FIVE

Mediating Fallibly

I. THE MIND’S STAGE, AND ITS ACTORS. Peirce’s objective idealism is a strange concoction indeed. Methodological (and epistemological) realism coupled with ontological idealism: something akin to physicist Arthur Eddington’s (1958a:xi-xix) desk as an uninterpreted complex of sensations (the positivist’s reality) and as a reified construct (a swarm of electrons). This distinction entails a transition from the perceived world at the edge of consciousness to the realm of mental constructs subject to human creative capacities and logical combinatorial principles. The one somehow, and hopefully, finally confirms the other, and the other the one.

A question, however, must be asked: “What would the ‘real’ be without minds to construct it?” This problem combines methodology (and epistemology) as well as ontology. Kant, of course, rooted both of these branches in general metaphysics. Ontology must rely on faith not methodology, and methodology in the final analysis relies on ontology, which is to say that over the long haul it relies on theory, itself ultimately based on faith—we see what the theory lets us see, Einstein (in Heisenberg 1971:63) once said. For Peirce, as I have repeated throughout, “reality,” that is, the myriad collection of all possible Umwelt-generated “semiotically real” worlds, reflects “mind-stuff.” Or perhaps better stated, the “real” is mind-stuff (Eddington 1958a, 1958b). But since this “mind-stuff” is never static and never terminal, we must be satisfied with the admission that “reality,” as we can know it “semiotically,” has many faces; these faces are changed without our consciously altering our “mind-stuff,” even in spite of our concerted effort to arrest such change. (As the early Wittgenstein [1961:6.43] trenchantly put it, the happy man and the sad man live in two different worlds.)

On the other hand, if this “mind-stuff and the “laws of nature are ideas or resolutions in the mind of some vast consciousness,” to requote Peirce, then we are placed in yet another pickle—of which Peirce was well aware. At the outset the notion that our minuscule minds are actors on the world’s stage appears to present no problem. Or does it? If we take physicist John A. Wheeler’s (1980a, 1980b, 1984) quantum cosmology at face value, we as actor-participants bring the world-as-recorded-world into existence. In other words, the world as a whole lifts itself by its bootstraps. This is tantamount to a Grand Interpreter saying what the world is as a Grand Interpretant, but in order that this be made possible, Interpreter and Interpretant must be coterminous. They merge one into the other to compose the unthinkable Cosmic Sign—they cannot be separated as Manley Thompson (1953) takes pains to do in his critique of Peirce.

Assume, for a moment, that the totality of the universe upon which this ultimate interpretant bears is serial. At a given point there are n interpreter-interpretant couplings. If a particular coupling under consideration is added to the preceding ones in the series, it can be enumerated n + 1, and upon so being taken into account, it becomes integrated: n + 1 = n. This synthesis then calls for an additional signifying act, ((n + 1) + 1) = n, an act corresponding to the last series, n, under purview. But in order to hold that series in a conceptual grasp, another act is required: (((n + 1) + 1) + 1) = n, and so on. The series is infinite, hence it can be taken in one instantaneous conceptual gulp solely by some inconceivable infinite mechanism or organism.¹

However, we can introduce a counterfeit “temporal-logical operator” into the series, thus exercising a cut, a “now,” which creates a distinction between before and after. If the “now” is arbitrarily placed at the instantiation of a given interpretant, t _o, then what occurs after that point can presumably be marked out as something other than what went on before in the n series. The sequence can be written n_t-1/n_to/n_t+l, where the latter, as a Second, maintains its individuality vis-à-vis the whole. The problem here, as we have observed regarding Godel’s (1949) interpretation of the Einstein-Minkowski “block” universe, is that, when considering all possible series for all possible interpreters, what for interpreter x is n _t-1, for interpreter y can be n_t+I, and the notion of “now” thus loses its significance. Everything exists as a static set of simultaneities (i.e., J. M. E. McTaggert’s [1927] B-series). All series and all “nows” are there, in bloc. Thus the paradox inherent in the series cannot be eliminated except by artificial means. Any “semiotic reality” capable of embracing this series is the result not of “time” or “logic,” traditionally conceived, but of “reality” according to its “block” interpretation. This “block” accounts for moving objects not in the Newtonian sense of classical mechanics but in terms of Einsteinian “world-lines.” By the same token, it would appear, the ongoing semiosic process of signs transmuting into other signs can be conceived as no more than a vast static set of series in what might be called the “semiotic block,” the trajectory of each sign being described as a minuscule curve within the whole Parmenidean package.

Consequently, from this monolithic conception of things, the ongoing web of multiple sign series can lay claim to citizenship rights in the same “block.” Signs, or better, interpretants, if conceived as following their respective “world-lines” like physical objects in the space-time continuum, necessarily form potentially an infinite set of series. Any interpretant referring to the “block” is therefore by definition part of the “block.” If we artificially interject “time” into this operation, it can be said that when that very interpretant used to interject “time” comes into existence, in the next instant it will be part of the timeless “block.” If history is conceived as the successive generation of interpretants, then any and all interpretants regarding the existence or nature of the “block” also become, in the next set of instants, integrated into the “block,” therefore they are part of the domain to which they refer.

In contrast to this “block” idea, to which I have frequently alluded in this inquiry, and more in line with Peircean semiosis, ontologically the determination of specific state properties of an object at the quantum level is a profound switch from the classical paradigm, though its ramifications bear on the universe as an interconnected web, which, like the relativity concept, also harks back to a holistic cosmological view. It is now time to be more explicit regarding this apparent contradiction.

