Re: Vedr.: Re: info & physics

Dear Rafael and Edwina

I think these are very difficult questions. But in Fuschl we greed on accepting "levels of existence" in some kind of heterachy (inspired by Len Troncale), where it made sense to distinguish between physical causality, informational causality and semiotic causality.

Now Peirce sets Aristotle's ontology into evolutionary motion. Peirce is not only a hyle-morphist but also hylozoist. Matter is alive inside (with the pure feeling of Firstness).Thus the world is bound together, not by an ideal potential pattern as in Aristotle, but by a continuum (plenum) with pure feeling's spontaneity and the law of minds tendency to take habits and become effete. Matter is effete mind says Peirce.

Thus Edwina is right that everything exist in relations, but I do not find it useful to call all relations semiotic. In the living we are already working with more than ten different kinds of semiosis or semiotic levels. (see the last figure in my paper). I would prefer - also for historical reasons and not to make the new vision too strange for the scientists - when talking about nature to accept an entangled form of causality on the quantum level, a physical-energetic causality on the physical-chemical level (as described in physics as exchange of energy), an informational-signal organizational causality in dissipative structures and the like and then a semiotic causality in living systems and finally a linguistic-communicative causality in human conscious and social systems. I agree with Rafael that the information concepts spins of from this our communicative relation.

Peirce's world view is interactive, so you are right (maybe with Maturana and Varela) that to a certain degree (with constraints of secondness and thirdness) "we bring forth a world" when we perceive and interpret it. It is fairly strait forward in social relations, but it has to go all the way down to inanimate nature but only to a very minor degree. We cannot give up the objective resistance of forces and willpower that is Secondness and the regularity and stability coming form Thirdness, (making Maya exists!),. Although we may all be one in the firstness of the pure feeling of mind at the deepest level of existence the world is still there.

(I will be incommunicado Thursday and Friday away on a conference. But that may be fortunate as I have already overstepped Pedro's ceiling of two messages per week.)

Best wishes

>>> capurro@hdm-stuttgart.de 21-05-02 21:31 >>>
Dear Søren,

>Part of the debate is about the necessary ontological framework. But as you
state it is not clear what a pan-informational or pan-semiotic view means.-
I do not find any of them useful if it makes everything into information or
signs. >

In order to solve (or, better, 'disolve') the question of metaphysics
Kant postulated, as you know, the 'Ding an sich' i.e. the 'view from
nowhere' (or from the 'absolute') to things (as they appear). Karl-Otto
Apel has shown how Kant's semiotics was 'pragmatically' and
'socially' transformed by Peirce. What do we learn with regard to
a 'pragmatic ontology'? I am not sure that we can learn to postulate
a unity of interpretation in the sense of an ideal 'community of
interpretants' (as Apel does) which, in the long run, would play a
similar role as Kant's transcendental subject (or as the Absolute
in classical metaphysics). I would prefer to think this 'pragmatism'
in a more radical way as giving rise to know interpretations (and each
frame of interpretation is an ontology...) that may create a complex
system of 'appearences' in a more or less coherent way. What is
possible at the level of human interpretation (and 'world design')
is possible, mutatis mutandis, at a pre-human level. Weizsäcker
uses the concept of 'objectivized semantics' in order to differentiate
between the 'eidos' or 'form' or structure and, say, the sum of molecules it
is build of. My question is now, how far can we re-interpret Aristotle's
substantialism and 'hyle-morphism' (=in-formation) in, as I like to say,
postalic (and not only: semiotic!) categories. I say: not only semiotic,
because I like the idea of send a message and give it an address.
This is less a question of interpretation than a question of
communication. Is, for instance, quantum theory of this kind?
Cheers
Rafael
Received on Tue May 21 23:15:38 2002