Subject: categories: *-autonomous non-category

From: Michael Barr <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Jul 1999 15:03:48 -0400 (EDT)

Peter Freyd has talked, maybe written, about a cartesian closed
non-category.  I have a *-autonomous non-category.  I wonder if this
rings any bells with anyone.  In order to talk about it on this
unforgiving medium, I will use the following notation:	2^X for the
powerset of X, \/ and /\ for union and intersection, resp.  ~Y for the
complement of Y (in X), T for the top and I for the bottom of the
lattice 2^2^X.

Now, the objects of this non-catgory are the upclosed subsets of 2^X.  I
will use a, b, c, ... for upclosed subsets of 2^X and Y, Z, W, ... for
subsets of X. Given a, let a* denote the { Y | ~Y is in ~a }. So Y is in
a* iff the complement of Y is not in X. These Y can also be
characterized as meeting every set in a (which is obviously upclosed).
It is the case that a** = a. Moreover, if we define a --o b = a* \/ b,
we get something like an internal hom.	What about composition?  Well,
first, what about identities.  The sets of the form a --o a = a* \/ a
are characterized by the property that for any Y, either Y or ~Y is in
it.  That is, a* \/ a has this property and if b has this property, then
b contains b*, so b = b* \/ b. It is not hard to show that (a \/ b)* =
a* /\ b* and vice versa, so that the tensor product should be /\.  The
unit for the tensor product is thus T, so there wants to be a map T -->
a as soon as for each Y, either Y or ~Y is in a. Let me call such a set
large.	An interesting observation is that ((a --o b) /\ (b --o c)) --o
(a --o c) is large, so it looks like we have a category if we define
there to be an arrow a --> b whenever a --o b is large.  Unfortunately,
despite the internal composition above, there is no external
composition.  In fact, call a small if a* is large.  The same reason
there is a map T --> a when a is large forces there to be a map a --> I
(the empty set) when a is small.  But the principal ultrafilter at any x
in X is both large and small (it is self-dual), so there is both T --> a
and a --> I. Needless T --o I is not large (it is I).  So that is it.
There is a graph, not closed under composition, but there is an internal
composition.  I suppose I should check if there is an arrow
 ((a --o b) /\ (b --o c) /\ (c --o d)) --> (a --o d)
 and so on but I'll bet there is.  (The binary composition involves 64
cases and I wrote a simple computer program to check them.  This one
would requre 256 and while there is no problem extending it to that
number, there needs to be a new idea to do it for an arbitrary number of
factors.

Of course, one way of making a category is to make all objects
isomorphic, with internal structure that separates them.  This seems
perverse, since the whole idea of categories is that isomorphic objects
should not be distinguishable.

Michael

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