Abstract
I offer a formal ontological theory where the basic building blocks of the world are timeless events. The composition of events results in processes. Spacetime emerges as the system of all events. Things are construed as bundles of processes. I maintain that such a view is in accord with General Relativity and offers interesting prospects for the foundations of classical and quantum gravity.
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Notes
See also Aristotle: “[Plato] as a young man became familiar with Cratylus and the Heraclitean doctrines that all sensible things are always flowing (undergoing Heraclitean flux)” DK 65A3 (The notation refers to the doxography in H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed., Berlin, 1951.)
If a weaker structure such as a causal ordering is imposed, then the ordering will be only partial, and we would be unable to accomodate space-like events in the theory. So I adopt a strong structure for the whole World, and then I shall show how local time can emerge from a partial ordering of time-like events.
For Euclidean spaces it is also the case that d(e 1, e 2) ≥0.
I use the word “atomic” in the original Greek sense of \(\acute {\alpha }\tau o\mu o\sigma \), “uncut”, “individual”, “not decomposable”. It should be considered as synonimous of “basic”, introduced in D 2.
Lorentz invariance is incompatible with most approaches to quantum gravity and with ontologies based on things, since in a Lorentzian world it is impossible to have an absolute minimum length.
I notice that a thing-based ontology, such as Bunge’s, is an emergent ontology of the system here presented, valid for any level well above the Planck scale.
Levels are define by space-like classes of events.
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Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Gabriela Vila for help with Figure 1. I thank Mario Bunge, Daniela Pérez, Janou Glaeser and Federico López-Armengol for stimulating discussions and comments.
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Romero, G.E. A Formal Ontological Theory Based on Timeless Events. Philosophia 44, 607–622 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9697-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9697-8