Objects and Events

Before trying to understand the Greens, it's good to know what objects and events actually are.

Objects

Objects are sets of points in spacetime.

Apples, tables, dogs, cats, and people all exist in spacetime. Physical objects that have rigid spacetime boundaries can be easily modelled as sets of spacetime coordinates that look like (x, y, z, t), where x, y, and z are points in 3D space, and t is some point in time.

Abstract objects like the color green, the concept of Christmas, and functional characters like Sherlock Holmes however do not occupy any particular space. In this case, we still say they are sets of spacetime coordinates, except the space components x, y, z are unknown. They still exist in time, so Sherlock Holmes for example is a set of spacetime points spanning from 1887 (or whenever Arthur Conan Doyle first imagined Sherlock Holmes) to the end of time.

When objects are equal

If two objects have the exact same set of spacetime points, they are the same object.

For objects that have points with components that are unknown, whether or not they are equal is also unknown.

Imagine if there were two fruits hidden in boxes and you don't know which fruits they are. You know they are both fruits, but you won't know if they are the same type of fruit until you open the boxes. Similarly, if you are given two sets of spacetime points which contain unknown components, you cannot actually tell if they are equal sets.

Events

This section could use some more justification and an example

Only objects without unknowns and occupy contiguous regions of spacetime can be considered events.

Conlanger note: What the heck is an event?

Right now I'm running into a somewhat complicated problem: I need to come up with a relatively intuitive definition for what an event is, while keeping the following considerations in mind:

  1. Greens (introduced in the next part of the guide) are sets that must be able to contain both events and objects.
  2. Both events and objects need to be usable as arguments to Blues, without differentiation.
  3. It would be nice to keep objects and events separate, so that Blues and Reds assert the existence of semantically different things, rather than just creating a new syntactic structure.

My current "solution" is to treat objects and events as both collections of points in spacetime, so that Greens assert the existence of named sets of spacetime points and Blues can accept sets of spacetime points as arguments. This satisfies bullet points 1 and 2. But this raises the question: how are objects different from events, if they're both just sets of spacetime points?

I was thinking that maybe that events are contiguous regions of spacetime. If you take a nap, the event of you napping consists of the points in space of your body across all the times that you are napping. Then if you wake up, there is a gap in time between this nap and the next nap you have, so they're separate events.

Okay, well, that's fine. But there are some events that are said to recur, like Christmas. Or sunrises. Now consider: are Christmas 2024 and Christmas 2025 part of a single recurring event, or multiple separate events that happen to be related by their Chrismasness? If we commit to the idea that events must be contiguous, then it must be the latter and not the former. This would, naturally, raise the question as to what it means for something to recur. Hmm.

Plus, the definition of an event as needing to be contiguous just feels kind of arbitrary, and not that intuitive. For instance, if I host a live-streamed Christmas party event, are all the people who tuned in to the live stream even connected in spacetime? Surely they're not all having separate Christmas live-stream events individually... right? Maybe you could argue their computers, the ethernet cables, and the electromagnetic waves of WiFi and such are part of this event, and all those are connected somehow.

If you have any thoughts, send me an e-mail at fred@fredchan.org.