"Stephen C. Rose" <[email protected]> wrote:
Stephen, Clark, lists,I mainly agree with you all. Just some thoughts to complicate the "mind-matter-unit"- concept:Here (below) there is a quote by Antonio Damasio. He says, that a human meaning (in the mind) is nonlocal within the nervous system. So I suspect, that nonlocality, maybe any nonlocality, is mind. But in the case of human mind, it is restricted to the humans nervous system, at least some part of it is, eg. the unspoken-of feelings, thoughts... Now an electron is nonlocal within its orbital. But the orbital is not restricted, it penetrates the whole universe. So now one may ask: Ok, electrons show a minds behaviour. But of whose mind? Analogously to the restriction within the humans nervous system, the restriction here is the universe, so it is the mind of the universe, not a mind of the electron, I think. I agree, that there may be no matter without mind. But I dont think, that a material units boundary is always also the or the only boundary of the mind-unit that interacts with the material unit.Best,HelmutQuote:
"In this proposal, and unlike traditional neurological models, there is no localizable single store for the meaning of a given entity within a cortical region. Rather, meaning is reached by widespread multiregional activation of fragmentary records pertinent to a stimulus, whereever such records may be stored within a large array of sensory and motor structures, according to a combinatorial arrangement specific to the entity. A display of the meaning of an entity does not exist in permanent fashion. It is recreated for each new instantiation."
(Antonio R. Damasio (1989): "Time-locked multiregional retroactivation. A systems-level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition", page 28)Clark Goble: “It would seem that Peirce would allow sentiency to even an electron in some degree yet it seems the ability to control ones behavior and form habits that makes for the degree of consciousness.”
SJ: What we are discussing has more to do with pragmatism than with the three categories. Perhaps rather than discussing things in terms of the “degree of consciousness” it makes more sense to proceed along the lines of pragmatism and “the degree to which things matter.” Do Newton’s axioms of physics apply less to a pebble in your hand than they do the planet Jupiter? No, they don’t. Same with the relevance of the categories to consciousness. What does change across species is what matters, and the extent to which things matter. Is a bee from a beehive as self-aware as a human from culture? Of course not, though, our definition of “self-aware” is kind of vague. A feral child raised by wild animals is probably spared most of the unpleasantness of their condition in their failure to incorporate the self-awareness of humans from culture... a self-awareness that indulges normal people in their sensitivities and emotional needs. Things like love and courage are things that matter less to bees and more to humans. Things like love and courage can only be understood by humans within a cultural context, they have no meaning within a beehive context.
Or consider slaves and their masters... slaves denied access to the wider world and what it has to offer learn a meaningless existence, and I could imagine in the most austere conditions, a tendency to a trance-like, zombie-like condition that has them operating on auto-pilot... learned helplessness... where even escape ceases to matter. Are slaves less conscious than us? Their existence is probably more meaningless. Curiously, is a busy bee’s slave-like dedication comparable to the trance (learned helplessness) of a slave, or does it feel alive and emboldened in its tiny universe of choices (as I am not a bee, I decline to comment). In one (the slave) the condition is unnatural and artificially imposed, while in the other (the bee), it is an _expression_ of its natural predispositions, and so the question of which feels more “alive” and paying attention to its Umwelt is an important one.
As for the ability to control one’s behaviour... the genocentric paradigm, with its presumptions of reality as objective (the famous subjectivity/objectivity debate) has a lot to answer for. I have now relocated to the northern hemisphere, the homeland of my family background, and even now I continue to be gobsmacked at what I am discovering about the subtler aspects of my personality that I have acquired in childhood. I thought I had everything under control, yet these subtle nuances have clearly escaped my control. Surprisingly, the discovery continues, and that in itself is a discovery. Don’t kid yourself... your personality is far more beyond your immediate control than you realize... the only way to shape it is through the choices you make and habituate, and only then can you bear witness to the “control” you have, as you discover the shifting sands on which your assumptions are based. You cannot just “will” the changes (without regard to the categories), and if you think you have, all you’ve done is expressed your inner narrative differently. “What was I thinking?” I hear you ask.
sj
From: Clark Goble [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, 9 September 2015 6:03 PM
To: Peirce Discussion Forum
Subject: Re:[peirce-l] [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:8863] The problem with instinct - it's a category
On Sep 8, 2015, at 1:36 PM, Helmut Raulien <[email protected]> wrote:
Stephen,
you wrote: "The axiomatic principles of cognition (Peirce’s categories) will establish how mind-bodies define the things that matter."
Again, I think that we have different concepts of the term "know" or "cognition". In my understanding, cognition does not appear in the three categories from the start, but is a matter of subcategories. I agree, that everything underlies the three categories possibility/quality, actuality/relation, representation/continuity. Secondness has two modes, and thirdness has three modes. These modes, or subcategories, again have submodes, or subcategories as before. I think, that knowledge is a matter of eg. thirdness of thirdness of thirdness, or something like that.
