Physical and Virtual Things and Information Systems: PART 1

The last post in this publication was “Real and Virtual Resources”. I got some things wrong in that post. I guess that’s a consequence of the dialectic of developing these concepts.

Importantly, philosophical exploration of theory of mind, human experience, and human identity, have helped me recognize the problems in my thinking. Philosophy is very important.

The title of that post, “Real and Virtual Resources”, misidentifies the key distinction. The distinction is not between real and imaginary things, but physical and virtual things. Virtual things exist within an virtual system or an information system. In virtual systems and information systems, interactions are abstracted away from the immediate laws of physics that govern physical systems. That is not to say these information systems aren’t physical or their behavior isn’t determined by physics, merely that the rules of their interactions are structured and simplified as to make direct analysis of the underlying physical phenomena unnecessary(such analysis is often also intractable).

It is difficult to define or recognize “randomness” in the physical world. Quantum physicists familiar with experimental results in their domain may be qualified to discuss this, but I am not. From my perspective, unknown dynamics, indetermined variables, or some kind of truly random physical mechanism are the possible phenomena underlying what we call “random outcomes”. In information systems randomness can be much easier to define and identify, because virtual information systems have rules that are simplified from the physical rules that underlie them. I won’t explore this anymore in this post, but it’s important.

I have developed specific definitions and concepts, for describing information systems, information, physical and virtual systems, and human experience and identity, but be warned, I’m not an expert. I have background in Mathematics, Computer Science, and am barely familiar with a few concepts from linguistics. I can only tell you there’s important stuff here, and describe what I see as best I can.

I am going to interlude now with a post discussing something called category theory, which is a branch of mathematics that seems to have a great deal of application to these questions, but which I do not understand yet.

You can continue reading about physical and virtual things, and their implications for economics, after that post.