On Sep 8, 2015, at 1:36 PM, Helmut Raulien <[email protected]> wrote:
Stephen,
you wrote: "The axiomatic principles of cognition (Peirce’s
categories) will establish how mind-bodies define the things that
matter."
Again, I think that we have different concepts of the term "know" or
"cognition". In my understanding, cognition does not appear in the
three categories from the start, but is a matter of subcategories. I
agree, that everything underlies the three categories
possibility/quality, actuality/relation, representation/continuity.
Secondness has two modes, and thirdness has three modes. These
modes, or subcategories, again have submodes, or subcategories as
before. I think, that knowledge is a matter of eg. thirdness of
thirdness of thirdness, or something like that.
It seems to me Peirce adopts a position where things are more
mind-like or more matter-like as a matter of degree rather than
kind. I’m not sure it relates directly to the categories beyond
the idea of consciousness seems tied to firstness in certain ways.
Yet the categories are always at play in an irreducible way.
At times Peirce appears to see the more mind-like as what is less
constrained. So evolution is leading to the development of substance
as a kind of permanence. Up to that time there is more “swerve”
and that swerve, when seen from the inside, is likely traditional
phenomenal mind.
This ontology of Peirce is probably the most controversial aspect of
his thought but it does lead to all sorts of interesting
considerations. An analogy someone else brought up recently was
Richard Feynman’s QED really being thinking what it must be like
to be an electron. In this conception there’s always an inside and
outside and Peirce isn’t quite so divorced from Kant as people
assume. Yet in taking this inner view we don’t have the thing in
itself in quite the same fashion. If only because Peirce lets
firstness create a sign. Indeed remembering our experience of a
phenomena is always a sign (thirdness) in response to firstness.
That may be what you mean by modes or subcategories though. (Forgive
me - haven’t yet caught up on my reading of the list)
On Sep 8, 2015, at 12:18 PM, Stephen Jarosek <[email protected]>
wrote:
Bees are conscious in accordance with the same principles that we
are conscious. This is one important aspect of the axiomatic
framework that I base my thinking on. That is to say, Peirce’s
categories apply to _all_organisms, even cells.
Pierce says bees have mind. I’m not sure he means by that they are
conscious in any strong way. It seems a matter of degree for Peirce.
Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in
the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical
world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that
the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there.
Consistently adhere to that unwarrantable denial, and you will be
driven to some form of idealistic nominalism akin to Fichte’s.
Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there.
But as there cannot be a General without Instances embodying it,
so there cannot be thought without Signs. We must here give
“Sign” a very wide sense, no doubt, but not too wide a sense
to come within our definition. Admitting that connected Signs must
have a Quasi-mind, it may further be declared that there can be no
isolated sign. Moreover, signs require at least two Quasi-minds; a
Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-interpreter; and although these two are
at one (i.e., are one mind) in the sign itself, they must
nevertheless be distinct. In the Sign they are, so to say, welded.
Accordingly, it is not merely a fact of human Psychology, but a
necessity of Logic, that every logical evolution of thought should
be dialogic. You may say that all this is loose talk; and I admit
that, as it stands, it has a large infusion of arbitrariness. It
might be filled out with argument so as to remove the greater part
of this fault; but in the first place, such an expansion would
require a volume - and an uninviting one; and in the second place,
what I have been saying is only to be applied to a slight
determination of our system of diagrammatization, which it will
only slightly affect; so that, should it be incorrect, the utmost
certain effect will be a danger that our system may not represent
every variety of non-human thought. (“Prolegomena to an Apology
for Pragmaticism CP 4.551)
Whenever you have signs, even physical signs, you have a
quasi-mind. So of course thirdness applies to them the same as it
does us. The question of feeling or firstness seems a bit more
tricky.
As I recall to the degree he talks about consciousness it’s the
inner aspect of the “swerve” or chaos. In other places he says
we have consciousness to the degree we have self-control. I think
this aspect of his ontology is among the most controversial of his
views. I think one can adopt most of his system without adopting
this particular thread. (Which I think comes out of the remnant of
Kant’s “in-itself” that survives no external thing-in-itself)
…whatever is First is _ipso facto _sentient. If I make atoms
swerve - as I do - I make them swerve but very very little,
because I conceive they are not absolutely dead. And by that I do
not mean exactly that I hold them to be physically such as the
materialists hold them to be, only with a small dose of sentiency
superadded. For that, I grant, would be feeble enough. But what I
mean is, that all there IS, is First, Feelings; Second, Efforts;
Third, Habits - all of which are more familiar to us on their
psychical side than on their physical side; and that dead matter
would be merely the final result of the complete induration of
habit reducing the free play of feeling and the brute
irrationality of effort to complete death (CP 6.201)
What further is needed to clear the sign of its mental
associations is furnished by generalizations too facile to arrest
attention here, since nothing but feeling is exclusively mental.
But while I say this, it must not be inferred that I regard
consciousness as a mere “epiphenomenon”; though I heartily
grant that the hypothesis that it is so has done good service to
science. To my apprehension, consciousness may be defined as that
congeries of non-relative predicates, varying greatly in quality
and in intensity, which are symptomatic of the interaction of the
outer world,— the world of those causes that are exceedingly
compulsive upon the modes of consciousness, with general
disturbance sometimes amounting to shock, and are acted upon only
slightly, and only by a special kind of effort, muscular
effort,— and of the inner world, apparently derived from the
outer, and amenable to direct effort of various kinds with feeble
reactions, the interaction of these two worlds chiefly consisting
of a direct action of the outer world upon the inner and an
indirect action of the inner world upon the outer through the
operation of habits. If this be a correct account of
consciousness, i.e., of the congeries of feelings, it seems to me
that it exercises a real function in self-control, since without
it, or at least without that of which it is symptomatic, the
resolves and exercises of the inner world could not affect the
real determinations and habits of the outer world. I say that
these belong to the outer world because they are not mere
fantasies but are real agencies. (Pierce, Pragmatism EP 2.418-419)
As I said this is controversial. At the time it put Peirce quite at
odds with the mechanistic determinacy that was taken for granted in
physics. Today we allow chance or swerve, yet it seems a kind of
deterministic probability that still is at odds with Peirce’s
notion of control.
It would seem that Peirce would allow sentiency to even an electron
in some degree yet it seems the ability to control ones behavior and
form habits that makes for the degree of consciousness.
