate such activities, much as when you say "Aunt
Sue should be landing in L.A. just about now" (or as in my example of
a sister taking finals in a different solar system), and you can you
can talk in hindsight about what *was* going on in
someone's/something's oblivious zone, as in the computer-debugging
example under discussion.
If you think about it, I think you will find that your third-thought
objection applies with equal force to the future-zone tense and the
oblivious-zone tense, given that we are equally unable to have any
direct knowledge of events in the future or in the oblivious zone.
(The difference between the two, that we can hope to influence events
in the future, but not in the oblivious zone, doesn't appear to enter
into your objection.) Do you seriously propose that the future tense,
although conceptually useful, ought to occur only in fantasy and
science fiction?
As of right now I would not plead ignorance and abstain but would
vote a definite NO. I have several reasons:
Yes, and while I haven't commented on this for fear of muddying waters
which most folks already find sufficiently opaque, it would be
possible to use relativistic tenses (and related predicates, of
course) in a loose metaphorical way when other communication rates
dominate the discussion.
If all of these gadgets turn out *not* to have been working for the
last century, I will be as surprised as if New York city turns out to
have been a media hoax. (I am *not* asserting that either is
absolutely impossible. But I've been to New York and I've spent years
studying particle interactions in bubble chambers, and you'll have to
come up with an awfully good story to convince me I've been had...)
Sure, and clocks may start running backwards and fairy godmothers may
fill the air. Nobody is claiming otherwise, we're just trying to
figure out how to deal with the things we *know* about. Rod Serling
can fend for himself.
The above example is still pretty Newtonian in most respects: all the
events are in the same inertial frame of reference, so our RNA logs
can still be synchronized sensibly: we can maintain the illusion of
"simultaneous" to some extent. With a more complex scenario involving
observers on independently moving relativistic spacecraft, (or a
computer designed using optically coupled relativistic electrons
confined in suitable magnetic structures) we could remove this prop as
well.
past
present
future
I see that this is an example where the choice of observer frame of reference
may lead to a different truth value for the claim 'A is before B', in short
'A is before B to observer C (in reference frame D?)'. That the observer
and reference frame are necessary to the truth value does not negate that
the statement is either true or false given the observer and reference frame.
Or at least I don;t understand th example if it is indeterminite given such
knowledge.
Around a specified reference event the null (lightwave) cone divides the
universe into past, future, and a large zone between them with can only
be reached by faster-than-light travel and which hence can neither
influence nor be influenced by the reference event (if we lack FTL).
It is very reasonable to me to call this the "present". The null cone
is independent of coordinates so the "past" and "future" need no
reference frame specified. However, by proper choice of coordinates
the time of any "present" event can be forced before or after the
reference, but that time difference has no physical significance. In
such a situation it would be better to say that "A is relativistically
disconnected from B"; of course the gismu now assigned to "present" or
"simultaneous" would be used.
Jeff has some interesting ideas concerning events that extend over a
region of time and space. However, given that Lojban tenses are
somewhat extendible, I think we can wait until star travel arrives to
deal with that problem :-)
One of the themes I've been playing (more of a bagpipe drone :-) is
that, with a relativistically sensible tense set, "A is before B" is
observer-independent -- it will be true for one observer only if it is
true for all observers. It is only the Newtonian tenses which have
the irritating property of being partly in the eye of the beholder.
But why only 4 tenses? You just argued that there might be 5 needed.
And given some of the strage theories like superstring theory with its 8
dimensions, why not 8 tenses (assuming that tense is relevant to the others).
I thought 10 was the most popular number ... ? Anyhow, the "extra"
dimensions are rolled up too small to matter. How wide is the
universe? Smaller than a proton -- if you travel through any of the
last six dimensions, har har!
I find it hard to take tachyons seriously. You can look through your
legs and see the world upside down. You can look at electrons as
positrons going backwards in time. Yawn.
