Clark, List, You say: "So Peirce clearly didn’t see conservation of energy as universal due to the role of chance. While I don’t think he put it in quite those terms, I believe the implication is that chance breaks symmetries enabled by determinism."
In saying this, you seem to be putting greater weight on points 2 and 3 below. 1. The general prevalence of growth, which seems to be opposed to the conservation of energy. 2. The variety of the universe, which is chance, and is manifestly inexplicable. 3. Law, which requires to be explained, and like everything which is to be explained must be explained by something else, that is, by non-law or real chance. 4. Feeling, for which room cannot be found if the conservation of energy is maintained. (CP 6.613) I would have thought that points 1 and 4 would be particularly important for understanding some of the reasons for limiting the scope of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics as explanatory for the growth of order in natural systems (i.e., that they govern closed systems, but are limited, in some sense, in the application to open systems). Here are two questions. (a) In what ways do points 1 and 4 add something that is not already found in points 2 and 3? (b) How might Peirce's account of the law of mind--which I take to be embodied in a summary way in the 1st and 4th points--help us better understand the relationships between the making and breaking of fundamental symmetries and the growth of order in natural systems? These two questions are not yet well formulated. I'm posing them here in the hopes of working towards a better formulation of what it is that I find puzzling about the law of mind and its application to these questions about the growth of order. --Jeff Jeffrey Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy Northern Arizona University (o) 928 523-8354 ________________________________ From: Clark Goble <cl...@lextek.com> Sent: Thursday, June 1, 2017 12:33 PM To: Peirce-L Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Did Peirce Anticipate the Space-Time Continuum? On May 30, 2017, at 2:49 PM, Helmut Raulien <h.raul...@gmx.de<mailto:h.raul...@gmx.de>> wrote: I am not happy with tychism: Conservation laws require infinite exactness of conservation: Energy or impulse before a reaction must be exactly the same before and after a reaction. Though in a very small (quantum) scale it is not so, but then there must be some kind of counting buffer mechanism to make sure that in a bigger scale infinite exactness is granted. This one is also governed by laws. I do not believe in the dualism sui-generis versus laws, I rather guess that it is all laws providing the possibility of evolution and generation of new things, self-organization and so on. Without laws nothing would happen, I´d say. I think that natural constants may change, but that there are some laws that dont. And if these laws are only the ones based on tautology: One plus one can never be 2.0000001, because 2 is defined as 1+1. I guess these eternal laws are the laws of logic. I think they are tautologies, like a syllogism is a tautology: The conclusion is nothing new, all is already said in the two premisses: "Arthur is a human, all humans are mortal, so Arthur is mortal", you can forget the conclusion by just putting an "and" between the premisses: "Arthur is a human, and all humans are mortal". The conclusion ", so Arthur is mortal" is redundant, except you do not believe in continuity which is indicated by the word "and" between the two premisses. My conclusion: "Law" is an inexact term. A "law" is a compound constructed of an eternal part (tautology, continuity), and a changeable part ((temporary) constants). Mathematically of course conservation laws arise out of Noether’s Theorem. That more or less just states the relationship between symmetries and conservation laws. I don’t think we need a “buffer” to deal with this, just symmetries. It would seem that continuity may (or may not) apply to those symmetries and thus determines the conservation. Of course Noether did her important work both on the theorem that bares her name as well as linear algebra well after Peirce died. But Peirce did do some work in the logic of linear algebra that is tied to the theorem. So far as I know he never approached the insight of her theorem though. He was familiar with the abstract principles though. However Peirce did write on conservation laws which we discussed here a few months back as tied to chance and determinism relative to habits. In my attack on "The Doctrine of Necessity" I offered four positive arguments for believing in real chance. They were as follows: 1. The general prevalence of growth, which seems to be opposed to the conservation of energy. 2. The variety of the universe, which is chance, and is manifestly inexplicable. 3. Law, which requires to be explained, and like everything which is to be explained must be explained by something else, that is, by non-law or real chance. 4. Feeling, for which room cannot be found if the conservation of energy is maintained. (CP 6.613) So Peirce clearly didn’t see conservation of energy as universal due to the role of chance. While I don’t think he put it in quite those terms, I believe the implication is that chance breaks symmetries enabled by determinism.
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