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}Agreed - but I'm not denying the semiosic action based on ignorance
which needs to 'seek the truth'.
For example, we must know the difference between a plant that is
poisonous and one that is safe to eat. We therefore, must move from
seeing that plant in its DO nature, to, examining it using our
mediation/ knowledge base..and come to a conclusion/Interpretant of
whether the safe plant is exactly what we have in our hands. This is
'truth'. Animals must of course do the same thing.
We must also, for example, know which is the correct part to buy to
fit the whatever...on our car. We must read the STOP sign correctly.
These are aspects of the 'argument from ignorance' whereby we move
from ignorance, so to speak, about that DO, to the final
interpretant, which is the 'truth' of that DO.
This is, of course, a vital part of our semiosic world. But- my
focus is on the argument from complexity, which rejects, absolutely
rejects, a 'final truth'. This semiosic action accepts multiple data
from multiple sites, weeds out some and discards it as 'waste' or
'noise'; accepts others, and even, mixes them with each other such
that the data is actually transformed in its morphology...and the
Dynamic Interpretant, made up of these multiple 'data bits' - is
completely different from any single 'bit'. This, to me, is the
complex semiosic process - and is continuous, open, adaptive,
evolving...and there is no 'final truth'.
Edwina
On Mon 22/07/19 10:42 AM , John F Sowa s...@bestweb.net sent:
On 7/22/2019 8:13 AM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
> That's why I assert that there can be no 'Final Interpretant' and
no
> ultimate Truth - not from ignorance but from the complexity of the
> interactions and data.
Yes indeed. I used an argument based on Cantor's set theory,
which Peirce knew very well: as the number of elements in a set
grows, the number of ways of combining them grows exponentially.
Assumption: No brain, set of brains, or set of supercomputers
in any universe can ever be as big as the universe itself.
Implication: The complexity of the universe will always be
exponentially bigger and more complex than any intelligent
being in that universe. No such being can ever represent,
much less understand all the complexity of the universe it
occupies.
Question: What does that imply about God?
Answer: Whitehead claimed that God created the universe in order
to understand what would happen. This is a very rough summary,
which Whitehead and others, such as Hartshorne explored in detail.
Conclusion: I believe that Hartshorne had a good reason for
finding Whitehead's process philosophy persuasive.
John
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