Re: Information and Natural Languages

   Rafael, I was too blunt previously.

>the question is what does it mean to be an observer? or, in other
>words, what is the ontological status of a non-observer.

   My observers are exclusively internal, even including myself.
There is no such a non-observer out there. This view however causes
a lot of headache to us, especially with regard to their ontological
status. Heidegger seems to have considered this problem seriously.
Some Heideggerian in the States told me that Heidegger in his intended
mysterious third division of "Sein und Zeit" tried to establish a new
ontology based upon the present progressive tense. In other words, if
everything is an actor or an observer in one way or another, the most
direct means of its description is in the present progressive tense
instead of in the present tense. I am quite sympathetic to the view.
Incidently, that Heideggerian found such statements in the hand-written
manuscript (roughly 200 pages) by Heidegger himself, kept in the library
of the University of Marburg.

   Regards,
   Koichiro

     Koichiro Matsuno
Received on Thu Dec 11 11:05:27 1997