Lojban is already VERY avant garde among human languages in making time and
space tenses almost completely symmetric gramamtically. We haven't left in
the time travel tenses, but there is an obvious spot in the grammar if they
are ever needed. Otherwise, the structures for time and space are identical.
But separate in the default because MOST people don;t think in terms of time
and space in the same breath. Lojban at least allows you to.
Aye, and there's the rub: To think and speak relativistically takes
four tenses, to think and speak in the Newtonian model takes only
three. Loglan adamantly restricts you to three. Repeat after me:
You *will* think Newtonianly!
You *will* think Newtonianly!
You *will* think Newtonianly!
...
Wherever practical, we;ve designed choices into the language that seem to
remove a constraint - to make something obligatory in most langauges optional
in Lojban. Our tense system is arguyably the most powerful such in human
langauge, though I occassionally find places where given infinite lexeme
size we might do better. I challenge Jeff and anyone else to actually look
at the tense grammar and the lexeme members we have. You'll blow your mind.
(In Lojban you can orbit a point in time, whatever that might mean.) If
Jeff and others can come up with a way that breaks it and is needed for human
communication, though, then we should consider further change. But the window
of time to do this is small, so start studying!!!
I reserve judgement about whether you are just daft, Jeff, or maybe ornery :-)
I also have no idea how trivial the question is. We've spent far longer
discussing more trivial points in the Loglan design before. If a change to
the language design is really needed, it is not too trivial.
Because I don't know, it is NOT a waste of time. The baseline grammar is up
he flaws in the language before the textbook is done and the dictionary, and
the language design is frozen, probably indefinitely for points like these.
I would urge people to study the grammar, and look for more significant
questions (they are certainly there - because we've made undocumented
decisions
that no one has discussed publicly).
I'm not yet convinced lojban needs more tenses/spatials/relatials than it has,
but will observe (`will' as in its original sense, of `want/wish to'....
'observe' used metonymically ...) that an acquaintance is working on a
computer with nanosecond switching times. His circuit boards are 18 inches
across and speed of light delays are a design/debugging issue.
It is possible that in English, time and causality have some deep structural
relationship that justifies Jeff's assumption. But Lojban, as a logical
language, need not, and indeed I believe does not.
The link between time and causality is in the physics of the world we
live in, not in the language we speak. English has developed among a
population of people who care, on a continuing and everyday basis,
about things like catching trains, planting crops, and not getting
killed... concerns which require accurate communication of information
about time and space. I've been presuming that Loglan will be used by
people with similar interests, but there is of course nothing in pure
logic which justifies such a presumption.
From the point of view of pure logic, we can drop the tense system
altogether, or use the "future tense" to denote events happening on
odd-numbered days, the "past tense" to denote events happening on
even-numbered days, and the "present tense" to mark events which never
happened at all. Logic would be perfectly happy with this
arrangement. Would *you* be perfectly happy with this arrangement?
I think you would *not* (whether you will explicitly admit it
or not :-) because such a tense system would not be tuned to conveying
the information you are most likely to want to convey.
I think that if you have the insight and honesty to explicitly dissect
out *why* the classical Newtonian tense system you favor is more
useful than the even-odd tense system above, you will find that it is
because the classical Newtonian tenses have associated with them
powerful reasoning rules which allow your listener to form additional
valid and useful conclusions from your statements, and that these
conclusions are centrally concerned with potential causality. For
example, scholars give primary credit to the *first* publication of a
fact or theory. Logic would be as happy with the *last* or *best*,
but from the standpoint of potential causality, the *first*
publication is uniquely positioned. I don't think this consideration
is *central* to priority disputes and most other discussions driven by
tense-carried information.
Since neither you nor anyone else has tried to formulate a formal
semantics for Loglan, I can't examine the reasoning rules *you* have
postulated for the tenses, and am necessarily reduced to offering my
own and guessing at yours... letting you arbitrarily dismiss mine and
object that my guesses are mere straw men. My formulation of tenses
is designed to allow the listener to make valid deductions about
potential causality. In the relativistic regime, the naive Newtonian
formulation does not allow this, and the four-tense relativistic
formulation does. What does the naive Newtonian formulation offer in
return? Or is conveying useful information to the listener completely
irrelevant to Loglan's mission?
