Hi Ed,
Thanks for detailing your theory of motion (which is fascinating),
according to which Newton's Second Law allows for irreversible mechanical
motions unlike its usual textbook interpretation implying that all
mechanical motions should be reversible (since the equation is symmetric
with respect to time, at least formally).
So Peirce's following statement would be invalid even based Newton's second
law (if we adopt your new interpretation of it):
". . . the law of the conservation of energy is equivalent to the
proposition
that all operations governed by mechanical laws are reversible; so that
an immediate corollary from it is that growth is not explicable by those
laws, . . . " CP 6.14
Besides, this statement would be invalid based on the Second Law of
Thermodynamics (SLT), which was what I had in my mind but did not explicate
in my 7/22/2015 post. As you know, according to SLT, all mechanical
motions in ISOLATED systems tend toward disorder irreversibly. But in
NON-ISOLATED systems such as biological organisms, some mechanical motions
(e.g. growth) can produce order, IF and ONLY IF such motions are coupled to
(or supported by) other motions that tend toward disorder (e.g.,
respiration, ATP hydrolysis). This was the heart of Prigogine's two
lectures given at Rutgers as I mentioned, entitled "The Constructive (yang)
role of Irreversibility (yin)" (parentheses are my addition).
All the best.
Sung
On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 4:26 AM, Ed Dellian <ed.dell...@t-online.de> wrote:
> Dear Sung,
>
> please let me get just one foot in the door; it concerns your mentioning
> of "Newton's second law" in paragraph (3). You say it wouldn't allow for
> irreversible motion. This is true with respect to the "second law" as it is
> taught in textbooks: Force equals mass times acceleration. It is not true,
> however, with respect to Newton's authentic theory. Just read his second
> law: "Mutationem motus proportionalem esse vi motrici impressae" (I spare
> the second half), which is: "A change in motion is proportional to the
> motive force impressed" (I use the Cohen-Whitman transl., Berkeley 1999).
> Note that "change in motion" is not "continuous acceleration", but rather
> the difference "delta p" between a former and a different latter state of
> motion, p; change ("mutatio motus") happens between both states. This
> terminology evidently implies that time flows between the two states, and
> since the flow of time is irreversible the law implies irreversible change
> in motion as well. Note, secondly, that "being proportional" is not "being
> equal", as the latter is presupposed by those who assert "force equals
> maass-acceleration" to be Newton's law. Newton's term requires a "constant
> of proportionality" between "change in motion" and "impressed force".
> Symbolizing the "force" with A, the "change in motion" with B, I obtain the
> "triadic" relation A/B = C = constant for Newton's authentic second law.
> Note that I succeeded years ago in identifying the dimensions of the
> constant of proportionality (which constant is omitted in the "classical"
> rendering of the law): they read "element of space over element of time".
> Therefore, the full "second law" reads "impressed force" over "change in
> motion" = "element of space" over "element of time". This is no longer
> "triadic", rather it is a quaternary proportion, or a "tetraktys", and you
> find it first in Galileo's "Discorsi" of 1638, at the beginning of the
> "Third day", when he mathematically (in terms of geometric proportion
> theory, that is) introduces the law of uniform straightlined motion,
> wherefrom Newton took it, as he explicitly says in a Scholium after
> Corollary 6 to the laws of motion, in the little-known second edition of
> the Principia (London 1713).
>
> It is evident that with a Newtonian "second law" that reads "impressed
> force over change in motion equals element of space over element of time"
> *everything
> *in the theoretical science of motion of today must change. In symbols
> the law reads: F/delta p = c, or generally: F/p = c, which is identical
> with the E/p = c derived from the Maxwell equations by Poynting in 1884.
> The same E/p = c is behind Planck's energy term of 1900, if you only
> remember that p = h/lambda (which in the end leads to E/p = c). It is
> behind Einstein's special relativity (just see Max Born's book on
> Einstein's relativity theory, chapter "The inertness of energy" (my
> translation from the German "Trägheit der Energie"). It is also the germ of
> Heisenberg's theory. This can be seen as early as you put Heisenberg's
> relations together to form a quaternary equation of products, so that h
> vanishes, and then transform it into an equation of relations according to
> the known rules of geometric proportion theory.