The subjectivity inherent in the quantum theoretical conception of the universe, I must first emphasize, exists at the micro-level (prototemporality)—Eddington’s desk as a swarm of particles. The macro-level physical objects of everyday living (eotemporality)—Eddington’s desk as an object upon which to write—are generally regarded as existing independently of any and all observers. The fact remains, however, that observation entails at least partial creation—though minute it may be—of the physical aspects of nature (see especially Herbert 1985). This aspect of quantum theory is indeed a profound revolution in Western thought. It does not presuppose Berkeleyan metaphysical idealism according to which the furniture of the world exists only insofar as it is perceived and continues its existence in the absence of any human being, for it is in the mind of that monolithic spirit, God. In the quantum theoretical sense, an electron as a discernible object exists in the physical world apart from any human or divine being’s thought or perception of it. What does not exist independent of its being observed (interacted with) is the particular set of physical variables pertaining to the electron as a function of the act of observation (interaction).

In Wheeler’s (1984) terminology, the choice, selection, and established distinction determine the nature of the electron—that is, its being recorded as such and such at a particular point in time for some observer and put to use for some purpose. Otherwise, the electron is simply there, in an abstract sense. The observer decides what property of the electron is to be measured, and in the act she becomes, in a manner of speaking, an attribute of the potential state of the electron, thus bringing about an “eigenvalue” for that property, though without necessarily being able to determine either which “eigenvalue” will result or precisely what the state will be after observation. In another way of putting it, the apparatus tells the system what properties are to be measured, and the system responds accordingly. The choice made by the observer-interpreter determines what is to emerge from chance. In this sense, the “uncollapsed” continuum (Firstness) is independent of consciousness until a choice is made and something selected, then the system is “collapsed” (into Secondness) and put to use.

To couch this more directly in semiotic terms, the sign generally leaves completion of its interpretation, and thus the specification of its interpretant, to the discretion of the interpreter, though she can never bring the interpretation to absolute completion, nor can she know precisely which of the probable immediate interpretants will pop up next. What she can do is choose, select, and distinguish this interpretant from that one, and put it to use or commit it to memory (record it) for later use. In this sense also we see that a slash is necessary between the “semiotically real” and the “real,” the latter being tantamount to the universe independently of whatever signification may be attributed to it, and the former being dependent upon the community—or as Wheeler (1980b: 154) puts it, the joint product of the community—and hence it is inexorably tinged with a degree of subjectivity, in spite of any force exercised by the “real” through its instantiations in the here and now as Seconds.

The classical view depicted the universe as evolving from some initial set of conditions toward some presumably teleological end, whether the human semiotic animal is part of the whole scene or not. The quantum picture plays havoc with that idea: at the micro-level the universe is altered, as a result of observer-observed interaction, in ways that are statistically but not deterministically predictable. Hence there is no teleology definable a priori. In comparable fashion, given the indeterminacy of a particular interpretant’s development, we cannot know what the future of our “semiotically real” holds in store for us. In lieu of a universe as somehow marching to the tune of an established set of initial conditions, it must now be conceded, as we shall note in the following sections, that, whether speaking of the micro-level or the macro-level of the “semiotically real,” the whole of the universe is constantly being (re)generated at each juncture according to unpredictable twists and turns. In the process some sort of order somehow and suddenly appears out of chaos: there can be no totally presupposed or calculable future state of affairs.

The Necker cube model as a micro-level superposition which can be, upon inspection, “collapsed” into one of two potential states is relatively clean and easily spit-polished for illustrating the essence of “quantum logic,” and it introduces a flexibility quite lacking in classical mechanics (see Comfort 1984:66-86). At large-scale molecular, and especially molar, levels involving particles in the order of 10¹⁰ and upwards, however, things become so messy that for practical purposes one may assume that the older determinism can by and large be retained: the system is governed in somewhat deterministic fashion in terms of statistical aggregates. Yet the existence of statistical rather than determined events at the small scale allows for the ubiquitous possibility of novelty. For example, at a given point in time an indefinite number of molecules in a pan of water at room temperature will reach the requisite kinetic energy to be converted to their gaseous state, thus part of the water constantly undergoes evaporation. If a sufficient number of the molecules were suddenly to reach the requisite kinetic energy and the water began to boil, no physical law would actually be violated, though the probability of this occurrence is virtually zero.

This possibility for novelty at the micro-level calls for qualification.

II. A SIGN COLLAPSED BECOMES/IS ANOTHER SIGN: FROM THE MICRO-LEVEL UPWARD. To repeat, no more than a minuscule portion of the events in the universe consist directly of human observer-dependent properties. For each of Wheeler’s phenomena that are recorded and put to use to become part of our “meaningfully real” or “semiotically real” universe, there are countless billions that go undetected. In this regard we are relatively insignificant, a mere handful of ants on the jungle floor. Nevertheless, with respect to our concept of the universe and of ourselves, our history, art, and all our intellectual endeavors, the physical universe as we conceive and perceive it is justifiably a matter of crucial importance to us. That which we select and record in the construction of our “semiotic world” constitutes what Wheeler (1984) calls “meaning physics,” the ultimate stage of investigation of the universe. Questions must thus be asked concerning how basic micro-level action is related to our thought and behavior, that is, to semiotics in general.

I begin with reference to the uncertainty and openness such as that permitted by quantum theory for the determination of properties of natural systems, which do not allow the same self-guidance and self-will as does classical physics. Richard Schlegel (1980:225) argues that the subjective conviction people have of being able to exercise their free will and make a decision with respect to some kinds of behavior coupled with evidence of a remarkable degree of unpredicted behavior in others is consonant with the multistate possibilities quantum physics has discerned at the atomic level. It becomes reasonable, consequently, for a person to believe that, subject always, of course, to many inherent constraints, she is capable of determining her self’s own properties, and that to a large degree what she is and does is of her own volition. Yet she is intrinsically a part of the natural world. Human ideals, values, and purposes, in this sense, may be regarded as rooted in nature, whereas in the classical-physics outlook they were considered to be mere epiphenomena at most, adjoined to our physical being but essentially belonging to a different order of existence.

