Replying to John again, then Christophe: (this is my last for this week)
Replying to John --
John Collier said:
At 05:24 PM 01/06/2008, you wrote:
John said the below.
SS: I take exception to the claim that order is not a projection from our
own experience and creations (notably logic). Nature, our scientific
model of The World is orderly by reason of its having a logical
skeleton. Naively perceived orders in The World, like the succession
of day and night, depend upon the locale, scale, and senses of the
observer. Thus, aspects of The World may seem orderly TO US, and we
take advantage of this relationship, which itself depends upon logic.
See the book by my student Scott Muller, Stan. The arguments
you give indicate at best that the order we perceive is not all the
order. If you can beat Scott's arguments, I would be willing to listen,
but frankly I am finding this construction of knowledge position
increasingly vapid.
S: Well, I find it to still be fruitful in
my pursuit of Natural Philosophy. Thus,
{Physico-chemical constraints {biological
constraints {logical constraints}}}, with each
higher level constraint a refinement of those
below it. This seems to point to
physico-chemical and biological orderlinesses,
but these are the products of scientific
investigations, which are guided largely by
logic. This does not lessen the need to
understand these physico-chemical and biological
orders. the construction of knowledge position,
like the semiotics of von Uexküll, merely points
out that we the observers are entangled with
physics, chemistry and biology.
JC: Sure, our investigations are guided by our
logic, but logic sets no limits on anything,
since it is entirely a priori, so what we find
through our investigations through logic
contains nothing with any information content,
since logic has no information content. So
anything we find using logic will not contain
any information from the logic per se. Logic can
just as well express disorder as order,
incidentally. Again, part of it not having any
information content.
S: Agreed. Yes, indeed! And what you don't
say is that sometimes new facts come in as
surprises. My point on these is that the system
of interpretance will assimilate these new
informations into its building record, where it
will be given a logical construction. Now I see
your objection. I was not trying to say that
nothing new could be discovered, only that
whatever new is found will be assimilated into
the logical system, in such a way that it will
not disrupt that system. As well, a la Uexküll,
there will be things we can never find because
who/what we are.
I also take issue with the idea that there is no power of intuition,
simply from my own experience, which is convincing (to me). Indeed,
I think that quantum mechanics has now cleared the way to introduce
intuition even into Nature.
Read the Pierce articles. If you can reply to them cogently,
I might listen. Otherwise, your experience and your interpretation of
it is fallible,
S: Isn't every position? I never claimed
infallibility. I leave that to the Pope!
Intuitions are typically said to be infallible,
as in our knowledge of our internal state,
fundamental axioms of logic and mathematics like
geometry, some Kantian intuitions, etc. One of
my PhD students is working on insight, which is
often called intuitive. Perhaps you mean
insight. In which case, I misunderstood you, but
also in that case your reply is irrelevant to
what I said in my post, so you misunderstood my
points, which I expand a bit on below.
and I would say that it must have failed you, or else
you didn't get the idea that all thought is in signs.
S: In my interpretation (forthcoming in
Semiotica) signs are CO-constructions of a system
of interpretance and the external object.
Right, but not the issue.
If not, there
is such a thing as pure thought that is not representational. I see
>no reason QM allows that.
S: In a view I find congenial, intuition
(for lack of a more exact term) is entangled with
local events before they unfold.
JC: I don't understand what that is supposed to
mean, unless you mean that there is an analogy
between unfolding and the "collapse of the wave
packet".
S: Yes. And I also imply that local events
can be influenced by our engagement with them as
they unfold. (I KNOW you won't go for that! )
JC: However the collapse of the wave packet view
has been proven false experimentally with
reversible measurements observed,
S; At what scale? Probably VERY small!
JC: so the analogue you want to make is not
there. Incidentally, this should follow from the
theory of QM (the reversibility), but people
like Penrose and others have given some very bad
arguments for irreversibility, and people have
used this as a basis for all sorts of bad
analogies.
S: I think irreversibility comes in
macroscopically, with all the contingencies it
brings along.
JC: have no doubt that complex systems are
entangled, but this makes no difference to the
points I made about Peirce and intuition. We
have no special knowledgeof our thoughts,
S: Or of our intuitions or insights. They
are not 'known' to / susceptible to logical
discourse.
JC: but know of them via our and their
connections to the external world. The
"epistemic cut" is a Cartesian hangover that
really doesn't make sense at all, and certainly
is not supported by QM, either its theory, or
its experimental results.
S: I think I am arguing against the
epistemic cut by way of the entanglement idea
Subsequently John and I have come close to agreement.
----------------------------------
Christophe says:
Bob,
Your point about 'mutual information between two
distributions' deserves some comments. If I
read you well, you want to address a connection
that can exists between two items/systems that
come together and somehow interact or
communicate. Considering the non organic level,
then only physical and chemical laws apply
(besides perhaps some 'trend to increasing
complexity'). The laws are for material (non
living) elements. And talking 'meaning' for
interaction in a pre-biotic world looks to me
as being more on the side of metaphysics
(putting apart the possible trend to increasing
complexity).
S: As there is no thermodynamic difference
between biological and abiotic dissipative
structures (and, as well, one must have evolved
from the other), it is hard to see why the
elaboration of form and behavior in biological
systems (due to genetic information) gives them
access to meaning as a newly emergent property.
I think it better to view abiotic meanings as
being only more vague than biotic ones. Biotic
systems develop into more highly specific
entities, and their meanings get to be crisp
enough so that they can become divergent. There
is no logical reason to deny a tornado, for
example, meanings in respect to heat gradients.
In fact, materially, nothing can evolve from
nothing. If we have meanings, then all our
ancestral systems must have had them too, but in
vaguer form. The materialist and evolutionary
perspectives demand that we allocate meanings to
abiotic dissipative structures.
STAN
I am not sure that we disagree here Stan. I find
your use of words very nonstandard, so it is
hard to tell.
Cheers,
John
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