Jeff, list, I have to confess that when I quoted the remark by Peirce that has puzzled me — “whatever is First is ipso facto sentient” — I was taking it out of context, and trying to explain it in a different context, namely Peirce’s post-1902 phenomenology. I don’t see any evidence that Peirce himself ever tried to explain that 1898 remark in his explicit phenomenology, or that he would have made that assertion at all in that context. (In fact I have not found a single instance of the word “sentient” in any Peirce text after 1898!)
I may also be guilty of some misdirection by introducing the question of whether a stone can be sentient. A stone is an existing thing, and a First is not. Obviously some existing things can be sentient, as I believe you and I are sentient; but this has nothing to do with the proposed sentience of a First. Getting back to Cambridge Lecture 8, which was the context of Peirce’s claim about the sentience of a First, Peirce is clarly not doing phenomenology, but rather a logical cosmology (the “logic of the universe”). Specifically he is defending his doctrine of Tychism, that chance (or indeterminacy, as I prefer to call it) is fundamental to the evolutionary process. I see your post (below) as an attempt to bridge the gap between current physical cosmology and Peirce’s logical cosmology. How successful your attempt is, I’ll leave others to judge, but I’d like to bring in more of the text leading up to the paragraph you’ve already provided from Peirce’s Lecture 8, just to clarify what the issue is here. This is CP 6.192 ff.: [[ From this point of view we must suppose that the existing universe, with all its arbitrary secondness, is an offshoot from, or an arbitrary determination of, a world of ideas, a Platonic world; not that our superior logic has enabled us to reach up to a world of forms to which the real universe, with its feebler logic, was inadequate. 193. If this be correct, we cannot suppose the process of derivation, a process which extends from before time and from before logic, we cannot suppose that it began elsewhere than in the utter vagueness of completely undetermined and dimensionless potentiality. 194. The evolutionary process is, therefore, not a mere evolution of the existing universe, but rather a process by which the very Platonic forms themselves have become or are becoming developed. 195. We shall naturally suppose, of course, that existence is a stage of evolution. This existence is presumably but a special existence. We need not suppose that every form needs for its evolution to emerge into this world, but only that it needs to enter into some theatre of reactions, of which this is one. 196. The evolution of forms begins or, at any rate, has for an early stage of it, a vague potentiality; and that either is or is followed by a continuum of forms having a multitude of dimensions too great for the individual dimensions to be distinct. It must be by a contraction of the vagueness of that potentiality of everything in general, but of nothing in particular, that the world of forms comes about. 197. We can hardly but suppose that those sense-qualities that we now experience, colors, odors, sounds, feelings of every description, loves, griefs, surprise, are but the relics of an ancient ruined continuum of qualities, like a few columns standing here and there in testimony that here some old-world forum with its basilica and temples had once made a magnificent ensemble. And just as that forum, before it was actually built, had had a vague underexistence in the mind of him who planned its construction, so too the cosmos of sense-qualities, which I would have you to suppose in some early stage of being was as real as your personal life is this minute, had in an antecedent stage of development a vaguer being, before the relations of its dimensions became definite and contracted. 198. The sense-quality is a feeling. Even if you say it is a slumbering feeling, that does not make it less intense; perhaps the reverse. For it is the absence of reaction — of feeling another — that constitutes slumber, not the absence of the immediate feeling that is all that it is in its immediacy. Imagine a magenta color. Now imagine that all the rest of your consciousness — memory, thought, everything except this feeling of magenta — is utterly wiped out, and with that is erased all possibility of comparing the magenta with anything else or of estimating it as more or less bright. That is what you must think the pure sense-quality to be. Such a definite potentiality can emerge from the indefinite potentiality only by its own vital Firstness and spontaneity. Here is this magenta color. What originally made such a quality of feeling possible? Evidently nothing but itself. It is a First. … 200. In short, if we are going to regard the universe as a result of evolution at all, we must think that not merely the existing universe, that locus in the cosmos to which our reactions are limited, but the whole Platonic world, which in itself is equally real, is evolutionary in its origin, too. And among the things so resulting are time and logic. The very first and most fundamental element that we have to assume is a Freedom, or Chance, or Spontaneity, by virtue of which the general vague nothing-in-particular-ness that preceded the chaos took a thousand definite qualities. … ]] What follows the part you quoted is of course the “blackboard” metaphor that Gary R and others have mentioned. I’ll leave it at that for now … Love, gary f Coming from the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Jeffrey Brian Downard Sent: 14-Dec-25 17:58 To: Gary Richmond <[email protected]>; [email protected]; Ivar Borensved <[email protected]> Cc: Gary Fuhrman <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Firstness and sentience Gary F, Gary R, Ivar, Edwina, List, My earlier note to Gary F zoomed in on one strand in Lecture 3 of RLT: Peirce’s work reads especially well when we see him arguing against--and sometimes with--contemporaries like Mill who are also wrestling with logic—especially the question of how signs (icons, indices, symbols) relate to qualities, and how those relations can be made intelligible without reducing them to mere mechanics. By Lectures 7–8, however, Peirce is largely doing cosmological metaphysics. He is trying