Ben, Kirstima, list,
yes! Interesting, valuable and lovely. And not contradicting anything I wrote: With things, that cannot take habits I meant inanimate things. Trees, apples, bean stalks, dragons, elves are organisms, which can. I do not think that I am a nerdish spoilsport of fairytales, just from claiming that inanimate things do not habitize. But: The apple does not want to refresh the eater, and is not red or golden because of its own will. The habit is not that of the apple, but that of the evolution. This one can see and still remain an agnostic who likes fairytales. Science based not on ideology, but on research, is not blunt, nor dull, nor limits it the possibility to tell and digest fairy- and other tales. However, it shifts the subjects people are afraid of. While in ancient times like the stone age people were haunted by dragons, apple trees, autocratic gods, in scientific cultures, like buddhism, which is a science based on research, they rather fear the universe mirroring their own deeds, for example. And fairytales: Not all of them are pure wisdom, I think. Maybe many of them have the function to discipline children by betraying and disinforming them. When a childs mind is crowded with ideas about kings and princesses, this child wont get the idea that monarchy is but natural. Ok, maybe I am or want to be a spoilsport of fairytales..., but not of all.
Best,
Helmut
Ben,
A most interesting & valuable post!
I do hope all involved in this discussion will pay attention to this
response of yours.
Kirsti
Ben Novak kirjoitti 16.7.2016 21:00:
> Dear Helmut and List:
>
> Helmut asks: "Can things take habits?"
>
> Discussion of Peirce's theory of habit reminds me of G. K.
> Chesterton's discussion of the logic of fairy tales in "The Ethics of
> Elfland", which in turn strongly resonates with Peirce's "Neglected
> Agument." Here is an extract from the former of the part relevant to
> the current discussion on Peirce-L. Chesterton writes of "a certain
> way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales,
> but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.":
>
> It might be stated this way. There are certain sequences or
> developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the
> true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the
> word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences.
> We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit
> that reason and that necessity. For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are
> older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) necessary
> that Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters. There is no getting
> out of it. Haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he
> pleases: it really must be. If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller
> is the father of Jack. Cold reason decrees it from her awful throne:
> and we in fairyland submit. If the three brothers all ride horses,
> there are six animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true
> rationalism, and fairyland is full of it. But as I put my head over
> the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world,
> I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in
> spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened -- dawn and
> death and so on -- as if they were rational and inevitable. They
> talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as
> the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an
> enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the
> imagination. You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you
> can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them
> growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. These
> men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an
> apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the
> distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of
> apples falling. If the apple hit Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the
> apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one
> occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple
> not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the
> air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike.
> We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between
> the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and
> the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only
> weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental
> impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven;
> but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical
> question of how many beans make five.
>
> Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the nursery
> tales. The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the apple will
> fall"; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the
> other. The witch in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn, and the
> ogre's castle will fall"; but she does not say it as if it were
> something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause.
> Doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen
> many castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her
> reason. She does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary
> mental connection between a horn and a falling tower. But the
> scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary
> mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple
> reaching the ground. They do really talk as if they had found not only
> a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts. They do
> talk as if the connection of two strange things physically connected
> them philosophically. They feel that because one incomprehensible
> thing constantly follows another incomprehensible thing the two
> together somehow make up a comprehensible thing. Two black riddles
> make a white answer.
>
> In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they
> are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting
> conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's
> Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy
> Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is
> not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation
> and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If
> there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that
> there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison
> and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can
> say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot
> say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a
> bear could turn into a fairy prince. As ideas, the egg and the chicken
> are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no
> egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest
> bears. Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is
> essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of
> fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the "Laws
> of Nature." When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in
> autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if
> Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell
> from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer that it is magic. It is not
> a "law," for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a
> necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we
> have no right to say that it must always happen. It is no argument for
> unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary
> course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the
> remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or
> a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of account, not because it
> is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility, but because it is a
> miracle, and therefore an exception. All the terms used in the science
> books, "law," "necessity," "order," "tendency," and so on, are really
> unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do
> not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing
> Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, "charm," "spell,"
> "enchantment." They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its
> mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs
> downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is
> bewitched.
