Guidence comes from 'What works Where' - Not Intuition

Memo for Wheeler 1966

Wheeler describes Putnam's loop description

Princeton Obituary pg 24

Wheeler highly praises Putnam

Princeton Obituary pg 25

Wheeler - quotes from and describes Putnam

Princeton Obituary pg 25

Wheeler/Everett’s Inclusion of the Observer in Syntax.

Putnam NS Model 1963 pg 47

Putnam describes Billion of Years of Evolution in letter to Wheeler

Wheeler/Everett Model 1970 pg 2

Meaning is from place in cycle - in letter to Wheeler

Link Syntax to Subjectivity page 3-4

The key is the recognition that the subjective enters the physics formalism not in relation to lengths in a common space, but in relation to heuristics in a common goal function*. The link to subjectivity is not made by abstracting things from space, but by abstracting the decision function ordering our acts.

The characteristics used to order or distinguish are thus, from the start, defined as active aspects of the will, not passive categories of observation. (Thomas says that thought is discursive not intuitive). The abstraction is made from the active decision process, not from a passive process of observation which is a nonexistent myth, implicit in our way of talking, but with no experimental roots. As a way of talking, it simplifies many information processing situations, and as such it is useful, but when taken seriously in relation to the foundations of physics it leads to nonsense (as in the interpretation of quantum theory).

Metaphysics is not prior to physics, but the servant of physics, deriving its categories from the defect practice within physics. Each new self model carries with it its form of making the leap to subjective categories. Lets examine the properties of this leap in more detail…

There is no such thing as passive observation

Meaning thus derives from place in cycle rather than things in space.

*What is the common goal function?