There was consensus that if, in the future, a case was made to justify a
relativistic tense of the sort proposed, it is merely the addition of a
cmavo to lexeme PU. The interaction of this tense with the rest of the
tense structure is of course unknown as to semantics.
pc did not have the exact reference, but the following should be
enough for jimc (who is at UCLA) to find, and probably Jeff as well.
Consider:
If so, Loglan detectives are going to suffer! Many detective stories use a
`means, motive, opportunity' format for figuring `who dun' it---Aristotle's
"final cause" is the type of cause considered, as well the "material cause"
and "efficient cause".
Loglan should be able to handle a world view that presumes that all
entities in the universe, including rocks, are sentient in some manner
and that all occurrences may be explained in a telelogical manner, in
which the causal events occur _after_ the caused event.
In English, when we say "If A then B" we often mean that "A causes B".
The example used in Loglan discussions historically is "If you water it,
it will grow." Those same historical discussions (most recently in one
of the Volume 5 issues of The Loglanist - I believe Richard Kennaway was
one of the authors, and is on this list - care to comment, Richard?),
clearly indicate that in Lojban, the conditional is a purely predicate
logic one, and that causality is not part of the definition. Elaborate
efforts were then made to allow parallel and independent assertion of
causality in a similar and parallel structure to the logical connective
form to specifically delineate the semantic opposition between the two
concepts. We retained this distinction in Lojban. Thus, for our example:
which both use lexer_G_935 of the lexer grammar to form the first compound.
A SIMILAR OPPOSITION EXISTS BETWEEN TIME TENSE, SPACE TENSE, AND CAUSALITY.
bagi do dunda loi djacu ko'a gi ko'a banro the tensal (?)
After you water it, it grows.
or
or
It turns out that causals are permitted anywhere else that tenses are
permitted, and indeed all sumti tcita of lexeme BAI and their
conversions and negations can occur anywhere that tenses are permitted.
The only constraint, which is dictated by the LALR1 grammar, is that you
cannot use a nonce sumti tcita using FIhO inside lexer portions of the
grammar, since a FIhO 'modal' (to use jimc's word) can carry a full
predicate with all of its sumti and other grammatical garbage into the
modal, requiring in effect the full grammar to be recursively embedded
in one lexeme.
(It is these same sumti tcita that allow specification of observer and
reference frame. Enjoy:
1 Why do we define the standard three Newtonain tenses the way we do?
Put another way: sorts of deductions does this formulation support?
2 Given the above, how can we extend those definitions into the
relativistic regime while doing minimum violence to them --
while preserving their logical properties as much as possible,
so that the sorts of deductions we are habitually accustomed
to making will continue to be valid?
"A before B" really means that "A is the in *past* part of spacetime
as partitioned at B". Whether this is true in a particular case
depends on just what rules we use to slice up spacetime. You are
arguing for a naive-Newtonian partition (apparently) because it saves
a LW, I am arguing for an alternate partition because it comes as
close as possible to letting people continue to use their familiar
Newtonian-regime tense-related reasoning patterns even in the
relativistic regime -- it preserves the logical properties of the
tenses, to the extent that it is possible to do so.
Since long before Newton, the present tense was used to describe things
that are going on now, that is, things you can not possibly see the
beginning of but may if you are "fast" enough see the end of. Yes, I
am sure that you could take long enough to get there that the Mississippi
would no longer be flowing, all its water stolen by the Achefallia
(I forget how it is spelled). Back when fast was horse back, "now" still
meant that you might have to be infinitely fast to observe it. The
notion of causality and interaction were IMHO far less significant in the
understanding of "now" than was the concept of linear time.
"Now" will still mean what it did even for events outside of the zone
of interactability. Let me offer the following SF situtation as an example.