>
> I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have
> some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is
> simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in
> words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite
> distinct from another; that there is no logical connection between
> flying and laying eggs. It is the man who talks about "a law" that he
> has never seen who is the mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is
> strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential
> sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has
> so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be
> some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is
> none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost
> love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the
> tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen
> them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of
> apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded
> him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals
> his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of
> his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist
> from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree
> should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.
>
> This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from
> the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is
> derived from this. Just as we all like love tales because there is an
> instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the
> nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the
> fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales:
> we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven
> is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon.
> But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a
> door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales --
> because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only
> person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read
> without boring him. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an
> almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that
> apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found
> that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us
> remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. I have said
> that this is wholly reasonable and even agnostic.
>
> [I do not know why the last paragraph copied in a different font size
> than the ones before..., but you can find the whole essay in a
> singular font online at:
> http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/orthodoxy/ch4.html [5]
>
> Best,
> Ben Novak
>
> BEN NOVAK [6]
> 5129 Taylor Drive, Ave Maria, FL 34142
> Telephone: (814) 808-5702
>
> _"All art is mortal, __not merely the individual artifacts, but the
> arts themselves._ _One day the last portrait of Rembrandt_ _and the
> last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—__though possibly a
> colored canvas and a sheet of notes may remain—__because the last
> eye and the last ear accessible to their message __will have gone."
> _Oswald Spengler
>
> On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 1:19 PM, Helmut Raulien <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear Gary F., list,
>> you wrote:
>> "Peirce says here that ‘the law of habit’ – as opposed to the
>> ‘fundamental law of mind,’ which is the _tendency_ of all things
>> to _take_ habits – ‘is a simple formal law, a law of efficient
>> causation.’".
>>
>> I donot think, that things can take habits. I think, only organisms
>> can. Also I think, that efficient cause cannot form a habit, but
>> only final cause can, which final cause is only a cause of
>> organisms, but not of inanimate nature. (and example cause too,
>> nervous animals/brain, but that is only my hobby topic). Ok, the
>> whole universe may well be an organism (and something comparable to
>> a brain animal too), but then it is the universe, that takes habits,
>> not the things. By the way: What about binary laws, eg. the
>> conservation laws, that only make sense if being exact? (Energy is
>> exactly conserved). There is no way for them to might have evolved
>> by growth of any kind. They are, if habits, saltatory emergent ones.
>> So habits, if you want to expand the term like Peirce did, are not
>> only growth affairs, but can be emergent too. See my last post in
>> the thread "the autors claim...". Binary laws cannot be due to "ever
>> so minute changes", and if Peirce has claimed that, he was wrong, I
>> think. Imagine a universe, in which energy is not exactly conserved,
>> but increases: This universe would glow white hot and explode in
>> nearly no time. If energy would decrease, it would immediately
>> shrink, cool down, and vanish. Peirce is not an overwise guru, he
>> might have been wrong in one or the other minor aspect, but all in
>> all he did a good job, and was right. But in this case, there is a
>> problem, I think. So please do not answer with Peirce-quotations,
>> but with your own thoughts. Can things take habits??
>> Best,
>> Helmut
>>
>> 13. Juli 2016 um 17:39 Uhr
>> [email protected] wrote:
>>
>> Here’s another Peircean post from my blog, a rather long one
>> linking Peirce’s cosmology with semiotic causality.
>>
>> Gary f.
>>
>> According to Peirce’s cosmological hypothesis, evolution is a
>> continuing process of _growth_ which accounts for both the diversity
>> and the regularities we observe in a universe both mental and
>> physical.
>>
>> The regularities or ‘laws’ of nature result from the
>> habit-taking tendency, which tends toward the extreme
>> ‘crystallization’ of form which in physics we call ‘matter.’