It seems to me Peirce adopts a position where things are more mind-like or more matter-like as a matter of degree rather than kind. I’m not sure it relates directly to the categories beyond the idea of consciousness seems tied to firstness in certain ways. Yet the categories are always at play in an irreducible way.
At times Peirce appears to see the more mind-like as what is less constrained. So evolution is leading to the development of substance as a kind of permanence. Up to that time there is more “swerve” and that swerve, when seen from the inside, is likely traditional phenomenal mind.
This ontology of Peirce is probably the most controversial aspect of his thought but it does lead to all sorts of interesting considerations. An analogy someone else brought up recently was Richard Feynman’s QED really being thinking what it must be like to be an electron. In this conception there’s always an inside and outside and Peirce isn’t quite so divorced from Kant as people assume. Yet in taking this inner view we don’t have the thing in itself in quite the same fashion. If only because Peirce lets firstness create a sign. Indeed remembering our experience of a phenomena is always a sign (thirdness) in response to firstness.
That may be what you mean by modes or subcategories though. (Forgive me - haven’t yet caught up on my reading of the list)
On Sep 8, 2015, at 12:18 PM, Stephen Jarosek <[email protected]> wrote:
Bees are conscious in accordance with the same principles that we are conscious. This is one important aspect of the axiomatic framework that I base my thinking on. That is to say, Peirce’s categories apply to allorganisms, even cells.
Pierce says bees have mind. I’m not sure he means by that they are conscious in any strong way. It seems a matter of degree for Peirce.
Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. Consistently adhere to that unwarrantable denial, and you will be driven to some form of idealistic nominalism akin to Fichte’s. Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there. But as there cannot be a General without Instances embodying it, so there cannot be thought without Signs. We must here give “Sign” a very wide sense, no doubt, but not too wide a sense to come within our definition. Admitting that connected Signs must have a Quasi-mind, it may further be declared that there can be no isolated sign. Moreover, signs require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-interpreter; and although these two are at one (i.e., are one mind) in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct. In the Sign they are, so to say, welded. Accordingly, it is not merely a fact of human Psychology, but a necessity of Logic, that every logical evolution of thought should be dialogic. You may say that all this is loose talk; and I admit that, as it stands, it has a large infusion of arbitrariness. It might be filled out with argument so as to remove the greater part of this fault; but in the first place, such an expansion would require a volume - and an uninviting one; and in the second place, what I have been saying is only to be applied to a slight determination of our system of diagrammatization, which it will only slightly affect; so that, should it be incorrect, the utmost certain effect will be a danger that our system may not represent every variety of non-human thought. (“Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism CP 4.551)
Whenever you have signs, even physical signs, you have a quasi-mind. So of course thirdness applies to them the same as it does us. The question of feeling or firstness seems a bit more tricky.
As I recall to the degree he talks about consciousness it’s the inner aspect of the “swerve” or chaos. In other places he says we have consciousness to the degree we have self-control. I think this aspect of his ontology is among the most controversial of his views. I think one can adopt most of his system without adopting this particular thread. (Which I think comes out of the remnant of Kant’s “in-itself” that survives no external thing-in-itself)
…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 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 (CP 6.201)
What further is needed to clear the sign of its mental associations is furnished by generalizations too facile to arrest attention here, since nothing but feeling is exclusively mental. But while I say this, it must not be inferred that I regard consciousness as a mere “epiphenomenon”; though I heartily grant that the hypothesis that it is so has done good service to science. To my apprehension, consciousness may be defined as that congeries of non-relative predicates, varying greatly in quality and in intensity, which are symptomatic of the interaction of the outer world,— the world of those causes that are exceedingly compulsive upon the modes of consciousness, with general disturbance sometimes amounting to shock, and are acted upon only slightly, and only by a special kind of effort, muscular effort,— and of the inner world, apparently derived from the outer, and amenable to direct effort of various kinds with feeble reactions, the interaction of these two worlds chiefly consisting of a direct action of the outer world upon the inner and an indirect action of the inner world upon the outer through the operation of habits. If this be a correct account of consciousness, i.e., of the congeries of feelings, it seems to me that it exercises a real function in self-control, since without it, or at least without that of which it is symptomatic, the resolves and exercises of the inner world could not affect the real determinations and habits of the outer world. I say that these belong to the outer world because they are not mere fantasies but are real agencies. (Pierce, Pragmatism EP 2.418-419)
As I said this is controversial. At the time it put Peirce quite at odds with the mechanistic determinacy that was taken for granted in physics. Today we allow chance or swerve, yet it seems a kind of deterministic probability that still is at odds with Peirce’s notion of control.
It would seem that Peirce would allow sentiency to even an electron in some degree yet it seems the ability to control ones behavior and form habits that makes for the degree of consciousness.
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