I set up my banks and banks of lasers years ago and fired them such that
now even as we speak their moon is exploding.
(and if you were omnipresent you would be able to both observe my statement
and its truth.)
The event light years away is going on now, I caused it years ago and I
will observe the feedback of the event in years ahead.
Any good change to "now" has to deal with a non absolute time. It is
not important to the notion of "now" that the senses may witness the effects
of two events in the wrong order, just that there is AN order. If time is
not monotonic, then the notion of "now" will have to be revised. As
long as time is monatonic, then there is one true ordering of the events
and while we have only a limited vantage point to observe the reality,
we are omnipresent in our model of that reality. "Now" means concurrent
with the speacker in that absolute time.
I can't find any better way of dealing with this (as of now).
It is not fair to claim that "The speed of light may not be the true limit",
implying that this would be no more surprising than the insights
Special Relativity added to those of Newton's Principia. The role
of the speed of light is as central to Special Relativity as universal
gravitation is to Principia. A *fair* comparison comparison would be:
(From General Relativity, we now know that the angles of any physical
terrestrial triangle do *not* add to exactly 180 degrees, and that any
physical parallel lines near Earth do *not* maintain a constant
distance between them. But Euclid's geometry still serves us as well
in practice as it did him, two millenia ago -- it is true to a very
high degree of accuracy, as the Greeks discovered and nobody since has
disputed. I haven't heard any proposals for striking the word
"parallel" from English *or* Loglan, whatever its status in Nature's
geometry...)
BUT: General Relativity or no, you can still plot the orbit of a
spacecraft just fine using Newton's laws, just as Newton plotted the
orbits of comets -- and in fact, NASA does so. Newton's laws are
still taught to students and used by engineers on a daily basis, all
over the planet. Nothing in General Relativity would make Newton hang
his head in shame, feeling that he had thoroughly screwed up.
Light travels more slowly in dense media than in vacuum, so we can and
do observe particles travelling faster than light in liquids and
solids, emitting characteristic Cherenkov radiation -- a photonic
"sonic boom".
Photons may yet turn out to have nonzero rest mass, hence travel
slightly slower than the relativistic "speed of light". (In which
case we will probably start calling it the "speed of neutrinos", or if
*they* have rest mass, "the speed of gravity". We still have almost
no idea why particles have mass, much less why they have the
particular masses they do...)
You can send light the long way around the planet and take a short
cut, arriving "faster than light". Clever, no?
Einstein never said (anything like) "consider this deep structure for the
universe and see how that prevents us from measuring the speed of light
relative to its medium (the ether)" rather he said (something like) "let us
accept the observation that we can not measure the speed of light relative
to its medium and see what the mathematical implication of that failure is")
The utility of the proposed "fourth tense", like the utility of our
particle accelerators, doesn't depend on the eternal acceptance of
Special Relativity as the best available description of phenomena like
the oblivious zone, just on the *existence* of those phenomena:
Even defining what one *means* by the phrase "faster than light" is a
vexing problem, if one makes any attempt at all to make it consistent
with what we know about the universe. For example: travelling faster
means covering a given distance in less elapsed time, by ordinary
intuition. Travelling at lightspeed means covering any given distance
in *zero* subjective elapsed time. Thus, travelling faster than light
presumably means covering a given distance in less than zero elapsed
time. This is a difficult concept for me... Again, any massive
observer boosted to lightspeed has infinite mass, as measured by a
naive observer. A massive observer boosted to more than lightspeed
would thus presumably have more than infinite mass, which is again a
difficult concept. Anyone travelling FTL will appear to be travelling
backwards in time to some observers. If you really let timetravel in,
it is going to be very difficult to keep *any* conservation laws in
effect, no? As I commented earlier, if time travel is possible, it is
quite difficult to explain why the extreme conditions of the Big Bang
didn't propel particles forward in time, to rain down throughout our
contemporary universe... everywhere one looks, things seem to be
coming unstrung. It's like adding the axiom "2+2=5" to arithmetic
and then frantically trying to patch all the problems that follow.
