ISBN:  Unavailable

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Page count: 25

Abstract: "This paper is concerned with the -- in contemporary computer science -- radical notion of applying the concepts and methods of vector algebra to the problem of describing the semantics of concurrent computation. Its focus is to display how to capture in vector algebraic terms the act of observation and the inference of causal connections in a concurrent computational context. The central analogy is that of an observer equipped with nothing but binary sensors, a single causality inference rule called the co-exclusion principle, and a memory in which to accumulate its inferences. Our fundamental epistomological position is that an 'object' is something displaying invariance in the time domain, which leads to the ontological position that everything is made out of time. This work should be viewed as well in the larger context of elucidating a mechanics of information, what we call the neo-mechanistic position. It is therefore particularly interesting that both the (computational) mechanism and the interpretation this induces on the vector algebra cast new and profound light on such fundamental physical matters as non-determinism, non-locality, the nature of light, the concept of half- integral spin, and the incremental appearance of spatial structure; there are also novel quaternion-like group structures at the elementary level. The structures exhibiting these interpretations exist (in the observer's memory, at least) as a self-similar hierarchy whose sensory boundary with the external world can be drawn arbitrarily, rather in the manner of Huygen's principle. The cardinal numbers of this hierarchy are essentially the same as those of the combinatorial hierarchy."