>
> This to consider I expect of you because I think that Galileo and Newton
> were right with their law of cause and effect, of *irreversible change*
> in motion caused by impressed forces, so that it was never necessary to
> conceive a special "second law of thermodynamics" in order to bring reality
> back to the science of motion. It was also not necessary to think with
> Peirce of "triadic" relations and of "abduction", things that appear at
> least superfluous as soon as one knows the principles of geometric
> proportion theory, which principles anticipate and imply everything that
> Peirce tried to formulate. Had he known the said principles, and had he
> known Newton's true irreversible second law, he would certainly not have
> developed what he did while presupposing mistaken principles of theoretical
> physics. It is necessary to correct the errors first, because in this
> mathematical science everything is connected to everything. I think that
> it makes no sense (I beg your pardon) to proceed with theoretical
> considerations which ignore fundamental errors about and misconceptions of
> the basic theory of motion.
>
> If you have any questions, please let me know.
>
> Best wishes,
> Ed.
>
> Am 22.07.2015 um 23:56 schrieb Sungchul Ji:
>
> Stan, Edwina, Tom, lists,
>
> (1) I am always impressed by the well-known fact that 99% of all the
> species that once populated the biosphere has undergone extinction. This
> scientific fact seems to support the yin-yang doctrine of the Daoist
> philosophy, speciation being the yang and extinction being the yin of the
> biological evolution. I am not a professional philosopher, but my
> impression is that the Western philosophy in general may have the tendency
> to emphasize the positive (or yang) aspect of reality, neglecting or
> ignoring the negative (or yin) aspect, and this may include Peirce's
> identification of matter (or reality) with mind (i.e., order, organization,
> habit, laws, etc.). I have long advocated a Daoist perspective on the
> relation between matter and mind: Matter is not only associated with order
> (or mind/organization) but also with disorder (or chaos/disorganization).
> To put it more strongly,
>
> "Mind/order (yang) and mindlessness/disorder (yin) are the two
> (8786-1)
> sides of the same coin, i.e., matter (Dao)."
>
>
> As I mentioned on these list on several occasions, Statement (8786-1) is
> consistent with Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures on which he
> delivered two lectures at Rutgers in the early 1980's, entitled:
>
> "The Construtcive Role of Irreversibility."
> (8786-2)
>
> which means that no construction (or organization) is possible without
> the irreversible loss of the free energy of matter.
>
> (2) Peirce's view of the biological evolution (
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agapism) seems to fit his principle of
> irreducible triadic relation (ITR) if we can define the
> structure-preserving mappings, f, g, and h, as indicated in the legend to
> Figure 1:
>
>
> f g
> Nature -----------> DNA -----------> Life
> |
> ^
> |
> |
> |__________________________|
> h
>
> Figure 1. The biological evolution as an irreducible tradic relation of
> Peirce.
>
> f = tychasm (e.g., thermal fluctuations, Brownian motions necessary for
> chemical reactions);
>
> g = anancasm (e.g., protein binding to DNA template triggering the
> synthesis of RNA, RNA acting as the template for protein synthesis upon
> binding to ribosomes);
>
> h = agapasm (e.g., tendency of organisms to reproduce, resulting from
> male-female attraction called 'love')
>
>
> As you can see, I have changed the name of the first node in this figure
> from "Biological Evolution" in my 7/20/2015 PEIRCE-L post to "Nature", and
> the names of the mappings f, g, and h from, respectively, (encoding,
> decoding, and inheritance) to (tychasm, anancasm, and agapasm), because the
> semantics of the former ITR was the microscopic view of the biological
> evolution, while that of Figure 1 above is the macroscopic view of
> evolution. What connects these two views of biological evolution is ITR,
> which is acting as what mathematicians call a 'functor' (see Category
> Theory for Scientists at http://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp13/).
>
> This illustrates the power of using a diagram to represent an idea or a
> theory, because the (commutative) diagram provides us with a set of the
> degrees of freedom of populating the NODES and ARROWS with different terms
> or concepts, depending on the context of the topic under discussion, as
> long as the STRUCTURE of the diagram is preserved.