I have not had time to review the texts on relativity, and since
you claim to work with it, can you post any examples of situations that
require time to not be monotonic, and/or prohibit an absolute ordering
of events (in an inhabitable reference frame)?
The problem is that the observed order of events often depends on the
observer, rather than the events.
No, you have fallen into a trap here: the use of the word "state"
begs the question. Implicit in the word "state" is the notion that
you are taking a "snapshot" of the entire universe *at the same point
in time everywhere*--but that is exactly the notion we are trying to
get a grip on! Observers in different inertial frames will differ on
what constitutes a state.
Here you say that states are subjective, but the various subjective states
that you referred to are misdirection.
There is either determinism (and we can keep our physics) or there isn't.
I will assume for at least this lifetime that there is determinism!
So, I am sorry, but the "successive states" model simply does not
necessarily define absolute global time. It does define local time,
and that is consistent with relativity.
The simple fact is that many things which seem "self-evident" are not,
and indeed a good number turn out not to be true. (Part of the
delight of science! Was it Eddington who said "The universe is not
only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we *can* imagine"?
But even if we cannot imagine Nature's wonders, we can discover them,
if we keep a sharp eye and open mind...)
(If you still think that relativity and interactivity affect our
notion of "now", realize that the size (in four dimensions) of the
zone ("cone") of commonly agreed "now"ness is a function of the
difference between the velocity vectors of the two observers IFOR's!)
In a sense, but since such translation is not needed, the point is moot.
Only one state description will correctly imply the future. That state
description is one of a sequence that is the absolute time reference.
That we can not measure, observe, or even correctly infer those
state descriptions will not deter me from the belief in their existence.
(A much more compelling proof on their non-existence will be required
to move me.)
Now what proof have you that we can not ever infer the "true and absolute"
event sequence for the events we do observe?
None! I don't even have a clear notion of what a "true and absolute"
sequence would be, given what we know about the universe, much less
how it might be established. (A verifiable angel stating that "Allah
is the only God, Mohammed is his Prophet, and Mecca defines his
Inertial Frame," perhaps? :-) Can you suggest an experiment that would
establish such a frame?
I also don't have any proof that we will not one day discover that the
Earth is indeed at "true and absolute" rest, with the rest of the
universe rotating around it, just as Ptolemy supposed.
In both cases, it is clear that any such proof would be of very little
practical importance -- it is *abundantly* clear that in practice, the
Earth is most conveniently treated as being just one more planet, and
that in practice the local inertial reference frame is most
conveniently treated as being just one more typical inertial reference
frame.
even if they kittens and lions sometimes look alike to some observers,
neglecting size and distance. We expect the speaker to make a
good-faith effort to distinguish the two cases for us, and provide an
observer-independent description, not to provide unedited sense-data.
In summary:
Right, there will always be people that can not understand the laws that
affect their perception of the absolute reality, and as such will never
be able to correct their perception for those distortions.
Further, we may have to refine our models to more completely correct
our observations.
Riposte III: I've explained what *I* think the primary use of tense
information is -- to provide the auditor with the
information needed to make qualitative deductions about potential
causation and interaction. For example, *I* regard the differences
between
The third value holds where neither a true or false value is applicable;
the traditional question is "When did you stop beating your wife?"
I seem to recall that there is another way to assert this third truth
value in Lojban, but I do not recall the method. If this is available,
then there is no need (other than shorthand convenience) for the fourth
tense; you merely state that *neither true nor false* *actor* *relation*
*arguments* ***at all times/places, if you must specify***
The entire Lojban tense/locator system is (as RLC likes to remind us)
a shorthand convenience for things we could say via (appropriate)
predicates, and one can certainly handle the fourth tense this way,
with or without a third logic value. But you lose symmetry,
compactness and compound tenses involving the fourth tense -- you add
enough verbosity to practically guarantee that nobody will actually
use the fourth tense: "Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit
needless words!" (Will Strunk.)