On 6/1/2017 11:23 AM, Jerry LR Chandler wrote:
If you have watched Sheldrake’s talk, how would you describe
his 10 categories?
I would call his categories hypotheses. But in any case, I found his
"dialogue with David Bohm" much more informative:
http://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/A_New_Science_of_Life_Appx_B.pdf
From the middle of page 1:
Bohm: In physics the Lagrangian law is rather similar; the Lagrangian
falls into a certain minimum level...
For background, see Wikipedia on the "principle of least action":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_action
Excerpt:
Scholars often credit Pierre Louis Maupertuis for formulating the
principle of least action because he wrote about it in 1744 and
1746. However, Leonhard Euler discussed the principle in 1744, and
evidence shows that Gottfried Leibniz preceded both by 39 years...
Summary: The equations of motion in physics represent a kind of local
causality, which shows how the state of a system at one instant causally
determines the state at the next instant.
But the Lagrangian represents a quantity called the *action* of an
entire physical system. What Leibniz probably discovered is that
the total action of a system represents a kind of "God's eye" view
of a system for all time. By finding a global minimum of the system,
God (or a fast computer) could compute the entire trajectory from
past to present to future.
Although Leibniz did not explicitly say so, this physical principle
may have inspired his claim that we are living in the best of all
possible worlds -- i.e., God computed and ordained a trajectory
for the universe that would minimize the total evil and maximize
the total good for all time.
That means that we, with our limited senses, can only see local
causality, but God saw the global view and all possible outcomes.
What Sheldrake called 'mechanistic' was the local view. But
Lagrange, who developed the math in detail, considered the local
view and the global view two aspects of the same mathematics.
Since Peirce had a solid background in math & physics, he certainly
understood the Lagrangian, the related Hamiltonian, and the math
that determined both the local and the global states of a system.
Another excerpt from the same Wikipedia article:
The principle remains central in modern physics and mathematics,
being applied in thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, the theory of
relativity, quantum mechanics, particle physics, and string theory...
More from the dialog:
Sheldrake: I think these morphogenetic fields are built up causally
from what's happened before...
Bohm: What you are talking about - the relation of past forms to
present ones - is really related to the whole question of time...
I explain this using the technical terms 'injection' and 'projection'.
Each moment is a projection of the whole, as we said. But that moment
is then injected or introjected back into the whole...
Now if we were to use the analogy of the radio wave receiver which you
discussed in your book: If you take a receiver, it has the ability to
amplify very small radio wave signals. As you say, we can regard the
radio wave as a morphogenetic field. And the energy in the receiver
(which comes from the wall socket) is being given shape or form by
the information in the radio wave itself...
Sheldrake: it would mean that these fields have causal (but non-local)
connections with things that have happened before. They wouldn't be
somehow inexplicable manifestations of an eternal, timeless set of
archetypes...
In the mathematics of dynamic systems, there is a term 'attractor',
which is very close to what Waddinton called a morphogenetic field.
René Thom, the mathematician who invented chaos theory, related
Waddington's fields to mathematical attractors. For more about them,
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor
And by the way, these issues are related to an article I co-authored
with a colleague, Arun Majumdar. The title is "Quantum cognition":
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/qcog.pdf
For more detail about some of the issues, see our slides about
Cognitive Memory: http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/cogmem.pdf
John
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L
to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To
UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the
line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at
http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