>
> (3) I happened to read this morning the following paragraph from CP
> 6.14 which indicates that Peirce's knowledge of thermodynamics was
> inadequate because he apparently was not aware of the Second Law of
> thermodynamics which allows for irreversible mechanical motions (and hence
> growth) unlike the Newton's Second Law of motions which prevents them:
>
> "Mr. Herbert Spencer wishes to explain evolution upon mechanical
> (8786-3)
> principles. This is illogical, for four reasons. . . . .Fourth, because
> the law of the conservation of energy is equivalent to the proposition
> that all operations governed by mechanical laws are reversible; so that
> an immediate corollary from it is that growth is not explicable by those
> laws, even if they be not violated in the process of growth. . . ."
>
> (4) I found another paragraph or two where I think Peirce conflated the
> concepts of "energy" and "information", thus violating the laws of
> thermodynamics and informatics. I will detail this finding in another post
> shortly.
>
> (5) These criticisms of mine not withstanding, I still believe that
> Peirce's notion of the "irreversible triadic relation" (ITR) is valid and
> universal. As the Daoist philosophy would predict, Peircean
> ideas/propositions are not always yang (i.e., positive/correct) but
> sometimes negative (i.e., yin/fallacious) as well, as Peirce himself would
> have acknowledged gladly (cf. his fallibilism). To distinguish between
> these two aspects of Peircean writings, it may be necessary to go outside
> the boundaries of Peircean thoughts and compare his writings with some of
> the new findings that have emerge since his passing in 1914, especially in
> the areas of irreversible thermodynamics (including self-organization),
> quantum mechanics (e.g., energy quantization possibly being a pre-requisite
> for organization), molecular and cell biology, neuroscience, and
> informatics.
>
> All the best.
>
> Sung
>
> With all the best.
>
> Sung
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 9:13 AM, Stanley N Salthe <ssal...@binghamton.edu
> > wrote:
>
>> Edwina -- Well, I think I'd go for a mixture of all three. neoDarwinians
>> vehemently deny any role for the anacastic.
>>
>> STAN
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 4:15 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Stan - In my view, agapasm is the only reasonable answer to the
>>> reality of evolution- I'm certainly not rejecting the randomness of
>>> tychasm, but I'd say it rates low on the scale of functionality. By the
>>> time a random solution emerged to a very real environmental problem, the
>>> species would have been long distinct. And I find the linear determinism of
>>> the anancastic - that rejects both Firstness (chance) AND networked
>>> association (Thirdness)..to be a weak remedy.
>>>
>>> I think that the agapastic method, which sees organisms/populations as
>>> informationally in contact and bionetworked with their environment, and
>>> coming up with anticipatory solutions to environmental challenges as the
>>> most reasonable.
>>>
>>> There ARE numerous researchers working in this area, exploring the
>>> informational networks. The best term for this very intensive area of
>>> research - might be: Complex Systems Biology. There are quite a few
>>> journals in this area. I'm sure you know BioSystems. And, biosemiotics is a
>>> major force in this area!!! There's also great work done by the CASYS
>>> group, led by Daniel Dubois, - dealing with anticipation in various
>>> systems: biology, economics, etc.
>>>
>>> Google Complex Systems Biology. There's an article on Wikipedia which
>>> can be a good start - but *you, yourself, are heavily involved in this
>>> area anyway!*
>>>
>>> Edwina
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> *From:* Stanley N Salthe <ssal...@binghamton.edu>
>>> *To:* biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee
>>> *Sent:* Tuesday, July 21, 2015 3:29 PM
>>> *Subject:* [biosemiotics:8784] Re: Instinct and emotion
>>>
>>> So, then, with "Evolutionary Love", Darwinism would be tychastic,
>>> developmental tendency would be anacastic, while the agapastic aspect would
>>> be...?
>>>
>>> STAN
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 10:15 AM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Stan - the basic existential nature of habit is *'attraction by
>>>> association'*..such that a functional new form will build itself up
>>>> and strengthen itself in the environment, by virtue of 'attraction'
>>>> ...which is one aspect of agapasm. [The other, I think, would be final
>>>> cause]. Again, "Mind has its universal mode of action, namely, by final
>>>> causation" (1.269)
>>>>
>>>> Habits are attractors of matter, binding new matter into the common
>>>> 'rules of formation' of that collection..."the habits and the tendency to
>>>> take them ever strengthening themselves until the events would have been
>>>> bound together into something like a continuous flow" 1.412. ...'bundles of
>>>> habits' are substances' 1.414. "In fact, habits, from the mode of their
>>>> formation, necessarily consist in the permanence of some relation" 1.414.
