(If the figure below is distorted, please refer to one of my earlier emails.)
Howard wrote:
". . . the bruteness of laws execute in real time at an (6985-1)
unalterable rate, whereas mathematical and logical rules
may be executed at your leisure with no effect on the
result. Laws do not exist by necessity of semiotic rules,
nor do semiotic rules occur by necessity of laws. They
are essential, irreducible, complementary categories."
In the manuscript that I just submitted to Computational and Structural
Biotechnology Journal, I suggested that physics, biology and linguistics
form a mathematical category:
f g
Physics -------> Biology ------> Linguistics => Semiotics (?)
| ^
| |
|_________________________________|
h
Figure 1. The PBL category theory of semiotics, asserting that physics,
biology and linguistics are components of an irreducible triad of Peirce
called "semiotics"(?).
Evidence to support the PBL category is provided by the fact that f = the
Planckian distribution (discovered in 2008), g = the cell language theory
( proposed in 1997), and h = the statistical mechanical Menzerath-Altman
law (recently derived by S. Eroglu; J. Statistical Physics 157:392-405).
(I am on the road so that I cannot provide any more details now.)
Do you see any conflict defining semiotics/mathematics as the irreducible
triad of physics, biology and linguistics ?
I know many semioticians (including Peirce?) regard linguistics as
something less fundamental than semiotics, but can you imagine doing
"semiotics" without language ?
With all the best.
Sung
_________________________________________________
Sungchul Ji, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology
Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology
Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy
Rutgers University
Piscataway, N.J. 08855
732-445-4701
www.conformon.net
> At 02:11 PM 9/24/2014, Benjamin wrote:
> [snip]
>>I'm just saying that if one regards mathematics mainly as a neural
>>activity, then mathematics would seem absurdly effective in physics
>>and other special sciences, as if an average child by doodling had
>>invented a rocket ship.
>
> HP: I do not see antipsychologism as a necessary stance if you
> understand neural activity as a product of evolution and learning.
> What do you mean by "mainly a neural activity"? If you think any
> mathematics, or any thinking, goes on elsewhere, then that thinking
> is still neural activity. What Kant says is absurd is thinking that
> your neural activity is not thinking about things-in-themselves.
>
> Kant: ". . . though we cannot know these objects as
> things-in-themselves, we must yet be in a position at least to think
> them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the
> absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that
> appears." Thinking about things-in-themselves is inescapable.
>
> That's what Born meant by "everything is subjective, without
> exception," and what Hertz meant by, "we do not know, nor have we any
> means of knowing, whether our conception of things are in conformity
> with them" except by comparing the necessary behavior of our neural
> models (denknotwendigen) with the observed necessary behavior of
> nature (naturnotwendigen).
>
> I emphasize that, so far, this is not psychologism, idealism,
> nominalism, solipsism, Cartesianism, Platonism, or any -ism. It is
> just evolution, observation (and a snippet of Kant). Anyway, thinking
> about a more detailed epistemology or ontology -- your own -ism --
> would still be your own neural activity.
>
> The scientific problem has always been to create neural models of
> things-in-themselves that generate predictions of observables that
> are as detached as possible from the states of individual brains.The
> first arithmetic rules and geometric proofs were invented to do just
> that. So was analytic geometry and calculus, but thinking about
> formal mathematical rules self-generated problems and new rules, and
> much of later mathematics became pure mathematics, freely imagined
> and not aimed at any application to physics. Its scientific success
> was at least fortuitous if not unreasonable.
>
> BU: I see no reason to regard as a quirk or happenstance the world's
> alliance of bruteness of force and physical law together, and I can
> see that physical law involves bruteness in a way that mathematical
> rules do not, if that's what you're getting at.
>
> HP: That is exactly what I was getting at. Note that the bruteness of
> laws execute in real time at an unalterable rate, whereas
> mathematical and logical rules may be executed at your leisure with
> no effect on the result. Laws do not exist by necessity of semiotic
> rules, nor do semiotic rules occur by necessity of laws. They are
> essential, irreducible, complementary categories.
>
> Howard
>
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