Ontology

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 116. Chapters: Reality, Existence, Problem of universals, Nominalism, Category of being, Posthumanism, Bundle theory, Concept, Substance theory, Process philosophy, Nothing, Ontological commitment, Idea, Core ontology, Bootstrap paradox, Metaphysical naturalism, Mereology, African Spir, Documentality, Externalism, Parsimony, Quantity, Mereotopology, Whitehead's point-free geometry, Mathematical universe hypothesis, Biocentrism, OntoClean, Geopolitical ontology, Ontological translator, Stoic Categories, Chance, Temporal parts, Transcendence, Identity of indiscernibles, Objectivity, Ontotheology, Formal ontology, Dasein, Literary nominalism, Pirsig's metaphysics of Quality, Plane of immanence, Actualism, Lightness, Physical body, Refined concept map, Natural Ontological Attitude, Applied ontology, Meinong's jungle, Ontic, Multiplicity, Frege¿Church ontology, Everything, Abstract object, Being in itself, Fundamental ontology, Meta-ontology, Neural processing for individual categories of objects, Perdurantism, Existentiell, Aristotle's theory of universals, Mental representation, Subjectivity, Neti neti, Ugly duckling theorem, Part-whole theory, Becoming, Facticity, Sat, Ontological security, Porphyrian tree, Rationalist-constructivist debate, Ontogame, Transcendentals, Basic Formal Ontology, Neutrality, Mental world, Inherence, Extensionism, Endurantism, Universal dialectic, Meontology, Cognitive ontology, Abstract particulars, Causa sui, YAGO, Energeticism, Ontologism, Panlogism, MOD Ontology, Guerrilla ontology, Paradigm classification, Limit situation, Partonomy, Modal property, Ontogenetic realization of categorization, Ontological maximalism. Excerpt: The bootstrap paradox is a paradox of time travel in which information or objects can exist without having been created. After information or an object is sent back in time, it is recovered in the present and becomes the very object/information that was initially brought back in time in the first place. Numerous science fiction stories are based on this paradox, which has also been the subject of serious physics articles. The term "bootstrap paradox" refers to the expression "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps"; the use of the term for the time-travel paradox was popularized by Robert A. Heinlein's story By His Bootstraps (see below). Because of the possibility of influencing the past while time traveling, one way of explaining why history does not change is by saying that whatever has happened was meant to happen. A time traveler attempting to alter the past in this model, intentionally or not, would only be fulfilling his or her role in creating history, not changing it. The Novikov self-consistency principle proposes that contradictory causal loops cannot form, but that consistent ones can. However, a scenario can occur where items or information are passed from the future to the past, which then become the same items or information that are subsequently passed back. This not only creates a loop, but a situation where these items have no discernible origin. Physical items are even more problematic than pieces of information, since they should ordinarily age and increase in entropy according to the Second law of thermodynamics. But if they age by any nonzero amount at each cycle, they cannot be the same item to be sent back in time, creating a contradiction. Another problem is the "reverse grandfather paradox", where whatever is sent to the past allows the...