to say something substantive about how law could emerge—how “natural laws” might be understood as the gradual formation and hardening of habits—and he recruits multiple notions of continuity to push the inquiries forward, including mathematical conceptions of continuity (e.g., topological/projective conceptions) alongside logical continuity (methodeutic, habits of inquiry, and the growth of intelligibility). That brings me to Gary’s original question—whether it makes sense to say that a rock might be sentient. The following passage from Lecture 8 seems to put the issue as sharply as anywhere: “But there is another class of objectors for whom I have more respect. They are shocked at the atheism of Lucretius and his great master. They do not perceive that that which offends them is not the Firstness in the swerving atoms, because they themselves are just as much advocates of Firstness as the ancient Atomists were. But what they cannot accept is the attribution of this firstness to things perfectly dead and material. Now I am quite with them there. I think too that whatever is First is ipso facto sentient. If I make atoms swerve, — as I do, — I make them swerve but very very little, because I conceive they are not absolutely dead. And by that I do not mean exactly that I hold them to be physically such as the materialists hold them to be[,] only with a small dose of sentiency superadded. For that, I grant, would be feeble enough. But what I mean is, that all that there is is First, Feelings; Second, Efforts; Third, Habits; — all of which are more familiar to us on their psychical side than on their physical side; and that dead matter would be merely the final result of the complete induration of habit reducing the free play of feeling and the brute irrationality of effort to complete death. Now I would suppose that that result of evolution is not quite complete even in our beakers and crucibles.” (RLT, 260–261) If we set aside—just for the moment—the narrower task of textual interpretation and ask how one might translate the cosmological suggestion into 21st-century terms, I think the question shifts. “Is a rock sentient?” is easy to hear as a category mistake, because “rock” names a macroscopic, late-formed, highly stabilized object—precisely the kind of thing Peirce is tempted to describe as “indurated habit.” A chunk of malpaís in my yard (lava that flowed millions of years ago) looks about as inert as anything could look; and yet, on Peirce’s picture, that inertness is itself an achievement of habit—a near “end-state” of stabilization, not the primordial baseline. So I’m inclined to reframe the issue at a different level of description. In contemporary physics, the rock is an organized pattern of fields and interactions. In the Standard Model idiom, protons and neutrons are composite; quarks interact via gluons; and what we call “particles” are, in many presentations, excitations of underlying fields. (If it’s useful as a shared visual reference, here’s a simple animation of the strong interaction: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_interaction#/media/File:Nuclear_Force_anim_smaller.gif> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_interaction#/media/File:Nuclear_Force_anim_smaller.gif .) >From a Peircean perspective, what matters is not whether the rock has a >mindlike interior, but whether the more basic levels of reality involve (i) >qualitative possibilities (Firstness), (ii) constraints/compulsions or “brute >suchness” (Secondness), and (iii) the formation of stable regularities >(Thirdness as habit/law). If one takes a continuous field ontology seriously, >then the primitives are not little billiard balls, but loci of qualitative >character (charge, spin, etc.) standing in relations of mutual >susceptibility—what Peirce calls the peculiar relation of affectability. And >if one further takes seriously the idea that law is not merely “written into” >the cosmos from the outset but becomes increasingly definite—then the growth >of regularity begins to look like the growth of a kind of memory: not memory >as personal recollection, but memory as the persistence of constraints, the >consolidation of tendencies, the sedimentation of habits across time—all >involving the growth and flow of information. On that way of putting it, the sharper question becomes something like: Is a primordial field of potentiality the kind of thing to which Peirce’s “whatever is First is ipso facto sentient” could intelligibly apply? That is: are the qualitative aspects and couplings of the most basic reality better thought of as utterly mindless “dead matter,” or as something whose most primitive mode is closer, in kind and not just in degree, to feeling/possibility—with “dead matter” emerging as the highly constrained limit where habit has hardened and the range of qualitative “free play” has been drastically narrowed? I’m not claiming this settles the textual question, and I’m certainly not claiming that quantum field theory proves Peirce is right. My more modest suggestion is that Peirce’s provocative line—“whatever is First is ipso facto sentient”—sounds least absurd when we do not start with a rock, atom or proton, but with the metaphysical role he assigns to Firstness and continuity: a world whose earliest mode is possibility/quality, whose constraints and collisions are secondary, and whose laws are habits that grow, stabilize, and in the limit can “indurate” into what looks like dead, inert stuff. If this is even directionally right, it gives a different angle on Gary’s worry. The claim wouldn’t be “rocks are sentient” in any ordinary sense; it would be that the metaphysical roots of law and order are not best modeled as perfectly dead. Rocks would then be products of habit-taking: late-stage regularities that tend to conceal rather than display the primordial qualitative loci in continuous fields of potentiality that are, on this account, more fundamental. I’d be very interested in pushback on two points in particular: (1) whether this reframing of the questions is faithful to what Peirce is doing in Lecture 8, and (2) whether the “field, habit and information” translation does any genuine explanatory work, or merely redescribes the mystery in prettier terms. Yours, Jeff
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