Gary,
It wouldn't do for me to make anything more than tangential remarks on Deacon's
work,
as it doesn't appear I'll be able to get around to reading it anytime soon.
Most of
the words I've heard so far are reminiscent of some hoary old topics in my own
studies --
"incompleteness" especially, in logic, math, physics, and the sciences
generally, was
a constant theme throughout my undergraduate decade, and though I did not
exhaust the
subject I fear I exhausted my fascination with it. But I may need to emphasize
that
I always use the words "object" and "objective" with 1 or 2 eyes to the
pragmatic
senses that refer to "pragmata", and these senses remain ever open to the
future.
As far as dispositions, final causes, intentions, teleology, and all that goes,
I think those questions are best handled by the ways and means that have become
available to us since the dawning of classical cybernetics, mathematical systems
theory, and systems engineering.
On the theme of "absence", all I have at present is this corollary ...
http://mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey/Papers/Inquiry_Driven_Systems_:_Part_5#5.2.4._Either.2FOr_:_A_Sense_of_Absence
Regards,
Jon
Gary Fuhrman wrote:
Jon, Gary, Ben and List,
There's another part of the Minute Logic which may be related to the connection
Jon is making between “objective logic” and “categories”. It is definitely
related to the argument in Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature, which Gary R.
suggested some time ago as worthy of study here. We haven't found a way to
study it systematically, but maybe it's just as well to do it one post at a
time. Or one thread at a time, if replies ensue.
The central part of Deacon's argument presents “a theory of emergent dynamics
that shows how dynamical process can become organized around and with respect
to possibilities not realized” (Deacon, p. 16). Depending on the context, he
also refers to these “possibilities not realized” as “absential” or
“ententional”. His argument is explicitly anti-nominalistic and acknowledges
the reality of a kind of final causation in the physical universe
(“teleodynamics”). It has a strong affinity with Peirce's argument for a mode
of being which has its reality in futuro. In other words, he argues for the
reality of Thirdness without calling it that – indeed without using Peirce's
phaneroscopic categories at all. (Personally i doubt that he is familiar enough
with them to use them fluently, but maybe he decided not to use them for some
reason.)
“Incompleteness” is a crucial concept of what i might call Deaconian realism.
In physical terms, it is connected with Prigogine's idea of dissipative
structures (including organisms) as far from equilibrium in a universe where
the spontaneous tendency is toward equilibrium, as the Second Law of
thermodynamics would indicate. Teleodynamic processes take incompleteness to a
higher level of complexity, but i don't propose to go into that now. Instead
i'll present here a Peircean parallel to Deacon's “incompleteness”. The
connection lies in the fact that incompleteness is etymologically – and perhaps
mathematically? – equivalent to infinity.
First, we have this passage from Peirce's Minute Logic of 1902:
[[[ I doubt very much whether the Instinctive mind could ever develop into a Rational mind. I should expect the reverse process sooner. The Rational mind is the Progressive mind, and as such, by its very capacity for growth, seems more infantile than the Instinctive mind. Still, it would seem that Progressive minds must have, in some mysterious way, probably by arrested development, grown from Instinctive minds; and they are certainly enormously higher. The Deity of the Théodicée of Leibniz is as high an Instinctive mind as can well be imagined; but it impresses a scientific reader as distinctly inferior to the human mind. It reminds one of the view of the Greeks that Infinitude is a defect; for although Leibniz imagines that he is making the Divine Mind infinite, by making its knowledge Perfect and Complete, he fails to see that in thus refusing it the powers of thought and the possibility of improvement he is in fact taking away something far higher than knowledge. It
is the human mind that is infinite. One of the most remarkable distinctions
between the Instinctive mind of animals and the Rational mind of man is that
animals rarely make mistakes, while the human mind almost invariably blunders
at first, and repeatedly, where it is really exercised in the manner that is
distinctive of it. If you look upon this as a defect, you ought to find an
Instinctive mind higher than a Rational one, and probably, if you cross-examine
yourself, you will find you do. The greatness of the human mind lies in its
ability to discover truth notwithstanding its not having Instincts strong
enough to exempt it from error. ]] CP 7.380 ]
This suggests to me that fallibility – which not even Peirce attributes to God
– is a highly developed species of incompleteness. The connection with
infinity, and with Thirdness, is further brought out in Peirce's Harvard
Lecture of 1903 “On Phenomenology”:
[[[ The third category of which I come now to speak is precisely that whose
reality is denied by nominalism. For although nominalism is not credited with
any extraordinarily lofty appreciation of the powers of the human soul, yet it
attributes to it a power of originating a kind of ideas the like of which
Omnipotence has failed to create as real objects, and those general conceptions
which men will never cease to consider the glory of the human intellect must,
according to any consistent nominalism, be entirely wanting in the mind of
Deity. Leibniz, the modern nominalist par excellence, will not admit that God
has the faculty of Reason; and it seems impossible to avoid that conclusion
upon nominalistic principles.
