Realism and Philosophy – An Event Is a Part of Something Else
In real life, events happen things on time, subject to outside influence, and subject to human potential. In philosophy, events are abstract objects in either instantaneous time or in timeless time. On some approaches, only changes in the external form of gaining or losing some property involved in an event can be classified as events, such as the rain’s becoming wet. Others view events as involving changes in potential that either creates or destroys an entity, such as the potential of water running uphill to fall into the pool below.
In philosophy of mind, we tend to think of cognitive complexity as consisting in virtue and not in mere substance. We seem to conceive of simple events as consisting of matter and events as consisting of spirit, leaving out the phenomenal character of mind. Philosophers who subscribe to this approach call this approach substance Dualism. The challenge is to show how an event is made simpler or more complicated by its external cause.
The simplest event E is a single head or source that produces one and only one event E 1 through E n, where E and n are different subsets of the total possible events. So if there are n possible events, then there must be at least one head or source that produces each of those events. And each single head or source can be re-assembled into smaller ones, producing even smaller events, until we have E n such that there are no longer any heads or sources of E n such that there is no single entity leftovers.
How does this fit with the Copenhagen School, whose view is that all reality is merely a complex geometric distribution and all events merely discrete random outcomes that can be copied or otherwiseometrically altered. That is to say, we can take any sample space and change it into something qualifiably simple by adding or removing agents. According to the Copenhagen School, any experiment that changes the sample space into qualitatively different patterns is a replication of an event. Thus, even though an event e is being repeated, so too must its corresponding experiment. Therefore, every event e’ in an experimental set up is a simple event, and any event e’ in space taken from a single experiment, but one which produces another event e’ in its own space (i.e., taking the sample of that space and repeating it).
By following the above thought process we can see that the Copenhagen School reduces all reality to a uniform, bifurcation continuum. Every event obeys a certain thermodynamic law, and every event in a given space can be reproduced in any space by adding or removing an agent. In general, all events may be infinitely complex, but there are three kinds: (a) the simple event; (b) the infinite event; and (c) the empty set. The simple event is just any existing event which can be copied by re-assembling its parts; for example, if we take a coin and roll it on a table, then it will still be a coin, but if we take it apart again and cut it into four sections, each section can be put back together again as a complete coin.
The infinite event is infinite because it doesn’t have parts, it is an event which does not occur with any other event. Thus, there are three kinds of infinite events: the union of two events (like union of two heads), the union of a set of events (like union of four heads), and the empty set. For example, the union of two points, the union of four points, and the empty set are all mutually exclusive events. So are the four points or the union of six points. Thus, the infinite events are the easiest to define as being nothing like real life, at least in the laboratory.