Re: Information and Natural Languages

   Rafael Capurro's questions

>3) What about introducing causes in time (during the processes)? Does
>it make possible a better prognose? This is the point where I see the
>concept of information understood as the _causa formalis_.

seem to address the fundamental issue on the relationship between
time and information. Consider, for instance, that your time read
out of your watch and my time read out of mine interact at least
conversationally. Of course, any third party carrying its own
watch can also intervene. This picture would remind us time as
a whole sticky network of dynamic processes of asking "What time
do you have" to others endlessly. No global synchronous time
is in sight unless somebody carrying the master clock enters in
the scene. The synchronization between your time and mine is
dynamic and informational, literally. It is, however, not due to
efficient causes we understand.

>I think
>that modern science disregard this sort of causality taking into
>account only the _causa efficiens_ . The _causa formalis_ allows only a relative
>prognose, as I do not know exactly what the effect of the
>'in-formation' processes will be.

   Once we wish to take information causal, global synchronous
time would face its own difficulty. Sharing the global time
among all of the participants is a matter of imposition, neither
dynamic nor causal. Perhaps, we are quite familiar with what
acausal information looks like. If causal information becomes
focused, on the other hand, the issue of time would come to take
a new outlook. Time as the sticky web of time experiencing may
invite the "dynamics of time in time", though I cannot decipher
what it is all about at this moment.

   Regards,
   Koichiro

     Koichiro Matsuno
 
Received on Mon Dec 22 11:52:05 1997