Schlegel goes on to suggest that since we can acquire knowledge of a given “eigenstate” of a system only by observing it, our mediated awareness of it must be associated with a corresponding superposition of states in readiness for interaction, which I will term, following Schlegel’s argument, a “semiostate” (i.e., the micro-level, or category 1 in regard to figure 5). A semiostate as a state of possibilities actualizable into consciousness is the “eigenstate” of a biological neurosystem which has generated, as a result of growth, experience, and education, a superposition of many possible states.² New states are constantly being formed by an organism in response to external and internal stimuli, some of which can be recalled, while others have been lost to memory (embedded). Or in Peirce’s terms, at the micro-level of unformed possibilia (Firstness), there is a superposition of states of complex probability amplitude. The instantiation (“collapse”) of one of these states into a “particle” (Second) corresponds to what, at that particular point in time and space, is. And a probability factor governs an aggregate of these “particles” in terms of what most likely would be under certain circumstances (Thirdness, the molar level).³

Now for a Gedanken experiment to illustrate the relative openness of the quantum view and its possible relevance to the semiosic process. At the micro-level let I be the mediately conscious subject, let Iⁱ be a particular internal semiostate (of self-other), and let I^e represent a semiostate (of self-Other) involving some aspect of the external world. The superposition of |Iⁱ> and |I^e> can be described thus:

|Iⁱ> is the immediate sensation, or feeling (First), of the organism’s semio-system of some quality, with the concomitant readiness of that semio-system to “collapse,” , according to a probability function, Σ_j, into a semiostate, _Iⁱ (Second), which is then mediated to take on an interpretant (Third) and become a thought-sign. The subscript of Σ_j also marks the possible result of a foregrounding or actualization (“collapse”) of , some item of experience in the world “out there,” defined by the probability function, Σ_k, into an empirical “semiotic object” (Second) as I^e. This external semiostate is then susceptible to mediated consciousness of it (Thirdness) by a concomitant foregrounding or actualization (“collapse”) of into a particular semiostate, IⁱI ^e. Mind, I |m>, as a sign, exercises a choice or selection, pace Wheeler, which entails a distinction (and subsequently the “collapse”) of the combined superpositions, though the two do not occur in the same instant—i.e., somewhat comparable to the wave-particle complementarity. Combining the mediating |m> with the internal and external components of the semiostate, we have: IⁱI^em.

In another way of putting it, the combined superposition is a juxtaposition and interconnectedness of things as possibilia, which corresponds to Fraser’s atemporal domain. The “collapse” yields a particular sign which is then placed in relation to its “semiotic object.” Subsequently it calls up a mediating sign, the interpretant, which in turn passes away into its semiosic successor. The conjun-tion of such signs and objects composes an aggregate, which, in its empirical manifestation, is commensurate with the eotemporal as a sheer linear succession of signs: semiosis. This succession, especially regarding human semiotic, entails the self or the sequence of interpretants, of Is addressing themselves to themselves (their other) as well as to their community and the “real” (Other) in an incessant Peircean dialogue. This entails the biotemporal (and potentially the nootemporal) realm evident in cell aggregates whose activity is coordinated toward some end. Such harmonious communities are best epitomized by those of insects and societies of more developed organisms—though any relatively complex developing organism evinces the same sort of harmonized “community” of cell aggregates as well. Most important, all these collections to a greater or lesser degree manifest mind, according to the Peircean framework.

In this manner, let otherness (other-Other) be an operator, O, acting on the combined superposition to produce mind (as sign) thus:

Mind as sign is not exactly a singularity, since it is interconnected with other mind-signs: it is a “compound sign” (see Merrell and Anderson 1989a). Neither is it necessarily formed by only one of the superposed states, since, marginally at least, and mediately as it were, the mind can be conscious of more than one sign. This characteristic of mind bears on Polanyi’s (1958, 1966) focal and subsidiary awareness as a component of tacit knowing (also Merrell 1982, 1983, 1990). For instance, while on the sofa in the pleasant surroundings of one’s home, one may be reading a book. Attention to the marks qua marks on paper exists only subsidiarily (as qualities or Firsts), while focal attention is directed toward them as marks qua symbol-signs which refer to something they are not (Seconds), and ultimately toward their meaning (interpretants, Thirds). At the same time, the sensation of a purring cat at one’s side on the sofa, the ticking of a clock nearby, the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, are all part of one’s subsidiary awareness, which can quickly be booted up to focal attention if the clock stops, or the cat leaves in search of a more exciting pastime. If this occurs, the cat and clock are signified by the “collapse” of external signs, while attention to the sequence of events in the book one is reading involves successive “collapse” of internal signs (in this regard, see Bohm and Peat [1987:75-84] on tacit or “subliminal” language use in scientific discourse and the problems it caused in articulating the quantum world).

The operator, governed by otherness, ranges from biological demand to social need to individual desire.⁴ Biological demand is what is in the here-now. It constitutes that which is necessary and necessarily reiterated as part of one’s action and reaction to inevitable sensations; it constitutes, in a manner of speaking, the Secondness function of the operator. For example, in a state of physical discomfort due to a drop in the temperature, images of the thermostat, an open window, or a sweater in the closet are conjured up as |m> states pointing toward a remedy for the inconvenient state of affairs. In contrast, social need, experienced as the compulsion to behave according to community conventions and standards, to accumulate a requisite set of material goods for the sake of status, to undergo certain sacrifices in order to reap future gain, involves the probability of such and such ensuing if specific conditions are met. It is a would be, the counterpart to Thirdness, which Peirce often viewed as a continuum of inferences much like a cable: though certain of its strands might be defective, its overall strength will stand up to the test (CP:I.137-39, 4.531 6.595). The “conclusions” of a train of thought, action, and events stemming from social need are in this respect highly probable, and if one follows them effectively to their end, one is relatively assured of certain benefits. Individual desire is another story altogether. It includes gratuitous mental play, sheer “musement,” which holds little relevance to the world of practical affairs. It is a might be, a mere possibility from the tossing ocean of pure chance. Whatever emerges in the mind during this largely supererogatory activity is akin to the abductive act (Firstness). Nothing is predetermined or determinate here. Everything is as it is for the moment: a monad. And for that moment it is self-contained and autonomous with respect to the world “out there.”

