Causal Theory Of Views

Good piece.    It is all ultimately about context, in the sense of location, events, agents, results ... connects to the rest of the world.   It drives things like goals, value, transparency and risk.   We diagrammed these in views that helped us understand their role in decisions.

The Causal Theory of Views
A Conversation with Lee Smolin  in The Edge

An event has a view of the world. First, let me tell you what I mean by a view. A view is the information that that event has about how it fits into the rest of the world. That includes who its parents were (by which I mean the events in its past that gave rise to it) and how much energy and momentum was propagated to it from them. If I am an event, my view of the world is what I see when I look around. I see light comes to me from the past, which I perceive as a pattern of colors, which come from photons of different energies striking my eye. That's my view; it's a property of a moment. That contains all that I, as an event, know about how I fit into the rest of the world.

Now, if you know the things that I just said were real—the events, the causal relations, the distribution of energy and momentum flowing—I can tell you what the view of each event is, but I can also flip it around. There's a dual description in which I just say what the views are and that's the whole description. So, I just say there's a view, and that view is that makes a kind of picture. You see the sky, a two-dimensional sphere around you, and there are some colors, which are photons coming in of different energies—that's the view. I can hypothesize that all that exists in the world is views and a process that continually makes new views out of old views. That's what I call the causal theory of views.  .... '

LEE SMOLIN, a theoretical physicist, is a founding and senior faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. His main contributions have been so far to the quantum theory of gravity, to which he has been a co-inventor and major contributor to two major directions, loop quantum gravity and deformed special relativity. He is the author, most recently, of Einstein's Unfinished Revolution. ... Lee Smolin's Edge Bio Page  .... "