>> But the behavior patterns of the physical universe are never
>> completely determinate, the laws of nature never absolutely exact,
>> because the habit-taking tendency is countered and complemented by a
>> spontaneity which keeps the universe alive and accounts for the
>> growing diversity and complexity of forms. This spontaneity is
>> primal to the mental side of evolution, which involves both taking
>> and breaking habits.
>>
>> Here is Peirce’s explanation of the ‘Uniformity’ of nature in
>> Baldwin’s Dictionary [1]:
>>
>> The hypothesis suggested by the present writer is that all laws are
>> results of evolution; that underlying all other laws is the only
>> tendency which can grow by its own virtue, the tendency of all
>> things to take habits. Now since this same tendency is the one sole
>> fundamental law of mind, it follows that the physical evolution
>> works towards ends in the same way that mental action works towards
>> ends, and thus in one aspect of the matter it would be perfectly
>> true to say that final causation is alone primary. Yet, on the other
>> hand, the law of habit is a simple formal law, a law of efficient
>> causation; so that either way of regarding the matter is equally
>> true, although the former is more fully intelligent. Meantime, if
>> law is a result of evolution, which is a process lasting through all
>> time, it follows that no law is absolute. That is, we must suppose
>> that the phenomena themselves involve departures from law analogous
>> to errors of observation. But the writer has not supposed that this
>> phenomenon had any connection with free-will. In so far as evolution
>> follows a law, the law of habit, instead of being a movement from
>> homogeneity to heterogeneity, is growth from difformity to
>> uniformity. But the chance divergences from law are perpetually
>> acting to increase the variety of the world, and are checked by a
>> sort of natural selection and otherwise (for the writer does not
>> think the selective principle sufficient), so that the general
>> result may be described as ‘organized heterogeneity,’ or,
>> better, rationalized variety. In view of the principle of
>> continuity, the supreme guide in framing philosophical hypotheses,
>> we must, under this theory, regard matter as mind whose habits have
>> become fixed so as to lose the powers of forming them and losing
>> them, while mind is to be regarded as a chemical genus of extreme
>> complexity and instability. It has acquired in a remarkable degree a
>> habit of taking and laying aside habits. The fundamental divergences
>> from law must here be most extraordinarily high, although probably
>> very far indeed from attaining any directly observable magnitude.
>> But their effect is to cause the laws of mind to be themselves of so
>> fluid a character as to simulate divergences from law. All this,
>> according to the writer, constitutes a hypothesis capable of being
>> tested by experiment.
>>
>> Peirce says here that ‘the law of habit’ – as opposed to the
>> ‘fundamental law of mind,’ which is the _tendency_ of all things
>> to _take_ habits – ‘is a simple formal law, a law of efficient
>> causation.’ Ten years earlier, in his ‘Reply to the
>> Necessitarians,’ Peirce had written that the necessitarian, while
>> believing that irregular events are inexplicable, also says
>>
>> that the laws of nature are immutable and ultimate facts, and no
>> account is to be given of them. But my hypothesis of spontaneity
>> does explain irregularity, in a certain sense; that is, it explains
>> the general fact of irregularity, though not, of course, what each
>> lawless event is to be. At the same time, by thus loosening the bond
>> of necessity, it gives room for the influence of another kind of
>> causation, such as seems to be operative in the mind in the
>> formation of associations, and enables us to understand how the
>> uniformity of nature could have been brought about. (W8:123, CP
>> 6.60)
>>
>> This ‘other kind of causation’ is called by Jesper Hoffmeyer
>> _semiotic causality_, which ‘gives direction to efficient
>> causality, while efficient causality gives power to semiotic
>> causality’ (Hoffmeyer 2008, 64). This duality or complementarity
>> of causes accounts for the two sides of evolution, the physical and
>> the psychical or mental.