Of course there can be a dynamic interplay between signs generated by biological demand, social need, and individual desire, as well as constant oscillation between focal and subsidiary awareness of them. While I can be preoccupied with a toothache, a loud noise may suddenly cause me to jerk my head in the direction from which it came in an attempt to identify it. Then, realizing it was a backfiring engine from a nearby car with a faulty muffler, my memory takes me back to a time in my childhood when I was playing with firecrackers on the Fourth of July. The toothache foregrounds |Iⁱ>, the exhaust explosion an alternative |I^e>, and the recalled event, another Iⁱ>, all occurring in rapid succession at focal and subsidiary levels in the mind, |m>. And all these instances of foregrounding are through and through semiosic, involving the “collapse” of one sign marked by the almost instantaneous emergence of another sign, as they dance in and out of consciousness. It reminds one of a set of Necker cubes flip-flopping back and forth.

Interestingly enough, Schlegel (1980:227), after illustrating how possibly the physics of elementary processes might lead to a better understanding of the flow of consciousness, concedes that, though there is yet no experimental basis on which to claim psychophysical validity for his proposal, nonetheless

it can illustrate that the fact of observer-dependence has significance far beyond the establishment of new concepts of physical property and causal behavior for the individual atomic-level particles. To the physicist those novel ideas alone are of immense import. But just as Newtonian physics brought a new way of thinking to all the sciences, and frequently with great success, we likewise can expect that quantum theory recognition of the role of the observer will lead to new understanding in domains where the mechanical impersonal physics was strikingly helpless.

In this sense, the initial immediate experience (Firstness) of signs could be regarded as arising in some manner at a rudimentary neurological micro-level. This would discount the theory of mind-brain parallelism, and to an extent the theory that mind happenings are epiphenomena of brain happenings. It does imply a hierarchical and increasingly complex chain of command from brain happenings to mind happenings, with neither being at all separable from the other (Hofstadter 1979).⁵ According to this third alternative, what one experiences and feels and intuits (as Firsts) is no less “real” than what one consciously perceives (as Seconds) and interprets (as Thirds).

An actual swan, as (1) a thought-sign, (2) the word swan, or (3) a “semiotic object” “out there,” is no less “real” for us than (4) the feeling or metaphorical image of a swan. All four are equally signs and all are equally “mind,” whether in thought or condensed into the crystallized, effete, “real” thing; that is, they are “semiotically real.” Furthermore, a poet with an inclination toward “swan-feelings” can create an image every bit as “real” as an actual swan in yonder pond, water rushing over the drop at Niagara, a tree in a deep ravine stretching its branches toward the sun’s path, or a mass of granite which, subject to untold pressure over the centuries, is transformed into gneiss. All are of the nature of things (that is, signs) and of the nature of “mind” in general. Demand, need, and desire, consequently, are dispositions commensurate with this nature of things. Drinking when thirsty, donning the clothes that will meet with peer approval, and free flights of the imagination either follow or deviate from habit. If they move along in automaton fashion, habit has exercised its hegemony. If they deviate slightly, then perhaps that particular habit was not concordant with its environment and context, and the “clash” of Secondness has made its presence known.⁶ If they deviate radically, then there has been a somewhat random dip into the pool of chance, of that vast realm of possibilities offered up by Firstness. In whichever case, the flow of signs continues on; happenings pile upon happenings in what often appears to be an accidental succession but which, as Schopenhauer mused, can often be seen, in retrospect, to have been composed according to a consistent plot.

Just as the observer—usually unwittingly—plays a crucial role in determining the properties of a physical micro-state, so the interpreter aids the interpretant along its weary road toward completion. Whether speaking of mind in relation to the physical-state disposition of a biological organism, or of mind as interpreter either of signs or of itself since it is also a sign, the same conclusion inheres: the Cartesian split has suffered a dissolution. Brain-mind, like particle-wave, or sign-interpretant, composes an utterly ineffable, incomprehensible whole—unsayable and unknowable primarily because language, as Bohr indefatigably pointed out, is incapable of giving it full account. That is to say, just as responsibility lies with the interpreter in determining the character of the interpretant, if that determination were to reach finality, which it cannot, there would then be no distinction between interpreter and interpretant. The sign, in all its fullness, would be an indivisible, completely transparent, dense continuum of meaning.

However, in our “real world” of polluted rivers, pizzas, concrete jungles, beer commercials, congested traffic, and videos, given the radically indeterminate nature of the interpretant and the interpreter’s fallibilism, whichever interpretation happens to be foregrounded is so foregrounded at the expense of a myriad array of other interpretations that could have been foregrounded but must remain in the background on to an indefinite future. Semiotically speaking, whichever eigensign happens to pop up is every bit as ephemeral as, at the micro-physical level, any other eigensign, for the sign, that is, its interpretant, almost immediately merges back into its respective semiostate, or perhaps some other one, to yield another probability of occurrence which then gives birth to yet another sign. And so one, and so on.

Although a given interpreter might conceivably be able to reconstruct in every detail the “semiotic universe” of the community to which she belongs, this construct would still not be everything, for, in the first place, she must at least in part be set apart from the field of signs in order to get on with the job of sign procreation—as Bohr (1934:119) wrote of physics, “the new situation . . . has so forcibly reminded us of the old truth that we are both onlookers and actors in the drama of existence.” And in the second place, when finally the interpreter might have concluded her task, that “semiotic universe” would have expanded, and hence evolved, into some new order.

