> On Aug 25, 2015, at 10:20 AM, Jerry LR Chandler > <[email protected]> wrote: > > With the exception of evolutionary time, Peirce’s comments on the nature of > time tend to be few and vague. > > Would this view of a constructor be consistent with your view of physical > time?
I think the problem is that physicists are uncertain with the nature of physical time. Certainly the “natural” way to read GR seems to give us a different way of viewing time than say Quantum Mechanics where the evolution of the Hamiltonian seems much more akin to a traditional Newtonian sense of time. Once one moves to theoretical unifying theories things get more complex, but there are reasons to be skeptical of such theories until they have empirical support. I just don’t know enough constructor theory to say much. (That’s largely why I brought it up here) It seems that the move is very much akin to the evolution of the sign within Peircean semiotics. So the sign looks at the possibilities of the object in order to determine the interpretant. (Where the interpretant here is the new physical state). This to me leads naturally to Hamiltonian conceptions of physical mechanics (whether Newtonian or quantum) in which time is emergent out of this semiotic movement. Yet having said that it seems to beg the question in a fundamental way of what makes possible this semiotic movement. To the degree we dare use the early Peirce here, I think we end up with a more neoPlatonic like conception. This is what Kelly Parker has argued for in Peirce although I think there are a few key places where his theory outstrips the argument. (There’s also the problem of the divide between the early Peirce and the mature Peirce of 1895 onward - this is very much reading the later Peirce via the early Peirce) I think we can avoid this by simply saying that ontologically the three categories (firsts, seconds, thirds) are irreducibly fundamental. It doesn’t matter why in this sense anymore than we can answer why there is something rather than nothing.
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