>>
>> Semiotic causality is implicit in Peirce’s definitions of
>> ‘sign,’ which generally follow the path of _determination_
>> object > sign > interpretant:
>>
>> I will say that a sign is anything, of whatsoever mode of being,
>> which mediates between an object and an interpretant; since it is
>> both determined by the object _relatively to the interpretant_, and
>> determines the interpretant _in reference to the object_, in such
>> wise as to cause the interpretant to be determined by the object
>> through the mediation of this ‘sign.’ (EP2:410)
>>
>> The reverse side of this path of determination is a path of
>> representation: the sign _represents_ the object _to_ the
>> interpretant, which then represents the sign – by determining
>> another interpretant sign, or else a ‘habit-change,’ which is
>> both an end of semiotic causality and a governor of efficient
>> causation, i.e. a determinant of future transformations in the
>> physical realm. Any actual occurrence of semiotic
>> _determination_/_representation_ must itself determine and represent
>> a change in a state of mind, quasi-mind or bodymind: in other words,
>> it must _make a difference_ to that bodymind, and this difference is
>> _both_ semiotically and efficiently caused.
>>
>> In other words, the _logical interpretant_ of a sign, as a
>> ‘habit-change’ or modification of the guidance system which
>> ‘gives direction’ to the subsequent _practice_ of the guided
>> system or bodymind, will determine the energetic interpretants [2]
>> of future signs, which over time will make the path of practice by
>> walking it. This in turn will make a difference to the physical (as
>> well as the mental) context of further semiosis.
>>
>> In terms of evolutionary biology, the way a type of organism
>> interacts with its environment can effect changes in both organism
>> and environment, which may in turn affect the ability of the species
>> to be represented in another generation of organisms. Over time,
>> then, natural selection will weed out the _ethos_ which does not
>> maintain its viability as an occupant of its ecological niche. But
>> natural selection must have a variety of possibilities to select
>> from, and does not in itself account for that variety. Hence the
>> need for the hypothesis that spontaneity or ‘chance’ is a primal
>> element in an evolving universe such as the one we all inhabit.
>>
>> } Freedom lies only in our innate human capacity to choose between
>> different sorts of bondage, bondage to desire or self esteem, or
>> bondage to the light that lightens all our lives. [Sri Madhava] {
>>
>> http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ [3] }{ _Turning Signs_ gateway
>>
>> ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on
>> "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message.
>> PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To
>> UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to
>> [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY
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>>
>> -----------------------------
>> PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY
>> ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to
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>> PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at
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>
>
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://www.gnusystems.ca/BaldwinPeirce.htm#Uniformity
> [2] http://gnusystems.ca/TS/prx.htm#semenerg
> [3] http://gnusystems.ca/wp/
> [4] http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm
> [5] http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/orthodoxy/ch4.html
> [6] http://bennovak.net
A most interesting & valuable post!
I do hope all involved in this discussion will pay attention to this
response of yours.
Kirsti
Ben Novak kirjoitti 16.7.2016 21:00:
> Dear Helmut and List:
>
> Helmut asks: "Can things take habits?"
>
> Discussion of Peirce's theory of habit reminds me of G. K.
> Chesterton's discussion of the logic of fairy tales in "The Ethics of
> Elfland", which in turn strongly resonates with Peirce's "Neglected
> Agument." Here is an extract from the former of the part relevant to
> the current discussion on Peirce-L. Chesterton writes of "a certain
> way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales,
> but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.":
>
> It might be stated this way. There are certain sequences or
> developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the
> true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the
> word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences.
> We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit
> that reason and that necessity. For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are
> older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) necessary
> that Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters. There is no getting
> out of it. Haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he
> pleases: it really must be. If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller
> is the father of Jack. Cold reason decrees it from her awful throne:
> and we in fairyland submit. If the three brothers all ride horses,
> there are six animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true
> rationalism, and fairyland is full of it. But as I put my head over
> the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world,
> I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in
> spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened -- dawn and
> death and so on -- as if they were rational and inevitable. They
> talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as
> the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an
> enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the
> imagination. You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you
> can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them
> growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. These
> men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an
> apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the
> distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of
> apples falling. If the apple hit Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the
> apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one
> occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple
> not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the
> air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike.
