To List, especially Victoria and Gary:
I would like to add a few comments to these highly controversial
posts on Peirce and Prigogine.
Before you a priori reject these comments as being scientifically
illiterate,
I feel that I ought to say a few words relevant to my point of view.
First, historically, modern decision theory has not changed
significantly since Porphory deduced his logical trees for
Aristotelian categories.
Current work on ontology for both computer science and biomedical
decision making come straight from the problem of categorization and
the search for decision trees.
Pierce, Prigogine, Robert Rosen, Alicia Juarrero, Eric Schneider,
Sagan and others all face the common problem of constructing a
meaningful narrative (with implied decision trees) about natural
categories, natural dynamics and the dynamics of natural categories.
Secondly, Aristotle developed his categories in terms of individuals,
species and genera and allowed for multiple layers of genera. Modern
mathematics, beginning with Cantor, moved away from Aristotelian
categories and reduced the narrative to individuals and genera,
members of sets (or, containment in sets.) Thus, modern mathematics
is forced to construct the Aristotelian notion of individuals,
species and genera by using an iterative process working on classes
of variables.
Thirdly, next weekend, Saturday afternoon, a small group of members
of the Washington Evolutionary Systems Society (WESS) will meet in
the Department of Mathematics at Georgetown University to discuss
"Into the Cool". (Eric Schnieder, Alicia Juarrero, Bob Ulanowicz and
myself are among the founding members of WESS.) The discussion of
"Into the Cool" is open and we invite you to participate. Eric has
sent us some questions he wishes us to address. Professor Prigogine
spoke to WESS on several occasions and was the only honorary member
of WESS. In the WESSbook group we have discussed the books of many
evolutionary theorists, including the works of Prigogine, Alicia
Juarrero, Ulanowicz, Rosen, and perhaps a hundred others.
(Victoria: We would be delighted if you would join us!) Over the
past three decades, I have had the good fortune to have had extended
conversations with Prigogine, Rosen, Juarrero, Schneider, Salthe,
Earley, Kainen, Pribram, Ehresmann, Artigiani, and Ulanowicz. They
have contributed much to my education.
Fourthly, my training is in biochemistry and genetics. After
retiring from NIH several years ago, most of my time has been devoted
to study of the mathematical dynamics of discrete systems. I have
taught two graduate level classes at NIH, both composed from the
original scientific literature. One class on Health Risk Analysis
which addressed biological dynamics from the perspective of potential
toxic exposures - when is an exposure that *causes* a disease? The
other was team taught with a physician, "Chaotic, Cyclic, and
Oscillatory Processes in Biology and Medicine." My objective is to
develop a logic for the chemical sciences based on the list of
chemical elements. This requires a specific grammar for chemical and
biological processes based on electrical concepts. Indeed, my
interest in Peirce was originally motivated by his background in
chemistry and its influence on his categorizations of logic.
Finally, I would note a critical logical and philosophical
distinction. Robert Rosen and Howard Pattee (a biophysicist) reject
the Prigogine approach and developed a school of writings that uses
the mathematics of category theory to construct a narrative. My
French colleague, Professor Ehresmann also uses category theory to
construct narrative about living systems. ( see: Memory Evolutive
Systems http://perso.wanadoo.fr/vbm-ehr/ )
Prigogine used the traditional mathematics of Newtonian Calculus
which is also the basis of thermodynamics. The concept of a gradient
is merely the concept of a slope, such as the slope of a roof. Rosen
and Ehresmann use the recently developed notions of relational
algebras with its potential binding to the logic of topos theory.
This long introduction is intended to provide to the reader a hint of
the perspective from which I write. Now for some comments.
On Apr 22, 2006, at 1:06 AM, Peirce Discussion Forum digest wrote:
Subject: Re: Peirce and Prigogine
From: "Victoria N. Alexander" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
On Apr 20, 2006, at 10:15 AM, gnusystems wrote:
Victoria,
[[ I believe the reduction of the gradient may be one of the
mechanisms
employed by final cause. But I believe that it is the instances of
emergence or "upgrades," to use Ben's term, which exemplify the
workings
of final cause. The ultimate degradation of system may be the "final
state" of its physical parts, but its actions or achievements, the
results of its "upgrades," may live on in other systems. ]]\
Yes; and here i think your "final state" is equivalent to Peirce's
"entelechy", which is not the final cause of creation but the
*object*
of it, the final cause itself being a symbol, according to the
penultimate paragraph of "New Elements" (EP2, 324):
[[[ A chaos of reactions utterly without any approach to law is
absolutely nothing; and therefore pure nothing was such a chaos. Then
pure indeterminacy having developed determinate possibilities,
creation
consisted in mediating between the lawless reactions and the general
possibilities by the influx of a symbol. This symbol was the
purpose of
creation. Its object was the entelechy of being which is the ultimate
representation. ]]]
That's helpful. Thanks for the grounding.
