Edwina, Kirsti, list,
ET
I wish we could get into the analysis of time in more detail.
I came across a short passage by Gregory Bateson that clarifies the
issues. See the attached Bateson79.jpg, which is an excerpt from p. 2
of a book on biosemiotics (see below). Following is the critical point:
GB
thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds
whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones...
A story is a little knot or complex of that species of
connectedness which we call relevance.
This observation is compatible with Peirce, but CSP used the term
'quasi-mind' to accommodate the species-bias of most humans:
CP 4.551
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.
Re time: We have to distinguish (1) time as it is in reality
(whatever that may be); (2) time in our stories (which include the
formalized stories called physics); (3) the mental sequence of
thought; and (4) the logical sequence (dialogic) of connected signs.
ET
The question is: Are the Platonic worlds BEFORE or AFTER the so-called
Big Bang? I read them as AFTER while Gary R and Jon S [not John S]
read them as BEFORE. In my reading, before the Big Bang, there was
Nothing, not even Platonic worlds.
This question is about time sequences in different kinds of stories:
the Big Bang story about what reality may be; and Platonic stories
about ideal, mathematical forms.
The time sequence of a mathematical story is independent of the time
sequence of a physical story. We may apply the math (for example,
the definitions, axioms, and proofs of a Platonic form) to the
construction of a physical story.
But that application is a mapping between two stories. The term
'prior to' is meaningful only *within* a story, not between stories.
In short, our "commonsense" notion of time is an abstraction from
the stories we tell about our experience. The time sequences in two
different stories may have some similarities, but we must distinguish
three distinct sequences: the time sequences of each story, and the
time sequence of the mapping, which is a kind of meta-story.
JFS
Does anyone know if [Peirce] had written anything about embedding
our universe in a hypothetical space of higher dimension?
KM
I am most interested in knowing more on this.
David Finkelstein, p. 277 of the reference below:
Peirce seems to have included geometry in his evolutionism, at least
in principle... [He] seems not to have responded to the continuously-
evolving physical geometry of Riemann and Clifford... nor to
Einstein's
conceptual unification of space and time.
In any case, I think that the notion of time as an abstraction from
stories -- imaginary, factual, or theoretical -- provides a way of
relating different views. It also allows for metalevel reasoning
that can distinguish and relate different kinds of stories that
have independent time scales and sequences.
John
____________________________________________________________________
From Google books:
_A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor
to Biosemiotics_ edited by Jesper Hoffmeyer, Springer, 2008:
https://books.google.com/books?id=dcHqVpZ97pUC&pg=PA246&lpg=PA246&dq=Order+is+simply+thought+embodied+in+arrangement&source=bl&ots=DQUnZlvOYu&sig=X8bH0YAG597uwjyedB4dSf2BuC0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizyZD88JrQAhVENxQKHeEeBwoQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=Order%20is%20simply%20thought%20embodied%20in%20arrangement&f=false
David R. Finkelstein, _Quantum Relativity: A Synthesis of the Ideas
of Heisenberg and Einstein_, Springer, 1996.
https://books.google.com/books?id=OvjsCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA277&lpg=PA277&dq=peirce+relativity&source=bl&ots=0rc7kjxqIJ&sig=Hsgtu9_LwZAoDxH7kbVgvWmAfiI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihk4SzpZzQAhWF3YMKHR1kA5wQ6AEIHzAA#v=onepage&q=peirce%20relativity&f=false