> We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between
> the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and
> the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only
> weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental
> impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven;
> but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical
> question of how many beans make five.
>
> Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the nursery
> tales. The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the apple will
> fall"; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the
> other. The witch in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn, and the
> ogre's castle will fall"; but she does not say it as if it were
> something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause.
> Doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen
> many castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her
> reason. She does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary
> mental connection between a horn and a falling tower. But the
> scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary
> mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple
> reaching the ground. They do really talk as if they had found not only
> a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts. They do
> talk as if the connection of two strange things physically connected
> them philosophically. They feel that because one incomprehensible
> thing constantly follows another incomprehensible thing the two
> together somehow make up a comprehensible thing. Two black riddles
> make a white answer.
>
> In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they
> are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting
> conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's
> Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy
> Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is
> not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation
> and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If
> there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that
> there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison
> and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can
> say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot
> say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a
> bear could turn into a fairy prince. As ideas, the egg and the chicken
> are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no
> egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest
> bears. Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is
> essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of
> fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the "Laws
> of Nature." When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in
> autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if
> Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell
> from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer that it is magic. It is not
> a "law," for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a
> necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we
> have no right to say that it must always happen. It is no argument for
> unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary
> course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the
> remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or
> a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of account, not because it
> is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility, but because it is a
> miracle, and therefore an exception. All the terms used in the science
> books, "law," "necessity," "order," "tendency," and so on, are really
> unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do
> not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing
> Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, "charm," "spell,"
> "enchantment." They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its
> mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs
> downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is
> bewitched.
>
> I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have
> some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is
> simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in
> words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite
> distinct from another; that there is no logical connection between
> flying and laying eggs. It is the man who talks about "a law" that he
> has never seen who is the mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is
> strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential
> sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has
> so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be
> some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is
> none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost
> love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the
> tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen
> them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of
> apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded
> him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals
> his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of
> his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist
> from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree
> should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.
>
> This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from
> the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is
> derived from this. Just as we all like love tales because there is an
> instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the
> nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the
> fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales:
> we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven
> is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon.
> But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a
> door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales --
> because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only
> person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read
> without boring him. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an
> almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that
> apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found
> that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us
> remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. I have said
> that this is wholly reasonable and even agnostic.
>
> [I do not know why the last paragraph copied in a different font size
> than the ones before..., but you can find the whole essay in a
> singular font online at:
> http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/orthodoxy/ch4.html [5]
>
> Best,
> Ben Novak
>
> BEN NOVAK [6]
> 5129 Taylor Drive, Ave Maria, FL 34142
> Telephone: (814) 808-5702
>
> _"All art is mortal, __not merely the individual artifacts, but the
> arts themselves._ _One day the last portrait of Rembrandt_ _and the
> last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—__though possibly a
> colored canvas and a sheet of notes may remain—__because the last
> eye and the last ear accessible to their message __will have gone."
> _Oswald Spengler
>
> On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 1:19 PM, Helmut Raulien <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear Gary F., list,
>> you wrote:
>> "Peirce says here that ‘the law of habit’ – as opposed to the
>> ‘fundamental law of mind,’ which is the _tendency_ of all things
>> to _take_ habits – ‘is a simple formal law, a law of efficient
>> causation.’".
>>
>> I donot think, that things can take habits. I think, only organisms
>> can. Also I think, that efficient cause cannot form a habit, but
>> only final cause can, which final cause is only a cause of
>> organisms, but not of inanimate nature. (and example cause too,
>> nervous animals/brain, but that is only my hobby topic). Ok, the
>> whole universe may well be an organism (and something comparable to
>> a brain animal too), but then it is the universe, that takes habits,
>> not the things. By the way: What about binary laws, eg. the
>> conservation laws, that only make sense if being exact? (Energy is
>> exactly conserved). There is no way for them to might have evolved
>> by growth of any kind. They are, if habits, saltatory emergent ones.
