Ontology and Cosmology in 14 Tweets →

Nick Violet asks this (in a link within a link that he called to my attention with a tweet):

…my question to economists or social scientists, or even physicists if interested is: are immaterial infrastructures (like institutions) thermodynamic systems (like the car we talked about) or not? And if yes, or not, why?

Click on the title of this post or here for my answer. This represents what understanding I have of ontology and cosmology from my reading. (Someday I’ll post a list of books I’ve read since 1995.)

A note on the tweet count: Nick Violet’s tweet, representing the question, is 1 of the 14 tweets. Questions are an indispensable part of the road to truth, and deserve credit. Here is an example of the importance of questions in economics:

In my judgment, Ed Prescott fully deserves his Nobel Prize for the questions he asked (including his methods for asking them), though he wouldn’t have deserved a Nobel Prize for his answers.  

(Finn Kydland was there with Ed, asking the questions, and fully deserves his Nobel Prize for asking those questions. But Finn is less associated with Ed’s later answers.)