This role of the observer-participant in determining the properties of the “semiotically real,” or concomitantly of the interpreter in determining the interpretant, is foreshadowed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) according to which the subjectively endowed modes and categories of thought and perception generated by the mind give knowledge its general structure. The knowledge I speak of here is Umwelt-dependent, corresponding to the “semiotic world,” rather than the Ding-an-sich, which set the stage for the dialogue between knower and known in the construction of this world. Kant, an inspiration especially to the younger Peirce, also had a definite bearing on the turn contemporary cosmology has taken.

In this light, I now focus on the interpreter as an actor on the stage of her “semiotically real” world, which consists of a multiply variegated “collapse” of signs making up a component of the “real,” the target of all cosmologies.

III. A HOLISTIC PARADIGM OF MIND BEFORE ITS TIME. Peirce’s cosmology is the most enigmatic aspect of his thought; it evinces a speculative intrepidity absent in most of his other writings. An important, perhaps the most momentous, facet of this cosmology is Peirce’s thesis that all things are constantly in a process of evolution toward some new order, and that the interpreter-interpretant takes on an axial role in this evolution. This view of cosmic evolution, when coupled with Peircean semiotics, is the culmination of myriad semiostates, which, in light of the concept of asymmetry and irreversibility developed from figure 4, mutually interact in a collaborative effort to keep the self-organizing semiosic dynamo in motion. And, as I shall argue in this chapter, this is strikingly commensurate with Prigogine’s hypothesis of an irreversible, self-organizing universe.

Peirce’s work on cosmology dates from 1890 on, when he was at the apogee of his creative endeavors and at the same time that he was placing strictures on unduly rampant metaphysical speculation. His raising cosmological problems and attempting to solve them apparently stem from two branches of his general interests: (1) the universal application of laws to radically diverse phenomena, and (2) the stalemate science had apparently reached (Turley 1977:64-65).

Although in general isolated from the intellectural mainstream of his time, Peirce was nonetheless at the forefront of some of the controversies surrounding problems evolving from classical mechanics, especially the question of determinism. Peirce argued repeatedly that (1) determinism is fallacious in regard to the emerging concepts of evolution, increasing complexity, human consciousness, and reason, and (2) an entirely mechanistic universe is incompatible with the notion of growth, development, and decay, all irreversible processes (CP: 1.174, 6.14, 6.72). Evolution must imply a general trend toward increasing diversity, which, Peirce remarks, “is the most intrusive character of nature” (CP: 1.159). Such diversity—the focus of Prigogine and the “physics of chaos” in the contemporary scene—cannot be accounted for with classical laws dictating strict uniformity and “one determinate result” while prohibiting any and all originary variations as the product of a truly creative universe (CP: 1.159, 6.553). Peirce remarks, and rightly so, that the ultimate and invariant laws of nature were regarded by the determinists as “hard, ultimate, unintelligible” facts, the “why and wherefore of which can never be inquired into.” To this, he argues, a sound logic “will revolt, and will pass over at once to a method of philosophizing which does not barricade the road of discovery” (CP:6.60).

Peirce comes close to labeling nineteenth-century mechanistic discourse, as did Whitehead after him, a “mystical chant” over ultimately an unknown and unknowable universe. Regarding consciousness, if, as the determinists claimed, the extramental universe behaves in strict accord with the laws of mechanics, the sole role remaining for consciousness must be that of a passive spectator, “a perfectly idle and functionless flâneur of the world, with no possible influence upon anything—not even upon itself’ (CP: 1.162). Peirce resisted treatment of consciousness as merely another mechanism in a clockwork universe. Quality, feeling, and quale-consciousness are simply not reducible to quantitative data like billiard balls rolling down an inclined plane.

According to Peirce’s cosmology, indeterminacy and chance—his doctrine of tychism—are equally as important to the inner workings of the universe as law, though the evolution of the universe is gradually playing out the range of possibilities while regularity is on the increase in a more or less inverse proportion. This domain of possibilia, corresponding to Firstness, also bears indirectly on Peirce’s doctrine of continuity. Since Firstness consists of a quasi-Platonic realm of qualities or feelings, Peirce believed it to be through and through mental in nature. This conception is in keeping with Peirce’s continuity thesis insofar as, if matter is fossilized mind, like tychism (and Bohm’s implicate), it holds a potentially infinite continuum of possibilities. And, since mind is highly flexible in comparison to matter, its laws hardly seem to be laws, there is such freedom of movement. Although there are grounds for distinguishing between mind and matter, the distinction is in degree rather than kind. Peirce’s psychical interpretation of matter is idealistic, not of the subjective idealist variety, but that of “objective idealism,” which is the “one intelligible theory of the universe that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws” (CP:6.25, also 6.148, 6.158, 6.268).

Peirce calls this psychophysical interpretation of the universe hylopathy (CP:6.24). We are told that something of the general nature of feeling pervades the universe. This daringly speculative leap is actually neither pantheistic nor animistic, though it is anthropomorphic. And it is through and through semiosic: matter and mind, living and inanimate, human and nonhuman, share signness above all, since the universe is in all probability composed of signs in its entirety. In this conception of things, it follows that just as mind, that is, consciousness, is a sign, everything, living as well as nonliving, possesses consciousness in varying degrees, since “what is meant by consciousness is really in itself nothing but feeling” (CP:7.364).

As I suggested above following Schrodinger (1967), activity which drops out of consciousness to become tacit or unconscious, and finally to become part of phylogeny, has to do not with a conscious/unconscious slash but with myriad levels of consciousness—i.e., Peirce’s trope of consciousness as a bottomless lake. This is yet another of Peirce’s reasons for throwing darts at the Cartesian dichotomy between res cogitans and res extensa. He argued that the most we can expect from the mechanical laws is the acceleration of material objects, and if the mind/matter split is enacted, then mind, being of an entirely distinct genre, is rendered forever unintelligible and inexplicable.