>> So habits, if you want to expand the term like Peirce did, are not
>> only growth affairs, but can be emergent too. See my last post in
>> the thread "the autors claim...". Binary laws cannot be due to "ever
>> so minute changes", and if Peirce has claimed that, he was wrong, I
>> think. Imagine a universe, in which energy is not exactly conserved,
>> but increases: This universe would glow white hot and explode in
>> nearly no time. If energy would decrease, it would immediately
>> shrink, cool down, and vanish. Peirce is not an overwise guru, he
>> might have been wrong in one or the other minor aspect, but all in
>> all he did a good job, and was right. But in this case, there is a
>> problem, I think. So please do not answer with Peirce-quotations,
>> but with your own thoughts. Can things take habits??
>> Best,
>> Helmut
>>
>> 13. Juli 2016 um 17:39 Uhr
>> [email protected] wrote:
>>
>> Here’s another Peircean post from my blog, a rather long one
>> linking Peirce’s cosmology with semiotic causality.
>>
>> Gary f.
>>
>> According to Peirce’s cosmological hypothesis, evolution is a
>> continuing process of _growth_ which accounts for both the diversity
>> and the regularities we observe in a universe both mental and
>> physical.
>>
>> The regularities or ‘laws’ of nature result from the
>> habit-taking tendency, which tends toward the extreme
>> ‘crystallization’ of form which in physics we call ‘matter.’
>> But the behavior patterns of the physical universe are never
>> completely determinate, the laws of nature never absolutely exact,
>> because the habit-taking tendency is countered and complemented by a
>> spontaneity which keeps the universe alive and accounts for the
>> growing diversity and complexity of forms. This spontaneity is
>> primal to the mental side of evolution, which involves both taking
>> and breaking habits.
>>
>> Here is Peirce’s explanation of the ‘Uniformity’ of nature in
>> Baldwin’s Dictionary [1]:
>>
>> The hypothesis suggested by the present writer is that all laws are
>> results of evolution; that underlying all other laws is the only
>> tendency which can grow by its own virtue, the tendency of all
>> things to take habits. Now since this same tendency is the one sole
>> fundamental law of mind, it follows that the physical evolution
>> works towards ends in the same way that mental action works towards
>> ends, and thus in one aspect of the matter it would be perfectly
>> true to say that final causation is alone primary. Yet, on the other
>> hand, the law of habit is a simple formal law, a law of efficient
>> causation; so that either way of regarding the matter is equally
>> true, although the former is more fully intelligent. Meantime, if
>> law is a result of evolution, which is a process lasting through all
>> time, it follows that no law is absolute. That is, we must suppose
>> that the phenomena themselves involve departures from law analogous
>> to errors of observation. But the writer has not supposed that this
>> phenomenon had any connection with free-will. In so far as evolution
>> follows a law, the law of habit, instead of being a movement from
>> homogeneity to heterogeneity, is growth from difformity to
>> uniformity. But the chance divergences from law are perpetually
>> acting to increase the variety of the world, and are checked by a
>> sort of natural selection and otherwise (for the writer does not
>> think the selective principle sufficient), so that the general
>> result may be described as ‘organized heterogeneity,’ or,
>> better, rationalized variety. In view of the principle of
>> continuity, the supreme guide in framing philosophical hypotheses,
>> we must, under this theory, regard matter as mind whose habits have
>> become fixed so as to lose the powers of forming them and losing
>> them, while mind is to be regarded as a chemical genus of extreme
>> complexity and instability. It has acquired in a remarkable degree a
>> habit of taking and laying aside habits. The fundamental divergences
>> from law must here be most extraordinarily high, although probably
>> very far indeed from attaining any directly observable magnitude.
>> But their effect is to cause the laws of mind to be themselves of so
>> fluid a character as to simulate divergences from law. All this,
>> according to the writer, constitutes a hypothesis capable of being
>> tested by experiment.
