Edwina, List,
Theories may be dangerous. Look for example, what marxism/leninism has caused. Or antisemitism, nazism, or religions. If you say, laws are hardened habits, things are too, then it seems, as if laws are like things, disposable of. Wat is a law anyway? The laws of logic are quasi-tautological. One plus one is two, because two is defined as one plus one. There is no way, one plus one could in former times have been e.,g. "1.9". Physicists are trying to find a GUT (great unifying theory), by which the natural laws are derived from the laws of logic. Following Peircean tychism is saying, this search is futile. But then please define the border between logic and physics. This whole "habit"-scheme would lead back to medieval time, it is like "Ether": Water waves need water, so light waves need some "ether". Why not say, that diseases are caused by miasma. My phaneroscopic sentience is clearly telling me, that the concept of generalized "habit" as a natural principle is anti-scientific, and anti-enlightment. And based on pure speculation, like a religion. Religions are dangerous too, see above.
Best, Helmut
15. Dezember 2025 um 15:14
"Edwina Taborsky" <[email protected]>
wrote:Jeff’s analysis, in my view, is excellent- and is saying what I was trying to outline in my thought-fantasy.
Jeff writes:
"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, tofeeling/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 think the above outline of the path from 1ns through 2ns to 3ns [ and reverse!] is excellent.
I think one has to be very careful , however, about the meaning of ‘primordial field of potentiality’ [let’s call this domain A]. . This does not mean determinism, ie, that the ‘forms’ of Existence’ are primordial’. The fact remains, that Firstness is chance and freedom ..and the actualities [call them B] are not the result of a direct linear action from A to B.
Edwina
On Dec 14, 2025, at 5:58 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard <[email protected]> wrote:
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, tofeeling/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?
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