Dear Jerry, >[Jerry] First, my apologies to Gary. My dyslexia kicks in at the strangest >times. I read "Gary" and typed "Jim"! >Second, I was unaware of possibility of a "movie". I will try it. >I presume I will get a different logical and emotional response from the show.
I don't know about a different logical response, maybe a different emotional one! They're mostly just special effects, whose impact is heightened mainly because one doesn't usually get much of that sort of thing in academic presentations. In a business, the liking for that sort of thing comes and goes, depending on what people have become used to. Also, remember that some of the pacing is geared to Gary's talking while the effects are happening, otherwise some of the effects seem a bit slow. >[Jerry] Thirdly, thank you for the long description of your views and the >quotes from CSP. >You are interested in "fours"? Interesting. >About 10 - 15 years ago, I read a book authored by a physicist (the name of it >escapes me this morning) that asserted that ten facets of "complexity" >existed. The author's rational for complexity completely ignored chemistry and most of biology / medicine. I thought the ten categories were completely misguided, merely a re-statement of applied mathematics. >My visceral response was to list a chemical perspective of complexity of life >in terms of two sets of four terms each, one set for internal relations and >the other set for external relations. The first four (bio-logic) >categories, from the perspective of a (biochemist / geneticist) >experimentalist were: closure, conformation, concatenation, and cyclicity. >If you will send me your surface mail address (offline), I will forward them >to you. Sounds interesting. I'll send you my address off-list, >[Jerry] Historically, this categorization eventually lead me to work with >Ehresmann and, subsequently, more than a decade of discussions on the >relations between chemistry and mathematics and consciousness. (I posted her >website address earlier.) Since I retired from NIH, I have had the >opportunity to focus on the nature of mathematics and take a class most >semesters. The consequence of the discussions with Ehresmann and the attempts to integrate mathematics, biochemistry and consciousness are many. I now see Greek mathematics as the source of chemical mathematics. Although chemical structures lack boundaries, the logic of chemistry is intimately associated with the internal logic or relations and the external logic of relations. Such a categorization is not possible if one presupposes that "mass" is a mathematical "point". In an informal way, one might say that this distinction separates the logic of chemistry from the logic of physics. Even though chemists work with individual, invisible and indivisible objects, we suppose that each object has a unique internal structure, that it is species with internal relations. After one strips away the hubris that accompanies the public perception of quantum mechanics, one finds that the mathematics of quantum chemistry is merely a long list of approximations, carefully guided by experimental data. Quantum chemistry is very useful in many many ways, especially in estimating the properties of structures. But, it is not a theory of chemistry! The imagination of chemistry necessitates a "deep structure" that is generative of relations, as CSP recognized. My work recently came to closure with an electrical theory of chemistry that I will talk about at the Whitehead Symposium in Salzburg in July and other meetings in Europe this summer. The electrical theory of chemistry is a pragmatic source of biosemiotics. Well, I certainly hope that the audience gets electrified! More seriously, I like the internal-external distinction. Special relativity provides a way to turn it into a non-redundant fourfold, though it is a bit "crowded." Anatomy and (internal) physiology are in the same "place." On the other hand, internal function and external function don't seem always so easily divided, either. My impression is that these are good "rough and ready" distinctions and that it's in mechanics that such distinctions as between rest energy and linear energy can be most precisely made (at least in the abstract). The internality-externality fourfold involves the kind of relationships of "inverseness" which I've mentioned holds between indices and diagrams, and which also holds between symbols & non-diagrammatic icons, as between (a) a logical alteration or reapportionment of comprehension, and (b) comprehension itself -- insofar as a quality like hardness contains a play of modality, possibility, necessity, logical dependences, novelty, probability, feasibility, optimality, etc. -- turn it conceptually inside-out and you have modality, logical dependences, novelty, probability, etc., as studied in the abstract by deductive mathematical theories of logic, information, probability, and (in its deductive math-theoretical aspects) optimization -- all those "whetherhood" things which symbols are especially well suited to denote or evoke. A familiar example of inverseness, in the sense in which I'm mentioning it, is the inverseness which is commonly noted between probability theory and statistical theory. I strongly suspect that these inversenesses will turn out to be quite pertinent to the question of chemical symbolism, though more in getting at what it is about chemistry generally that lends itself to such symbolism in distinction from mechanics, biology, etc., than in unraveling any particular riddles of chemical symbolism -- at that level of the more particular, I doubt the broader conceptions would shed much light except in exchange for significant light shed upon _them_. I can't help but think that it'd be a slog. On the other hand, I don't know. It also ties in with conceptions such as those of the singular, the universal, the general, etc. >[Jerry] BTW, in the face of persuasive arguments from other system >scientists, the gradual de-construction of my ad hoc categories more or less >forced me into the history of scientific logic and hence to Porphyrean trees >and Aristotle and hence to Greek mathematics. As I mentioned in another post, >decision theory remains a central source of scientific logic and, of, course, >the semantics of mathematics. I agree with Rosen that modern science and >medicine is closer to Aristotle. It is my view that Kant's narrative suffer >from the burden of mis-guided Newtonism. The structure of elementary extensions, "codomains," or scopes or whatever one wants to call them -- the singular, general, universal -- has not received systematic logical treatment of which I'm aware from any major philosopher. The terminology is almost non-existent. One doesn't even know what to call them as a kind of conception. The subject is like a nameless yard mostly uncultivated. A few corners are cultivated in some detail. It's true that the "problem of universals" has been important throughout philosophy's history, but this problem has been pursued mostly in unexpanded, shriveled form, as if all that there were to be understood were generals (monadic or polyadic) and monadic singulars. I'm saying not that -adicity has been too much ignored, rather that the singular is too much glued to it, complicating and crumpling the logical structures before they have a chance to unfold. It's strange that people look at elementary logical quantification (universal and particular) and try to read the system of singular, universal, etc., right off of it, instead of emulating it and building a logical system of such ideas, a system of binary conjunctions of simple quantifications (Boolean A, I, E, O) of a term over all objects besides that or those of the particular monad or polyad of which the term is supposed to be true. Peirce stands apart from the general logical and imaginative stuntedness because Peirce at least went about adding another dimension, that of vagueness. Philosophy has done better on the intensional or categorial side, though. I think that the categorial and "univeral, singular, general, etc." are two sides of the same coin, so overall, categories & the universal/singular/general/etc. are a field with most of its future still ahead of it. > (The long digression is of doubtful interest to CSP philosophers but it is at > least tangential to CSP's work and interpretation and Rosen. I qualify as an > interpretant!) > Can you guide me toward your work on fours? Gary R. steered you to it, http://tetrast.blogspot.com/ . It's getting to need some updating. I need to go through my peirce-l posts, I've had a brainwave or two since I last wrote anything really new at the Website. >Thanks again for your clarifications. You're welcome. Best, Ben Udell --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