But it is not in Nominalism alone that modern thought has attributed to the human mind the miraculous power of originating a category of thought that has no counterpart at all in Heaven or Earth. Already in that strangely influential hodge-podge, the salad of Cartesianism, the doctrine stands out very emphatically that the only force is the force of impact, which clearly belongs to the category of Reaction; and ever since Newton's Principia began to affect the general thought of Europe through the sympathetic spirit of Voltaire, there has been a disposition to deny any kind of action except purely mechanical action. The Corpuscular Philosophy of Boyle — although the pious Boyle did not himself recognize its character — was bound to come to that in the last resort; and the idea constantly gained strength throughout the eighteenth century and the nineteenth until the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy, generalized rather loosely by philosophers, led to the theory of
psycho-physical parallelism, against which there has, only of recent years,
been any very sensible and widespread revolt. Psycho-physical parallelism is
merely the doctrine that mechanical action explains all the real facts, except
that these facts have an internal aspect which is a little obscure and a little
shadowy.
To my way of regarding philosophy, all this movement was perfectly good
scientific procedure. For the simpler hypothesis which excluded the influence
of ideas upon matter had to be tried and persevered in until it was thoroughly
exploded. But I believe that now at last, at any time for the last thirty
years, it has been apparent, to every man who sufficiently considered the
subject, that there is a mode of influence upon external facts which cannot be
resolved into mere mechanical action, so that henceforward it will be a grave
error of scientific philosophy to overlook the universal presence in the
phenomenon of this third category. ]] CP 5.62-4; slightly variant reading in
EP2:157. ]
In these terms, Deacon's argument is that “actions” governed by functions and
purposes are not parallel to the physical world but continuous with it, i.e.
emergent from it but still requiring it for actualization. He is essentially
carrying forward Peirce's argument above, that there are real forms of action
that are not mechanical, by incorporating into it some of the physical theories
and observations that were not available to Peirce. Others have been doing this
since the mid-20th Century, but Deacon's is the most fully developed version
i've seen yet that is worked out in purely physical terms. This is his way of
bringing the psychical facts out of the shadows.
Notice however that Peirce speaks of Thirdness as present in the phenomenon.
Deacon on the other hand speaks of it as Absence (the title of his first
chapter, appropriately numbered 0). This makes Deacon's terminology
incompatible with Peirce's phaneroscopy, which “is the description of the
phaneron; and by the phaneron I mean the collective total of all that is in any
way or in any sense present to the mind” (CP 1.284). However, i don't think
Deacon would argue that his Absence (Peirce's Thirdness) is not present to the
mind in any sense; so i don't see this terminological difference as
theoretically significant.
Gary F.
} Stay us wherefore in our search for tighteousness, O Sustainer [Finnegans
Wake 5] {
www.gnusystems.ca/Peirce.htm }{ gnoxic studies: Peirce
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