Kristina, Stephen, Helmut, Edwina, list members,
The heated debate between Edwina and Kristina reminds me of the Republican
debate we saw on TV last night. Let us not fight against each other but
focus on defeating the Democrats of the challenging problems in
contemporary science and philosophy.
One possible way to resolve the perennial mind-body problem in philosophy
may be to utilize the principles of *supplementarity* and *complementarity*
introduced into philosophy by Niels Bohr in the first decades of the last
century [1]:
" . . . Within the scope of classical physics, all characteristic
properties of a given object can in principle be ascertained by
a single experimental arrangement, although in practice various
arrangements are often convenient for the study of different aspects
of the phenomenon. In fact, data obtained in such a way simply
supplement each other and *can be combined *into a consistent picture
of the behavior of the object under investigation. In quantum
mechanics, however, evidence about atomic objects obtained by
different experimental arrangements exhibits a novel kind of
*complementary relationship*.
Indeed, it must be recognized that such evidence which appears
contradictory when combination into a single picture is attempted,
exhausts all conceivable knowledge about the object. Far from
restricting our efforts to put questions to nature in the form of
experiments, the notion of *complementarity* simply characterizes
the answers we can receive by such inquiry, whenever *the interaction *
*between the measuring instruments and the objects forms an* *integral *
*part of the phenomenon*. . . . (my italics) [2]"
In 2012 [3], I proposed a possible solution to the mind-body conundrum
based on the principles of *supplementarity* and *complementarity *defined
above and two more ingredients -- (i) the so-called the
*Structure-Information-Matter-Energy
(SIME) Square *of Burgin [4] (see below) and (ii) the *modeling relation*
of Rosen [5]. First, SIME Square:
". . . information is not of the same kind as knowledge and data, which
are structures.
Actually, if we take that *matter* is the name for all substances as
opposed to *energy*
and the *vacuum*, we have the relation that is represented by the
following diagram called
the Structure-Information-Matter-Energy (SIME) Square:
similar
* Energy * ~
* Information*
^
^
|
|
*contains * |
| *contains*
|
|
|
|
* Matter * ~
*Structures
*(also called *Knowledge *[4, p. 116])
Figure 1. The Structure-Information-Matter-Energy (SIME)
Square. Reproduced from [3].
I presented a possible solution to the mind-body problem in a diagram [3,
p. 636] which is reproduced below:
* S Natural System (N) <- - - - - -> Formal System
(F) *
* U ^
^*
* P |
|*
* L v
v*
* E Energy <- - - - - - - - - - - - ->
Information 'LIFORMATION'*
* M MATTERGY | |
| | or*
* E Matter <- - - - - - - - - - - - ->
Knowledge/Life 'INFOKNOWLEDGE'*
* N ^
^ T |
| A** v
v*
* R Body <- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ->
Mind I ^
^*
* T * |
|
*Y* |____________ _____________|
*COMPLEMENTARITY*
*Figure 1.* A schematic representation of the postulate that the *mind* and
the *body* are the complementary aspects of the *ultimate reality*. (If
the figure is distorted in your email, please see the original figure
available on line at http://www.conformon.net [3].
The following points deserve emphasis in Figure 1:
(*1*) There are two vectors; the Body-Matter-Energy-Natural System (BMEN)
vector on the left and the Mind-Knowledge-Information-Formal system (MKIF)
vector on the right. For convenience we may refer to these vectors as the
N (Natural System) and F (formal System) vectors, borrowing the terms used
by Rosen [5]. There is an unmistakable family resemblance among the
components of the N vector which are connected one to the other by the
Principle of Supplementarity as exemplified the the additive (i.e.,
supplementary) relation between *matter* and *energy* as established by
Einstein's E = mc^2. The components of the F vector also exhibit
unmistakable family resemblance, as exemplified perhaps by Shannon's famous
equation, H = log_2 W, where H can be interpreted as *Information* and W as
our *Knowledge* or *Mind* knowing or counting W.
(*2*) The key postulate of Figure 1 is that the N and F vectors are
complementary to each other. In other words the N and F vectors are the
complementary aspects of a third entity which I identify with the *Ultimate
Reality* or the *Firstness* of Peirce.
