While working on the easy questions in life I put aside some time to work on defining the fundamental natures of our experience of this universe. The best that I could come up with is:
* Identity: We experience a sense of self that is separate from “others”.
* State: We experience things with a certain configuration.
* Time: We experience a past, present, and future.
* Quantity: We experience configurations in varying amounts. Nearly every idea may be expressed as a number.
* Causality: We experience or observe state changes due to interactions. A combination of identity and state result in things like the phenomenon of sequencing.
* Mortality: We are subject to death and decay.
Observations:
* Is it really this simple? What am I missing? What should be removed?
* Programmers may be intrigued to view their medium at a higher-level if they have not before done so. For functional programmers bewitched by “purity”, one might consider that there is a lot more to remove from a particular programming language to really make it “pure” as long as it remains befuddled by my long list. As I read the list, my romance with logic and its foundations in computer science is deeply reinvigorated.
* Would your life be the same if we didn’t have time? Or causality? What if we lived in only one dimension? What if past and present were intertwined?
* If we never died, how would we live differently or evolved differently?
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I might add emotion. We obviously experience life as more than merely observing them logically – we have feelings about what we experience.
Of course, if you are going for really abstract, you could probably limit your list to: state, transition, time – but at that point, you are at such an abstract state, it doesn’t seem to be valuable.
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