>>
>> Peirce says here that ‘the law of habit’ – as opposed to the
>> ‘fundamental law of mind,’ which is the _tendency_ of all things
>> to _take_ habits – ‘is a simple formal law, a law of efficient
>> causation.’ Ten years earlier, in his ‘Reply to the
>> Necessitarians,’ Peirce had written that the necessitarian, while
>> believing that irregular events are inexplicable, also says
>>
>> that the laws of nature are immutable and ultimate facts, and no
>> account is to be given of them. But my hypothesis of spontaneity
>> does explain irregularity, in a certain sense; that is, it explains
>> the general fact of irregularity, though not, of course, what each
>> lawless event is to be. At the same time, by thus loosening the bond
>> of necessity, it gives room for the influence of another kind of
>> causation, such as seems to be operative in the mind in the
>> formation of associations, and enables us to understand how the
>> uniformity of nature could have been brought about. (W8:123, CP
>> 6.60)
>>
>> This ‘other kind of causation’ is called by Jesper Hoffmeyer
>> _semiotic causality_, which ‘gives direction to efficient
>> causality, while efficient causality gives power to semiotic
>> causality’ (Hoffmeyer 2008, 64). This duality or complementarity
>> of causes accounts for the two sides of evolution, the physical and
>> the psychical or mental.
>>
>> Semiotic causality is implicit in Peirce’s definitions of
>> ‘sign,’ which generally follow the path of _determination_
>> object > sign > interpretant:
>>
>> I will say that a sign is anything, of whatsoever mode of being,
>> which mediates between an object and an interpretant; since it is
>> both determined by the object _relatively to the interpretant_, and
>> determines the interpretant _in reference to the object_, in such
>> wise as to cause the interpretant to be determined by the object
>> through the mediation of this ‘sign.’ (EP2:410)
>>
>> The reverse side of this path of determination is a path of
>> representation: the sign _represents_ the object _to_ the
>> interpretant, which then represents the sign – by determining
>> another interpretant sign, or else a ‘habit-change,’ which is
>> both an end of semiotic causality and a governor of efficient
>> causation, i.e. a determinant of future transformations in the
>> physical realm. Any actual occurrence of semiotic
>> _determination_/_representation_ must itself determine and represent
>> a change in a state of mind, quasi-mind or bodymind: in other words,
>> it must _make a difference_ to that bodymind, and this difference is
>> _both_ semiotically and efficiently caused.
>>
>> In other words, the _logical interpretant_ of a sign, as a
>> ‘habit-change’ or modification of the guidance system which
>> ‘gives direction’ to the subsequent _practice_ of the guided
>> system or bodymind, will determine the energetic interpretants [2]
>> of future signs, which over time will make the path of practice by
>> walking it. This in turn will make a difference to the physical (as
>> well as the mental) context of further semiosis.
>>
>> In terms of evolutionary biology, the way a type of organism
>> interacts with its environment can effect changes in both organism
>> and environment, which may in turn affect the ability of the species
>> to be represented in another generation of organisms. Over time,
>> then, natural selection will weed out the _ethos_ which does not
>> maintain its viability as an occupant of its ecological niche. But
>> natural selection must have a variety of possibilities to select
>> from, and does not in itself account for that variety. Hence the
>> need for the hypothesis that spontaneity or ‘chance’ is a primal
>> element in an evolving universe such as the one we all inhabit.
>>
>> } Freedom lies only in our innate human capacity to choose between
>> different sorts of bondage, bondage to desire or self esteem, or
>> bondage to the light that lightens all our lives. [Sri Madhava] {
>>
>> http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ [3] }{ _Turning Signs_ gateway
>>
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>
>
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://www.gnusystems.ca/BaldwinPeirce.htm#Uniformity
> [2] http://gnusystems.ca/TS/prx.htm#semenerg
> [3] http://gnusystems.ca/wp/
> [4] http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm
> [5] http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/orthodoxy/ch4.html
> [6] http://bennovak.net
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