(*3*) Combining (*1*) and (*2*) leads to the following diagram that
connects the mind-body problem to Peircean (metaphysics) and [semiotics]:
f
g
* Phaneron *------------->* Body *
-------------->
* Mind (Firstness) (Secondness)
(Thirdness) [Object]
[Representamen] [Interpretant]*
|
^
|
|
|__________________________________|
h
*Figure 2.* The postulate that the phaneron-body-mind as an
irreducible triadic relation (ITR).
f = perception/consciousness (?); g =
conceptualization (?); and
h = correspondence or grounding (?)
If you have any questions, suggestions or corrections, let me know.
All the best.
Sung
____________________________________
Sungchul Ji, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology
Rutgers University
Piscatawy, N.J.
[1] Bohr, N. (1958). Quantum Physics and Philosophy - Causality and
Complementarity, *in * *Philosophy in the Mid-Century,* R. Klibansky
(ed.), La Nouva Editrice, Florence.
[2] Ji, S. (2012). Complementarity.
<http://www.conformon.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Excerpts_Chapters_2_complementarity_08192012.pdf>
In: *Molecular Theory of the Living Cell: Concepts, Molecular Mechanisms,
and Biomedical Applications.* Springer, New York. Section 2.3, pp.
24-50. PDF at http://www.conformon.net.
[3] Ji, S. (2012). Towards a Category Theory of Everything
<http://www.conformon.net/?attachment_id=993> (cTOE). In: Molecular Theory
of the Living Cell: Concepts, Molecular Mechanisms, and Biomedical
Applications. Springer, New York. Pp. 633-642. PDF at
http://www.conformon.net
[4] Burgin, M. (2010). *Theory of Information: Fundamentality,
Diversity and Unification.* World Scientific, Singapore. P. 117.
[5] Rosen, R. (1991). *Life Itself*, Columbia University Press, New
York.
On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 3:09 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:
> Stephen, I don't think adding "unity" helps. Unity is already implied in
> the form of the 'mind-body'. - The problem lies deeper than in wordings.
> The mind-body problem needs to be solved. Which is not easy. Right now I'm
> quite busy writing down the solution I have arrived at, using both Peirce
> and Foucault. (Which will yet take a month or two...). After I've finished
> my work, I'll be happy to discuss it with you & other listers.
>
> Kirsti
>
> Stephen Jarosek kirjoitti 16.9.2015 16:56:
>
>> Kirsti, you make a sensible observation. Speaking for myself, it looks
>> like I have become a bit sloppy in my wording... I used to write
>> "mind-body unity" but have become lazy, shortening it to "mind-body",
>> assuming that people will take the "unity" part for granted. But is
>> there an alternative to writing "mind-body unity" every time? I like
>> Ken Wilber's use of the word "holon", but not everybody knows what
>> that means. I suppose the word "entity" is an alternative to "holon"
>> and I've seen that used in the past.
>> Cheers
>> sj
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
>> Sent: Wednesday, 16 September 2015 3:23 PM
>> To: Clark Goble
>> Cc: PEIRCE-L
>> Subject: Re: [peirce-l] [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:8863] The problem
>> with instinct - it's a category
>>
>> Dear list,
>>
>> I sincerely do find talk about "mind-bodies" basically twisted. A
>> modern division, a split, is thereby taken for granted, taken as the
>> starting-point. - A being, be it a human being, or a bee, should
>> remain as the starting point.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Kirsti
>>
>> Clark Goble kirjoitti 15.9.2015 21:13:
>>
>>> Apologies - I just found out I’d sent this to the old Peirce list
>>> rather than the new one. My apologies for the problem. Apple Mail
>>> appears to autosuggest based upon what emails you have archived.
>>> Sometimes this leads to the old list getting picked up. Unfortunately
>>> Mail’s UI also doesn’t display the full email unless you click on it.
>>> So unless I click on the Peirce-L name I occasionally get the wrong
>>> email. When I’m posting regularly I always remember. When I’m posting
>>> infrequently (as has of late been the case) then I can forget. Once
>>> again my apologies again.
>>>
>>> On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 12:03 PM, Clark Goble <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> 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 _all_organisms, 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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--
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
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