So, Sung, you are now into declaring that SINCE Peirce was a chemist and even
had a chemical lab as a boy (doesn't every boy?), THEN, anything posted
relating to chemistry, is relevant to the Peirce-L list. Before, your claim was
SINCE we 'think, write and speak in signs' and Peircean research was 'devoted
to signs'...THEN, your conclusion was that 'any topics that we 'think, write
and speak' about are therefore valid on a Peircean list.
Such trivialization and reductionism of analysis leads me to really, really
feel that my recipe for chicken soup is highly relevant to the Peirce-L list.
After all, it's in signs, isn't it? And, gosh, it's a chemical mess, isn't it?
So...And, you note, as a post hoc validation of your use of chemistry, that,
IF Peirce were alive, he'd be 'fascinated' by your chemical outline. Well, I
can say the same thing. IF Peirce were alive - he'd love my chicken soup.
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: Sungchul Ji
To: PEIRCE-L
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2015 1:32 PM
Subject: [biosemiotics:8761] The Universality of ITR (Irreducible Triadic
Relation) -- IV
Hi,
This is a continuation of "The Universality of ITR (Irreducible Triadic
Relation) -- III" posted on 7/11/2015.
The purpose of this post is to add another item to the ITR table that was
attached to the above post. The new item to be added is the phenomenon of
"self-organization" [1] that can be defined as the formation of the orderly
patterns (e.g., chemical concentration waves formed in a Petri dish) among the
components of a material system driven by the free energy generated WITHIN the
system itself, e.g., the flame of a candle, action potentials, etc.
One of the best studied examples of self-organization is the
Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction that was discovered in Russia in 1964 [2]
and investigated theoretically by I. Prigogine (1917-2003) and his group in
Brussels in the 1960's and 70's, culminating in the formulation of the
theoretical model of BZ reaction called the Brussellator and the awarding of a
Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Prigogine in 1977. As I explained in
[biosemiotics:8320] dated 4/14/2015 [3], the Brusselator consists of the
following 4 main steps:
A -------> X
(1)
2 X + Y -------> 3 X
(2)
B + X -------> Y + D
(3)
X -------> E
(4)
________________________
A + B -------> D + E
(5)
where A and B are the reactants, X and Y are transient intermediates, and D
and E are the final products of the reaction. As you can see, these chemical
species constitute 3 distinct groups, and in [biosemiotics:8320] I proposed
that the interactions among these three groups of chemical embody an ITR
(irreducible triadic relation):
f g
(A + B ) -------> (X + Y) -------> (D + E)
|
^
|
|
|_________________________|
h
Figure 1. Reproduced from Figure 3 in [biosemiotics:8720]. f = production; g
= degradation; h = information flow. For more details, see Figure 3 in
[biosemiotics:8720].
Based on Figure 1, therefore, I am suggesting that the Brusselator can be
viewed as a member of the ur-category and hence the ITR table as shown in Row
14 in the attached table. (Please note that the order of the rows in this table
has been rearranged so that the fields are more or less organized in the
following order: Peircean semiotics and metaphysics, religion, philosophy,
psychology, physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. Also some of the
words in the field column have been modified.)
For those who may be wondering how the BZ reaction can be Peirce-related, I
just what to remind them that Peirce was basically a chemist, having received a
bachelor's degree in chemistry from Harvard and having had a chemistry
laboratory of his own in his basement that was set up by his father. It is
probably for this reason that Peirce's logical and philosophical thoughts are
heavily influenced by the principles of chemistry known to his time, and I
have no doubt that, had the BZ reaction been discovered while he was alive and
its mechanistic model, the Brusselator, known to him, Peirce might have been
fascinated by the presence of the "termolecular" reaction, (2) above, in it.
It is probably not an accident that the key to the self-organizing chemical
reaction is this "termolecular step" (as once pointed out to me by Prigogine)
and that it is irreducible, i.e., cannot be replaced by any combination of
biomolecular steps such as (3) and/or monomolecular steps (1) and (4). Thus I
suggest that the termolecular step in the Brusselator represents the Peircean
irreducible triad at the molecular level.
I would like to emphasize the following points abut the ITR table:
(1) To the extent that each row satisfies the ur-category (or the
commutative triangle) shown in the legend to the table, it represents a
mathematical category [4, 5, 6].
(2) The relation that connects one category to another is called "functors"
[4, 6]. One striking feature of the ITR table is that most, if not all, rows
have their "j" column labeled as "information flow" or "cordality" defined as
the information-mediated interactions. Therefore, it seems logical to conclude
that "information flow from A to C", i.e., codality, is a functor of the
categories listed in the ITR table.
(3) Since Step j commutes with the combined Steps f and g, it may be
justified to view the combination of mappigs f and j (which was identified with
the traditional concept of "causality", or energy- or force-mediated
interactions) as another functor.
(4) The relation that connects one functor to another is called the "natural
transformation" [4, 6]. I here suggest that the relation between the two
functors, namely, CAUSALITY (energy- and force-mediated interactions) and
CODALITY (information-mediated interactions) that appear in the ITR table
constitute a natural transformation and that this natural transformation in
turn can be identified with the Principle of Gnergy or the Information-Energy
Complementarity [8].
(5) It should be pointed out that the term Gnergy (a complementary union of
information, "gn-", and energy , "-ergy") belongs to the same category of
concepts as the Dao, God, Brahma, Substance, etc. [10].
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for any irreducible triads
to be added to the ITR table, let me know.
All the best.
Sung
--
Sungchul Ji, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology
Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology
Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy
Rutgers University
Piscataway, N.J. 08855
732-445-4701
www.conformon.net
References:
[1] Ji, S. (2012). Principles of Self-Organizaition and Dissipative
Structures. Section 3.1 in Molecular Theory of the Living Cell: Concepts,
Molecular Mechanisms, and Biomedical Applications. Springer, New York. Pp.
69-78. PDF at http://www.conformon.net under Publications > Book Chapters.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_reaction
[3] [biosemiotics:8320] attached.
[4] Spivak, D. I. (20xx). Category Theory for the Sciences. The MIT
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Open Access HTML Version at
http://category-theory.mitpress.mit.edu/
[5] Abrey, J. (20xx). Mathematical Notes.
http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wikiindex.php/User:Jon_Awbrey/Mathematicsl_Notes.
[6] Brown, R. and Porter, T. (20xx). Category Theory: an abstract setting
for analogy and comparison. PDF at
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.65.2083&rep=rep1&type=pdf.\
[7] Ji, S. (2012). ibid. p. 93.
[8] Ji, S. (2012). Information-Energy Complementarity as the Principle of
Organization. Section 4.13 in Molecular Theory of the Living Cell: concepts,
Molecular Mechanisms, and Biomedical Applications. Springer, New York. Pp.
110-113. PDF at http://www.conformon.net under Publications > Book Chapters.
[9] Taiji or Tai Chi. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiji_(philosophy).
[10] Ji, S. (1995). Complementarism: A Biology-Based Philosophical
Framework to Integrate Western Science and Eastern Tao, in Psychotherapy East
and West: Integration of Psychotherapies, Korean Academy of Psychotherapists,
178-23 Sungbuk-dong, Songbuk-ku, Seoul 136-020, Korea, pp. 517-548. PDF at
http://www.conformon.net under Publications > Proceedings & Abstracts.
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