Thus began the Days of the Bliss of Valinor;
and thus began also the Count of Time.
Tolkien • Quenta Silmarillion
While looking for something else on the web, I ran across an old note I had written in reply to an inquiry on the Conceptual Graphs List, and it seemed to express one of the points of the present thesis in a fairly clear fashion, so here’s the bit that seems fit to revive.
Time Representation
The point of view that develops from fundamental physical considerations is that the concept of Process is more fundamental than the concept of Time, since references to a time parameter are simply references to a process taken as standard, in other words, to a clock.
Of course, we can always develop yet another “naive physics”, natural language tense logic, or implicit psychological theory of time, and maybe that’s all we need in particular settings, but if we push for a deeper logical analysis of timed processes themselves then we need to have a logical framework that can deal with relations between systems that undergo changes in their properties, as described by logical statements.
This is the impulse that leads to Differential Logic. As it happens, Peirce’s way of doing logic, especially in graphical form, lends itself quite naturally to being able to do this especially well.