In addition, Peirce continued to nurture the belief that the system of nature enjoys an affinity with thought—that is to say, with logic. But the “logic” he speaks of in this regard is not that of the relatively restricted traditional variety. While it is true, he concedes,

that the whole universe and every feature of it must be regarded as rational, that is as brought about by the logic of events, . . . it does not follow that it is constrained to be as it is by the logic of events; for the logic of evolution and of life need not be supposed to be of that wooden kind that absolutely constrains a given conclusion. (CP:6.218)

This general conception falls in line with objective idealism, which sets for itself the task of discovering what is “intelligible and reasonable in the universe at large” (NE, IV:378). In fact, the very search for such an understanding of the universe presupposes objective idealism: belief that nature is commensurate with good thinking, which is in turn commensurate with the logic of events, of evolution, of life. The whole enterprise is circular, which does not necessarily discount objective idealism or Peirce’s metaphysics in general, since both, unlike Cartesian discourse, are capable of embracing such infinite regresses as germane to the nature of the universe. Peirce’s notion that thought, and by interpolation the mind, enjoy an affinity with nature, which he variously calls insight, instinct, and genius, should enable us eventually to discover “the Thirdness, the general elements,” of the universe (CP:5.173). The evolution of knowledge via the community must be the case in order that it be consistent, Peirce asserts, with the general evolution of the psychophysical universe.

This evolutionary view places Peirce squarely within the contemporary milieu of theoretical science with the likes of Prigogine and Wheeler, as well as Bohm, according to which the only feasible account of the laws of nature for uniformity in general is to suppose them the results of evolution.⁷ They are thus neither absolute nor obeyed with precision. They are invariably tinged with a degree of “indeterminacy, spontaneity, or absolute chance in nature.” Peirce continues:

Just as, when we attempt to verify any physical laws, we find our observations cannot be precisely satisfied by it, and rightly attribute the discrepancy to errors of observation, so we must suppose far more minute discrepancies to exist owing to the imperfect cogency of the law itself, to a certain swerving of the facts from any definite formula. (CP:6.13; also 6.201)⁸

To repeat, as the realm of possibilities in the cosmic game of chance are gradually being played out, the universe is becoming more lawlike. Yet, to the extent that cosmic habits have not reached predominance, chance and spontaneity continue to resist encroachments. And since psychical phenomena resist habituation with the greatest effort, and given the perpetual de-embedment of embedded and automated habits, the mind’s frequent tendency to diverge from regularities represents a swim against the evolutionary current. In this sense hylopathy and tychism are inseparable: the former without the latter is dead; the latter without the former is empty of meaning. Tychism, absolute chance, nonetheless implies a universe in which consciousness and mind are fully integrated; hylopathy, rather than universal order in obedience to static classical laws, demands an uncertainty factor enabling consciousness and mind to remain actively involved with(in) the universe.

Ultimately, it appears, though semiosis, like the quantum universe in general, is mind-dependent, the mind, itself bound within the field of semiosis, brings about evolutionary changes and at the same time is the victim of those changes. The mind is in part the author of semiosic evolution, yet it cannot foresee its evolutionary path, for it remains within semiosic evolution. The game is inexorably played from inside, but there is ordinarily no awareness of this insideness; from within, it always appears that an unlimited number of possibilities are there for the taking. Hence the mind “collapses” the semiostates of its universe of its own volition, yet it is itself a semio-system “collapsed” by/within the field of semiosis; it is free and it is not free, fortunately, on account of its own finitude—and its blissful ignorance (see appendix 3).

IV. FROM THE PARTICULATE AND MOLECULAR TO THE MOLAR WITH A VENGEANCE. “But,” one asks, “surely there is a set of determinable constraints in the workings of the mind, perhaps most adequately specifiable in terms of linguistic constructions such as those sought by Chomskyan linguistics?”

Perhaps. And perhaps not. What the present state of fallible knowing suggests is not only that the world is radically indeterminate at the lower levels, but that chaos may well lie at the very roots of all forms of what we generally take to be order. This places the traditional notion of order irretrievably beyond the boundaries of predictability and explanation. Order can be modeled, but not directly known or predicted. It becomes well-nigh impossible to speak of constraints within this context. Nonetheless, Tursman (1987:115-31) proposes the following constraints stemming from Peirce’s metaphysics: (1) the most general constraint on the laws of nature, the logical illative relation of arguments (what would be the case—Thirdness—comparable to material implication), which requires a certain set of initial conditions (see Tursman [1987:72-74] on the illative relation), (2) monotonic constraints (the imperative, or irreversible)—comparable to the Second Law of Thermodynamics: birth, growth, death, (3) mind-body interface constraints (the apparently irreconcilable differences between the mental and nonmental), and (4) limitations at the atomic level.

Upon discussing (1)-(4), I wish to place Peirce in a somewhat more contemporary light than Tursman does—though this is not meant to reduce the importance of his disquisition. Constraint (1), the illative relation, a would-be exigency of Thirdness, is relatively clear-cut when one attends to Tursman’s first example: if NaCl were added to H₂SO₄, the result would be a different salt, Na₂S0₄, and a different acid, HC1. When we shift from inorganic to certain organic reactions, however, less regularity enters the picture. Yields from particular reactions are based on percent averages, since they do not go to completion. More complex problems arise with another of Tursman’s examples, the harmonic notion of a pendulum swing which is describable by a precise equation. When considering friction, the earth’s force of gravity, and other diverse perturbations, which Tursman duly notes, a pendulum swing undergoes a potentially infinite number of variations which are nonlinear rather than linear, and indeterminate rather than determinate.

