Jack, I’m not sure what to make of your “quantum method,” but I agree with most
of you post, including this: “What we take to be “the past” is, surely, that
which may be called upon within the present at any given moment (or otherwise
we cannot even cite said "past").” In a given extended moment, the past part is
remembered and the future part is anticipated (and there are no real boundaries
between these “parts); what we recall as previous to the moment is only a
representation of experience, while the more or less distant future is
imagined. Both are signs rather than dynamic objects of direct experience. They
are not real things or collections of things; what we call “the past” is a
recollection, mediated in one way or another.
However I must take issue with your use of AI-Source. What it cites as coming
from CP 2.303, for instance, is not a direct quote from Peirce’s text. Those of
us who care about Peirce’s exact terminology at least look at the actual text
before we cite it as Peirce’s. Those who include a lot of such quotations in
our posts (such as Jon Alan Schmidt and I) can do so because we have searchable
databases of Peirce texts which may come from e-books, PDFs, transcriptions
from manuscript, etc. My own primary database consists of three large HTML
files where I’ve copied texts that seemed important to me in my reading of
Peirce over the past 20 years or so, and arranged them in chronological order.
Personally I don’t trust an AI even to summarize Peirce (or anything)
accurately, let alone supply exact quotes. Better not to use quotation marks at
all!
Now I’ll go back to have a closer look at your “quantum method” …
Love, gary
Coming from the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg
} By their fruits ye shall know them. [Matthew 7:20] {
<https://substack.com/@gnox> substack.com/@gnox }{
<https://gnusystems.ca/TS/> Turning Signs
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of
Jack Cody
Sent: 27-Jul-25 09:57
To: Peirce-L <[email protected]>; Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Time and Semiosis (was Semiosic Ontology)
Speaking of the past—and here I may depart from orthodoxy among Peirce
scholars—I do not consider Peirce’s system to be a literal description of the
world as it is, but rather a model for understanding consciousness. I realize
this may be rejected outright, but I cannot help but interpret it in this way.
When it comes to time—past, present, future—I read Peirce’s categories not as
fixed ontological boundaries, but as phenomenological modalities of temporal
consciousness. That is, I see time in Peirce much like I see it in quantum
theory: not as a clean succession of fixed states, but as an ongoing process of
semiotic determination. Peirce’s account of the categories—Firstness (quality
of feeling), Secondness (reaction or brute fact), and Thirdness (law or
mediation)—already admits a model of continuity that resists closure:
“Firstness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively
and without reference to anything else. It is the realm of possibility,
quality, feeling.”
— CP 1.337 (1885 - by AI-Source).
In Peirce’s semiosis, the sign is not static: it unfolds through a process of
interpretation, where the Interpretant alters and extends the meaning of a
given sign. In this way, the sign is not an object, but a relational function
across time. Similarly, in quantum terms, the act of measurement—or
interpretation—collapses a possibility space into a particular state, but never
exhausts it. This is why, for example, a sign that emerges twenty years later
may retroactively restructure the significance of a prior event. The past is
made newly legible through present interpretation.
This is consistent with Peirce’s claim that semiosis is infinite and that
interpretants are themselves signs, capable of being interpreted again:
“The sign depends upon its interpretant for its interpretation, and this
interpretant again is a sign, which has an interpretant of its own; so that the
process of semiosis is unlimited.”
— CP 2.303 (1903 - by AI-Source)
As such, what we call "the past" is not determined once and for all, because it
remains open to revision by future interpretants. If the past were fully
determinate, then the most basic acts of reinterpretation, revision, or
understanding would be impossible.
This same structure is evident in the quantum method I use. In my deductive
framework, I describe recursive systems (S₁, S₂, …) as semiotic phases: each
invocation of S₁ alters it, such that S₁ becomes S₁′, and then S₁″, and so on.
It is never the same state again. This is not merely metaphorical—each call
alters the relational state space, just as each interpretive act in semiosis
transforms the “meaning” of the sign.
Only when S₁/S₁′ (S₁″… S₁ⁿ) is no longer invoked at all can we say that the
past configuration has truly ceased to be—no longer semeiotically active. In
network or systems theory, that point can be modeled through thresholds of
signal collapse or feedback saturation. But in consciousness or human reality,
it is far less clear: the "end" of a sign’s activity is not determined
ontologically, but functionally—whether or not it continues to be invoked.
This is in line with Peirce’s theory that semiosis is never complete. There is
no final interpretant “in this life”—and perhaps not even “in the next”:
“There is no final, or absolute, interpretant. The process of
interpretation never ceases. The semiosis is infinite.”
— CP 2.92 (1903 - by AI-Source)
A sign, like a quantum state, may lie dormant, but not concluded.
In that light, semiosis is akin to the quantum structure I devised (states and
call-backs) in that each is recursive, reinterpreting, historically contingent,
and indeterminate until it isn’t. What we take to be “the past” is, surely,
that which may be called upon within the present at any given moment (or
otherwise we cannot even cite said "past").
I must add, here, that owing to my relative "novice" status within this list I
have had to program an AI to grab Peirce quotations where I think they may or
may not fit but the message: I think it important to clarfy such things these
days. As many of you may or may not know, my own work is moving in divergent
areas so I am trying much more, these days, to find some common ground within
the Peircean corpus. It's something that must be addresssed, by me, personally,
at any rate, for me to advance my other work and thus this community is very
helpful (in its agreements and disagreements).
(I add, think Marcel Proust and the cake — for those literary inclined among
us).
Best,
Jack
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