>>>>
>>>> And a long outline of the three modes of evolution and adaptation...
>>>>
>>>> "Remembering that all matter is really mind, remembering, too, the
>>>> continuity of mind...(6.301)..."The tychastic development of thought, then,
>>>> will consist in slight departures from habitual ideas in different
>>>> directions indifferently, quite purposeless and quite unconstrained whether
>>>> by outward circumstances or by force of logic, these new departures being
>>>> followed by unforeseen results which tend fix some of them as habits more
>>>> than others.
>>>>
>>>> The anancastic development of thought will consist of new ideas adopted
>>>> without foreseeing whither they tend, but having a character determined by
>>>> causes either external to the mind, such as changed circumstances of life,
>>>> or internal to the mind as logical developments of ideas already accepted.
>>>>
>>>> The agapastic development of thought is the adoption of certain mental
>>>> tendences, not altogether heedlessly, as in tychasm, nor quite blindly by
>>>> the mere force of circumstances of of logic, as in anancasm, but by an
>>>> immediate attraction to the idea itself, whose nature is divined before the
>>>> mind possesses it, by the power of sympathy, that is, by virtue of the
>>>> continuity of mind..." 6.307.
>>>>
>>>> I note that for Peirce matter=mind. And of course, agapastic evolution
>>>> obviously brings in Final Causality.
>>>>
>>>> Edwina
>>>>
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> *From:* Stanley N Salthe <ssal...@binghamton.edu>
>>>> *To:* biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee
>>>> *Sent:* Tuesday, July 21, 2015 9:51 AM
>>>> *Subject:* [biosemiotics:8781] Re: Instinct and emotion
>>>>
>>>> Thanks Edwina! That's a nice summary. Then, how does one get from
>>>> habit to love?
>>>>
>>>> STAN
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 8:49 AM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Stephen - I'm not sure of the point of your post. Are you trying to
>>>>> say that Peirce's view of the origin of life and its evolution/adaptation
>>>>> was pure Darwinism? If so, this is incorrect. His analysis of *The
>>>>> Origin of Species* "merely extends politico-economical views of
>>>>> progress to the entire realm of animal and vegetable life" (6.293). Peirce
>>>>> analyzed three modes of evolution, the 'evolution by chance' or
>>>>> 'fortuitous variation' (6.296) of Darwin - and he acknowledged that
>>>>> chance, as a mode of Firstness (freedom) was existent - and then, 'those
>>>>> theories which attribute all progress to an inward necessary principle, or
>>>>> other form of necessity" (6.298). This was 'mechanical necessity' as the
>>>>> chief factor of evolution (6.298). Then, there was Lamarck's which is
>>>>> 'evolution by the force of habit' (6.300).
>>>>>
>>>>> Then, he says, "Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before
>>>>> us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity,
>>>>> and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution or
>>>>> tychasm, anancastic evolution or anacams, and agapastic evolution or
>>>>> agapasm". 6.302.
>>>>>
>>>>> And he considers 'tychasm and anancasm' as 'degenerate forms of
>>>>> agapasm'. 6.303.
>>>>>
>>>>> Obviously, we can see that each mode represents one of the three
>>>>> categories: Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.
>>>>> All three modes therefore play a role in evolution and adaptation. And
>>>>> this means that life is neither fully accidental (Firstness) or
>>>>> fully inevitable (Secondness) but is a process of Mind extending itself
>>>>> within forming habits-of-association (Thirdness. ). As to why life exists,
>>>>> there can be no answer; my individual opinion is that abiotic morphologies
>>>>> developed to prevent the dissipation of matter, and that biotic
>>>>> morphologies then developed as more complex measures to fufill the same
>>>>> role.
>>>>>
>>>>> Edwina
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> 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
>
>
>
--
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
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L
to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To
UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the
line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at
http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