This observation, to the chagrin of Peirce scholars coveting a modicum of finalist determinacy vaguely suggested in some of his work, places us directly within the field of “chaos physics.” Phenomena such as pendulum swings now go by the name, coined by David Ruelle (1980), of strange attractors in phase space (Davies 1988:44-51). Phase space is generally composed of as many variables (or dimensions) as are needed to describe a system’s behavior. As a variation of the acceleration problem graphed in figure 1, assume you begin accelerating in a sports car with a stick shift. Each time you change gears you must release the pressure on the accelerator pedal, then resume the pressure when the proper gear ratio has been established. This causes the vehicle’s acceleration to wane, followed by a renewed surge. Figure 9 demonstrates, as did figure 1, that the corresponding phase spaces look different on a graph than the actual trip “feels.” The “feeling” as Firstness and the action as Secondness have their Thirdness realized as a graph (a type of hypoicon, the diagram [CP:2.276f.]), which becomes a metaphor (a higher type of hypoicon) of the experienced sensation. The graph, as Thirdness, is radically abstracted. Yet it is a helpful map, especially insofar as it reveals that the car’s trajectory is much less smooth and orderly than might be expected.

FIGURE 9

A more dramatic example of phase space consists of a measure of the instantaneous state of a periodic process such as that of the pendulum. Pendulum swings are normally in one-dimensional space: back and forth. A graph of such moves consists of all the necessary information of the system: the moving pendulum gradually slowing down is reduced to a single point when it comes to rest. A given swing of the pendulum can be graphed timelessly to represent the system during one of its cycles (see figure 10). It is as if at one instant the pendulum were located at a point, and with each successive instant the point moves along its circular trajectory until it reaches its original position. Since the dynamic system is in constant change, the point’s position is constantly altered. The entire history of the system can thus be charted by the imaginary moving point, which, like a “world-line” within the Minkowski “block,” or the acceleration problem represented on a graph, traces a static trajectory through phase space with the passage of time.

FIGURE 10

The set of point-instants, in short, is plotted along the Cartesian coordinates. For a free-swinging frictionless pendulum, the variables are position and velocity. When the pendulum begins its swing, the velocity is zero at a point along the x axis, and as it reaches its highest velocity at the bottom of its arc, that velocity is represented by a point on the y axis. Then the pendulum slows to a standstill once again at a point on the x axis opposite from the beginning point, and finally, as the negative swing on the opposite side of the y axis reaches the initial point, a circle is described. And everything is in order. If friction is taken into consideration, the pendulum steadily loses energy, and the point’s trajectory describes a spiral gravitating toward an “attractor,” the o coordinate in the graph, which indicates the pendulum’s eventually coming to a rest.

However, things never quite conform to our ideals. That is to say, Peirce’s illative relation, when regarding the distinction between the “semiotically ideal” and the “semiotically real”—to say nothing of the “actually real”—is not as determinate as we would like. It has to do with that incommensurability between the “mind-stuff’ of the emerging world model and the “physical-stuff’ of the classical mechanistic-deterministic universe. In the present context the nemesis of Western thought which could well be termed turbulence, that telltale sign indicating the prominence of “mind-stuff,” has been everywhere evident, though it generally has been pushed under the rug by most great philosophers and physicists. Recently, as I suggested briefly in chapter 3, the turbulent activity playing havoc with the entrenched classical paradigm has gradually been pulled out of the closet. From Mandelbrot’s (1982) fractals we learn that the universe is more cloudlike than clocklike. From Prigogine and the “physics of chaos” we are forced to concede that wild, unpredictable patterns are more fundamental—not to mention more interesting—than the well-scrubbed security of Newton’s equations. Take the everyday example of a faucet in your kitchen. If you open the valve slightly, water courses out in a smooth flow, hissing slightly; open it a bit more and a to-and-fro rhythm commences; then turn the knob more, and another, less orderly frequency takes over, and finally, the even flow becomes chaotic.⁹

For an illustration of such “chaos,” if a perturbation is applied at the anchor point attaching the pendulum to an otherwise stable source, after a few swings it will begin an apparently sporadic behavior that will become wilder with each oscillation rather than eventually reach a stable point. The attractor is in some sort of undefined motion: it has become a strange attractor. The movement is now never quite periodic with respect to an antecedent oscillation and a successive oscillation. There is always a difference: the pendulum never exactly repeats itself in a periodic loop, but rather, with each cycle its swings become wilder and wilder. The consequent nonlinear loops and spirals are infinitely deep. They never quite join and never quite intersect, yet they remain within a finite phase space (see figure 11).

The implication of this and other such phenomena is that the world’s fastest supercomputers are incapable precisely of tracking the trajectory of the point in phase space tracing out the life of not-quite-periodic motion around a strange attractor. In the typical euphoria experienced by a number of scientists working with strange attractors, David Ruelle (1980:137) exclaims: “I have not spoken of the esthetic appeal of strange attractors. These systems of curves, these clouds of points suggest sometimes fireworks or galaxies, sometimes strange and disquieting vegetal proliferations. A realm lies there of forms to explore and harmonies to discover.”

The very important point is that strange attractors irreparably muddy the waters of the classical world. Nature becomes radically unpredictable, an inordinately fickle mistress. This tends to aggravate those physicists searching for a harmonious universe, especially since phase space, it seems, is so pregnant with possible happenings as to be well-nigh incomprehensible. “It always bothers me,” Richard Feynman (1967:57) remarks in a complementary context, that “it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do?” Here, quite lucidly, we sense Peirce’s lifelong obsession with infinite regresses and other paradoxes of infinity. A given set of initial conditions, though it could be absolutely specifiable—which it cannot be, as Peirce argued and as the “physics of chaos” has demonstrated—would not lead to determinable and determinate knowledge regarding any and all future events. Knowledge must in this regard always remain vague, hence contradictory and inconsistent at the level of Firstness, and general, though incomplete, at the level of Thirdness. That is, knowledge is as unspecifiable as it is indeterminate. This, I am afraid, plays havoc with the would be of the illative relation. Since, given “chaos physics,” a vast number of important phenomena are unpredictable, it appears as if in certain respects the circle has been completed, the continuity of generality has gravitated toward the continuity of vagueness, and law becomes a strange bedfellow of chance.

