You could answer “Is matter a sufficient ingredient to constitute reality?” “No, matter is how it functions and there is non-matteric functioning and reality is made of functions, so matter is insufficient.”. But you could also mean with “One of the functions of the heart is to pump blood” that you don’t mean “function” as an ontological entity.
Barry Smith created Basic Formal Ontology which is the central framework for ontology used in bioinformatics. Basic Formal Ontology does take the stance that functions are ontologically meaningful entities. It does take the stance that they are part of the ontological entities that make up reality.
Other big biological ontologies like FMA also have immaterial anatomical entities.
Part of why the work of Judea Pearl didn’t happen earlier is that materialism and reductionism are frameworks that held back science from studying non-materialistic ontological entities. There’s a lot of progress that happened in the last twenty years that was about moving beyond those frameworks and how they stifled science.
There is also the distinction of computer science ontology and metaphysics ontology. The linked opening suggests that BFO can be “instantiated” to be about a chemical, physical or biological system.
That seems to be a setup for a effective theory kind of scheme. Assume that you have a electric field while having the understanding that a electric field is a result and not a starting point of another theory ie quantum field theory makes vacuum buzzing mediate the influence of charges.
An effective theory can be ambivalent whether it is taken to be for the metaphysical existence. One take that the quantum fields are the only thing that “really exists” and there is no electric field beyond them. Another take is to “believe in electric fields” thats a a thing that “really exists”. An effective theory in essence goes “assume X” without being cornerned whether X is or is not the case.
BFO point seems to be that it should provide a representation for any existing thing and thus more int he computer science realm. So that all territorities have a map instead of being a special purpose map that can be used to map some but can’t be used to map others.
For metaphysical claims it is an issue whether an electron makes charge and spin exist or charge and spin make an electron exist. A scheme that just wants the representations straight is just happy that the things involved are “electrons, spin and charge” without making any claims about their relationships (while maintaining that such relationships should be expressible).
“function” as an ontological entity
tried to refer to the metaphysical kind of claim. As I am currently reading the Pearl advances are about allowing to talk about waving without anything that waves which is a representational improvement that allows for generalisations that do not get stuck on concretizations. Instead of going “assume that natural numbers exists” you go “assume that a group exists”
Barry Smith created Basic Formal Ontology which is the central framework for ontology used in bioinformatics. Basic Formal Ontology does take the stance that functions are ontologically meaningful entities. It does take the stance that they are part of the ontological entities that make up reality.
Other big biological ontologies like FMA also have immaterial anatomical entities.
Part of why the work of Judea Pearl didn’t happen earlier is that materialism and reductionism are frameworks that held back science from studying non-materialistic ontological entities. There’s a lot of progress that happened in the last twenty years that was about moving beyond those frameworks and how they stifled science.
There is also the distinction of computer science ontology and metaphysics ontology. The linked opening suggests that BFO can be “instantiated” to be about a chemical, physical or biological system.
That seems to be a setup for a effective theory kind of scheme. Assume that you have a electric field while having the understanding that a electric field is a result and not a starting point of another theory ie quantum field theory makes vacuum buzzing mediate the influence of charges.
An effective theory can be ambivalent whether it is taken to be for the metaphysical existence. One take that the quantum fields are the only thing that “really exists” and there is no electric field beyond them. Another take is to “believe in electric fields” thats a a thing that “really exists”. An effective theory in essence goes “assume X” without being cornerned whether X is or is not the case.
BFO point seems to be that it should provide a representation for any existing thing and thus more int he computer science realm. So that all territorities have a map instead of being a special purpose map that can be used to map some but can’t be used to map others.
For metaphysical claims it is an issue whether an electron makes charge and spin exist or charge and spin make an electron exist. A scheme that just wants the representations straight is just happy that the things involved are “electrons, spin and charge” without making any claims about their relationships (while maintaining that such relationships should be expressible).
tried to refer to the metaphysical kind of claim. As I am currently reading the Pearl advances are about allowing to talk about waving without anything that waves which is a representational improvement that allows for generalisations that do not get stuck on concretizations. Instead of going “assume that natural numbers exists” you go “assume that a group exists”