Paper detail

Uncertainty and the Communication of Time

Prigogine and Stengers (1988) have pointed to the centrality of the concepts of "time and eternity" for the cosmology contained in Newtonian physics, but they have not addressed this issue beyond the domain of physics. The construction of "time" in the cosmology dates back to debates among Huygens, Newton, and Leibniz. The deconstruction of this cosmology in terms of the philosophical questions of the 17th century suggests an uncertainty in the time dimension. While order has been conceived as an "harmonie préétablie", it is considered as emergent from an evolutionary perspective. In a "chaology", one should fully appreciate that different systems may use different clocks. Communication systems can be considered as contingent in space and time: substances contain force or action, and they communicate not only in (observable) extension, but also over time. While each communication system can be considered as a system of reference for a special theory of communication, the addition of an evolutionary perspective to the mathematical theory of communication opens up the possibility of a general theory of communication.