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Wittegenstein said that all problems in philosophy are mere problems of language. This is not true, but certainly many problems can be reduced to that.
In particular, most problems in epistemology can be trivially dismantled when we realize that perception and representation are mechanical processes, questions only of physics and computation.
We might very well ask how a car knows if its tire pressure is low, but a rigorous answer must be an account of sensors connected to microcontrollers that sustain a virtual picture of the car by means of the circulation of lightning through a Turing machine.
The word virtual shares the same Latin root as âvirtueâ and it once meant âpertaining to virtue,â which is to say that virtuality is evocative Iâd excellence or efficiency flowing from inherent quality.
The modern sense of âvirtualâ refers to an ontological modality which sits in opposition to âactualâ â but to demote virtuality to a mere category of pretending is to discount the virtue, the inherent efficacy, of the imagination.
A virtuality is a kind of abstraction, a kind of drawing away. Borges illustrated this in his story On Exactitude In Science; a fictional country develops cartography to a maximum of rigor, and builds a 1:1 scale map of their kingdom, filling 100% of its territory, supplanting it
This exercise demonstrates that a map must be smaller than the world, because it is contained in the world. The map becomes smaller by means of abstraction. An abstraction is a generalization, a commonality drawn away from a series of specificities.
In the science of emergence, we discover that a set of relatively simple rules at the level of physics begets a larger and more complex set of interactions at the level of chemistry.
The classic example is the phenomenon of temperature; at the level of particles, temperature does not exist, though each particle has a velocity, a measure of its kinetic energy. A single particle can be fast or slow, but only a mass of particles can be hot or cold.
Temperature is an abstraction of speed and quantity; it is seldom necessary or useful to model temperature as a high-dimension vector of particles and speeds. From the perspective of temperature, each particle is wholly interchangeable with any other; only the aggregate matters.
We recognize the tendency of masses of particles to intermix until speed is distributed normally over space, but the recognition itself is an artifact of the mind; it literally exists, but it does not inhere in the mass that mixes, it inheres in the mass that recognizes.
If two bodies of water, one hot and one cold, are connected, then the warm water will flow into and mix with the cold until the temperatures are equalized. We call this tendency entropy.
Entropy is a very specific type of chaos. It is the chaos of pure homogeneity, which is not a condition that usually springs to mind when we think of chaos, but in fact pure homogeneity â total equality â is the distilled, platonic realization of chaos.
In a state of entropy, all of the energy is equally distributed, and any sub-division of entropic space is statistically identical to any other. This is perfect chaos, because in an ordered system, parts are not arbitrarily interchangeable. Every part has a meaning and a function
That a body of matter contains an uneven distribution of fast and slow particles whose distribution homogenizes over time is a fact, unaffected by the presence of an observer.
That a mass of cold water and warm water intermix and their temperature equalizes is an abstraction, present only in the mind of an observer.
Physical facts are actuality, abstractions like water and temperature are virtuality, and both are real, but if there is no one to see the water, then there is no water, only matter. âWaterâ is the name of a concept, and both names and concepts live only in the mind.
Where there is virtuality, there is an inside and an outside, and the conditions that obtain on the outside are opaque form the perspective of the inside. This is because virtuality is abstraction, and abstraction hides detail in order to make perception tractable.