The danger of miscommunication between philosophy and science about
chaos is high. In modern scientific usage, the narrative of chaos is
constructed from Newtonian Calculus; it is fully deterministic yet
generates highly irregular attractors. Given the initial conditions,
the evolution of chaos is fully predictable. Be wary in the usage
and potential meanings of this term!
I suspect that when modern science decided to stop talking about
final
causes, it did so because it failed to distinguish between final
cause
and final state.
I think you are right. That's the feeling I got reading Into the Cool,
but I could not express it so well.
I believe that the challenge of "final cause" is a temporal
challenge. In short, one has to imagine one future point in time
acting on the present. In a simple sentence: The death of Bill
Clinton in 2035 caused G W Bush to end the war in 2006.
Schneider and Sagan are not focusing on behavior patterns; it's the
final cause *of their being* that they claim to be gradient
reduction.
I think you're right here, but I don't think that putting it this way
saves S&S from my criticism. Probably my definition of final
cause, in
its particularity or peculiarity, prevents me from agreeing with them.
I make distinctions between, what I call, directionality and
originality in final cause phenomena. I'm a literary theorist, who
works on the problem of intentionality, and, as strange as this
sounds,
I did my dissertation work with a theoretical physicist at the
Santa Fe
Institute. So we are coming at this from very different angles, as
you
suggest, but I think we may meet around a similar center. To put my
position very briefly, I believe that self-organization itself (which
is what is "caused" by intense reduction of the gradient) is not
sufficient to be considered a final cause phenomenon. I think of
final
cause phenomena as emergent systems. Although self-organization is
often cited as an example of emergence of radical novelty, there
doesn't seem to be true "intentionality," as I define it, in these
mere
"directional" forms of emergence (Jeffrey Goldstein makes a related
critique of the practice of equating emergence with self-organizing
phenomena.
I believe this issue is also discussed in terms of first-
and second-order emergence.)
What is the distinction you wish to express?
Is it comparable to first and second order cybernetics?
Or, differential equations?
[[ One has to think of a system as fully embedded: its relevant
environment being part of itself. In this view (made by Alicia
Juarreo
(I presume you mean Alicia Juarrero?)
or Walter Freeman, for instance), it's intentional actions are not
always conscious, so, as Peirce points out, one ought not confuse its
intentional behavior, with "purposeful" behavior, by which we usually
mean conscious purpose. ]]
The excellent works of Susan Oyama on The Ontogeny of Information and
Contingency should be considered in this discussion.
Ah, now you're singing my song! I worked for some months on an
investigation of "intentionality", drawing heavily on Walter
Freeman's
work -- i never finished it as a stand-alone piece because i
eventually
realized that i couldn't extricate it from the rest of the theory i'm
developing (in the book i'm now revising). But if there's interest, i
could pull some relevant sections from the book draft and post them
here
or put them up on my website. I think we have enough context now that
it
may be useful; it would certainly be useful to me, because i
worked all
that out before i'd read any Peirce, and now i'm curious to see
how it
would translate into Peircean (or semiotic) terms.
Great. Yes, I'd love to learn more about your theory. I just sent
Walter a paper that I wrote on emergence using Peircecan semiotics.
I'm
anxious to see what he makes of it.
Victoria: Would you forward me a copy of your paper?
The deepest problem that separates the arts and literature from the
sciences and mathematics is the usage of the same symbols with
different intent.
I am very curious about your approach to this area.
For now i'll just mention that the word "intentional" raises the same
problems as the word "purpose", in that its relation to consciousness
is
ambiguous in ordinary language and needs special measures to
disambiguate. One such measure is Stan Salthe's "specification
hierarchy", which is explained in our article at
http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/44
(and
in many of Stan's other articles.)
Stan Salthe is also a long time participant in WESS affairs. His
efforts to separate hierarchy theory into two categories are notable.
Your abstract pretty much sums up my interests as well. I'm reading it
now.
Victoria
In closing, I would add a comment on symbol systems. The chemical
sciences developed a symbol system, a very special symbol system,
that is based on the list of atomic numbers and relations between
these numbers. Chemical relations also form a particular logic that
is different from physical logic. This logic can be used to calculate
the number of certain structural and optical isomers - neither of
which can be calculated from physical or mathematical principles.
This is a very special form of logic that was used to develop
molecular biology and genetics. These two sciences, both developed
over the past 100 years, use chemical logic, not Newtonian calculus,
to describe cause and effect relations in living systems. These two
sciences also take an Aristotelian view of categories - individuals,
species, and genera - for constructing decision trees. The dynamic
decisions of cells in expressing DNA information are expressed in
terms of relations among chemical symbols and chemical logic.
I presuppose that most readers of this list will find these
statements to clash with their philosophy of physics, the philosophy
of genera. I can merely add that the symbol system of physics is not
the sole symbol system and that the philosophy of physics is not the
sole philosophy of science. The philosophy of the chemical sciences
is vastly more complex than the philosophy of physics because it must
posit quantitative relations among individuals, species and genera.
It must provide a source of generative grammars, not merely genera.
Such is Life Itself.
Cheers
Jerry
Jerry LR Chandler
Research Professor
Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study
George Mason University
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