Re: [Fis] A definition of Information

At 03:46 PM 2004/03/16, Jesper Hoffmeyer wrote:
>Hi, Stan, Søren and John
>
>Just dumping in on the latest exchanges: As you know I am neither a Peirce
>scholar or a philosopher, but it seems to me that the following quote from
>the 1891 paper in the Monist "The Architecture of Theories" points to an
>ontological interpretation of the law of habit taking as I prefer to call
>it (because people invariably identifies mind with human mind, which was
>definitely not what Peirce had in mind):
>
>"In the beginning - infinitely remote - there was a chaos of
>unpersonalized feeling, which being without connection or regularity would
>properly be without existence. This feeling, sporting here and there in
>pure arbitrariness, would have started the germ of a generalising
>tendency. Its other sportings would be evanescent, but this would have a
>growing virtue. Thus, the tendency to habit would be started; and from
>this, with the other principles of evolution, all the regularities of the
>universe would be evolved." (Peirce 1931-35) CP 6.33).

I think that this quote also is compatible with Stan's approach. I note
that this passage is especially hard to interpret, since it predicates
something, but says that it is, "properly" without existence. So we have to
take the sense of predication here to be in the context of non-existence.
Typically in philosophy this is reserved for the mythological, fictional,
fantastic, or the merely possible. My main point in raising this issue, and
I'll address this to Søren's post, is that such things like feeing, mind,
consciousness, etc do not exist in any sense prior to Secondness. In
talking in general terms about categories like mind, one needs to be very
careful not to over-reify the concept and abstract too much from its
conditions for existence, which all lie in Secondness. Stan's approach may
not be sufficiently integrative (I reserve judgment on that here), but at
least he takes this issue as seriously as it needs to be taken.

Finally, I will say that on issues of meaning, I am inclined to agree with
what Loet said in his most recent post. I think that to get the levels and
kinds of what might be called meaning clear, we need to get clear about
what we mean by functionality, and that we should be cautious about
confusing meaning with mere functionality: meaning is a special case of
functionality, and does not precede it in existence.

Cheers,

John

I've found the link between apes and civilised men - it's us.
                        -- Konrad Lorenz
Professor John Collier collierj@ukzn.ac.za
Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
http://www.nu.ac.za/undphil/collier/index.html
http://www.kli.ac.at/research.html?personal/collier

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Received on Fri Mar 19 13:56:30 2004