Yeh, I had a chemistry set as a boy. I also collected rocks. The rocks won.
I thought Peirce was a logician, but collecting chemicals and rocks may have irreversibly distorted my understanding of logic. For example I think that there are multiple orbits possible that are infinitely close to each other. Like Mercury has a 2:3 revolution tom rotation with the Sun, but the Moon has a 1:1 with the Earth. The rocks won. Peirce also seems to have recognized the possibility before Löwenheim and Skolem. John From: Edwina Taborsky [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: July 14, 2015 8:04 PM To: [email protected]; PEIRCE-L Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8761] The Universality of ITR (Irreducible Triadic Relation) -- IV 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<mailto:[email protected]> To: PEIRCE-L<mailto:[email protected]> 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<tel:732-445-4701> www.conformon.net<http://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<http://www.conformon.net/?attachment_id=1110> 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,<http://www.conformon.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Complementarism_1995_Proceedings2.pdf> 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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