On 11/4/2016 8:57 AM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
my own view that our 'existential cosmos' IS a three category semiosic universe. That is, my view is that the three categories only emerge within the existentiality of the matter/mind universe.
Yes. But at the instant of the Big Bang and for some time thereafter, there were no minds or quasi-minds that could perceive and interpret that existence. But there was a physical kind of monadic and dyadic pre-semiosis. As soon as life of any kind (even some kind of pre-life) began to form, there was the beginning of a non-degenerate Thirdness. As soon as there were animals with sight (any alien animals on any early planets), they could look up at more ancient stars and interpret (full Thirdness) patterns that had never previously been the objects of semiosis.
my reading of this pre-universe state is that it was, as Peirce notes "unbounded potentiality'. This "Nothingness of boundless freedom 6.219..." is not, in my view, the same as the logic of freedom or possibility [which is Firstness].
I agree. But we have to distinguish the universe (whatever it is) from any mathematical coordinate system we impose upon it, around it, or outside of it. For the moment, let's ignore string theory, multiverses, and other such hypotheses. Just consider an Einsteinian 4-D universe. Mathematically, we can postulate a 100-dimensional coordinate system in which that 4-D universe is "embedded". But that system is just pure mathematics. Nothing exists that has that shape. We could name one of those dimensions "supertime" and imagine that coordinate line running through the middle of the 4D universe. Then we could call the line segment running to minus infinity "pre-time" and the segment running to plus infinity "post-time". But whatever we call it is irrelevant. It exists only in our 100-D hypothesis. For the actual universe, that line called supertime is meaningless. As Peirce would say, supertime has no implications whatsoever for anything that any intelligent being in the universe could ever perceive or act upon. It's just pure mathematics with no observable effects or meaningful applications. John
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