> On Aug 4, 2016, at 2:08 PM, Helmut Raulien <[email protected]> wrote: > > "That is to be conscious would seem to have a connection so we experience a > flow. But if we tie it just to the swerve it’d seem like each conscious > moment is unconnected." > I guess, the states of the primisense are not directly connected with each > other, but the primisense contents encounter the altersense, then both are > combined in the medisense, and then the result goes back into the primisense. > So the images in the primisense are rather like a slide show than like a > video. But we experience a flow, because each picture is connected with > upcoming memories and thoughts, and creates a new picture, or a new state of > consciousness. That reminds of Edelman and Tononi, who say, that a brain can > change its state very quickly.
Early on he says this. Swerve proper is just chance but he allows something semi-chance that is instead a kind of mental spontaneity. I attribute it altogether to chance, it is true, but to chance in the form of a spontaneity which is to some degree regular. It seems to me clear at any rate that one of these two positions must be taken, or else specification must be supposed due to a spontaneity which develops itself in a certain and not in a chance way, by an objective logic like that of Hegel. This last way I leave as an open possibility, for the present; for it is as much opposed to the necessitarian scheme of existence as my own theory is. (CP 6.28) Later he makes this more explicit. One opinion frequently met with is that the law of energy does not prescribe the direction of velocity, but only its amountl so that the mind may cause atoms to “swerve,” in regular Lucretian fashion. (CP 6.83) The key issue distinguishing mind from “consciousness” is over the category of Firstness. (As I mentioned when Peirce speaks of mind technically rather than loosely he almost always means Thirdness) …whativer i First is ipso facto sentient. If I make atoms swerve - as I do - I make them server 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 does of sentiency superadded. For that, I grant, would be feeble enoguh. But what I mean is, that all that 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 merely the finally result of the complete induration of habit reducing the free play of feeling and hte brute irrationality of effort to complete death (CP 6.201) The quasi-flow that connects these is basic to Peirce’s somewhat neoPlatonic ontology. (Again Kelly Parker has written on this a fair bit) Out of the womb of indeterminacy we must say that there would have come something, by the principle of Firstness, which we may call a flash. Then by the principle of habit there would have been a second flash. Though time would not yet have been, this second flash was in some sense after the first, because resulting from it. Then there would have come other successions ever more and more closely connected, the habits and the tendency to take them ever strengthening themselves, until the events would have been bound together into something like a continuous flow. (CP 1.412)
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