FIGURE 11

But there is a certain consolation regarding Tursman’s monotonic constraints, or the imperative of irreversibility. Suffice it to reiterate that Prigogine (1980; Prigogine and Stengers 1984) and his associates have argued quite successfully for asymmetry and irreversibility not only at the macroscopic, molar level of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (of generality, Thirdness, semiosis) but also, as we shall note in more detail below, at the molecular, particulate, and even micro-level (of vagueness, semiostates), and in the inorganic as well as the organic realm (or in the Peircean sense, the living as well as the nonliving, mind as well as matter). Prigogine, like Peirce, foregrounds becoming. Pluralism is in this context highlighted over monism. In contrast, Western thought has traditionally foregrounded being. Parmenides, the Stoics, da Cusa, Spinoza, the German idealists, Bradley, and McTaggert have generally held that propositions should be directed toward one subject: substance, essence, the absolute.¹⁰

However, a few preliminary words before engaging directly with Prigogine. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Boltzmann demonstrated that classical particles described by reversible equations can be made to fall in line with the irreversible universe of entropy. Then came the quantum debacle. Unlike the classical mechanical and thermodynamic views with which Boltzmann contended, the two complementary quantum worlds are truly at odds. Before a “collapse,” the multiple possible solutions to the Schrodinger equation exist in simultaneity; time is reversible, and the potential “particle” is spread over the wide area. After interaction, and after the particle is detected, time takes on meaning. The mathematical description before the “collapse” is generally considered to be the most fundamental; after the “collapse” the system is no longer in its pristine, pure form.

Prigogine disagrees with this interpretation. He attempts to place the irreversible, yet timeless, picture of the quantum universe (prototemporality) on equal footing with the reversible, yet time-bound, picture of thermodynamics (eotemporality). In accomplishing this task he evokes two concepts: (1) symmetry breaking and (2) nonlinearity. The first introduces irreversibility and time. According to the classical conception, symmetry lies at the heart of the universe. Space has no up or down, forward or backward: complete democracy prevails. And time has no necessary arrow. “Reality,” however, breaks such symmetry. For example, a pair of dice can be placed in mirror-image symmetrical relation one to the other. Then if they are tossed, the symmetry is broken. The numbers are no longer lined up parallel to one another, and most likely two different numbers will be showing. This marks a direction for time. Something occurred, which resulted in a different state of affairs, and for there to be such an occurrence, the previous symmetry must have been broken. Comparable happenings at the quantum level muliplied by a number to the order of 10¹⁰ give an indication of the complexity of broken symmetry.

But mere symmetry breaking is not enough. If, as Prigogine—along with Bohm—believes, everything interacts with everything else, then all happenings, from the quantum level upward, are nonlinear rather than linear. Nonlinear equations are far more forbidding than their linear counterparts. Linear equations change in proportion to a change of one of the variables. Nonlinear equations, in contrast, may manifest a gradual change, then at some unexpected point there is a sudden breakdown, and a totally distinct situation arises. It is like the straw that broke the camel’s back; a certain threshold is crossed and the animal collapses with the addition of a minuscule addition to its load. Rene Thorn’s (1975, 1983) catastrophe theory is appropriate here. His seven models illustrate how, for example, two dogs meet, test each other with snarls, bared fangs, and aggressive postures, then a catastrophe occurs when one of the two animals moves across some boundary, and a fight ensues.

Symmetry breaking, irreversibility, and nonlinearity are keys to Prigogine’s radical view, predicated on (1) openness of systems, (2) exchange of energy, material, and information with the outside environment, and (3) far-from-equilibrium conditions that lead to fluctuations and dissipative structures by way of symmetry breaking and nonlinearity. The very term dissipative structures seems at first blush contradictory: structure is ordered, while with dissipation, order disintegrates. The fact of the matter is that dissipative structures exhibit two characteristics. When near-equilibrium prevails, order diminishes (particularly in isolated systems), but when far-from-equilibrium conditions are present, order can emerge out of apparent chaos. This occurs when a system proceeds, through fluctuations and symmetry breaking, until a threshold level, a bifurcation (critical) point, is reached, and the system progresses to a new form of order. Such processes require open systems continuously taking in energy, material, and information from their environment and maintaining a continuous expulsion of entropy as dissipation or waste. The system thus constantly renews itself: it is self-organizing. It retains its identity by perpetually changing. Such order from chaos cannot be adequately captured by the popular label “negentropy,” mind you. Dissipative structures do not generate something from nothing; they reorganize themselves and their environment such that they minimize entropy within their own system. In fact, like the entropy principle, dissipative structures not only are irreversible and time-bound, they also bear witness to the impossibility of absolute stability.

Non-self-organizing systems and self-organizing systems roughly correspond to Maturana and Varela’s (1980) distinction between allopoietic and autopoietic entities. A bicycle is allopoietic. It must be propelled by an outside force, and if it breaks down it cannot replace its own defective parts. It can do no more than decay if abandoned by its owner. A living organism is autopoietic—though I use this term with the reservations outlined in chapter 4. Each of its cells, and the entire organism as an aggregate, is open to its environment. It takes in energy and material, renovating itself by transforming the subsystems within it, from microbes to molecules to atoms, and expelling entropy as waste. Through this incessant change it is able to maintain a form of identity, having set itself apart from its universe, as this, a mark of distinction indicating what is not this (the remaining part of the universe).

From Prigogine’s view, somewhat at variance with Maturana and Varela (Jantsch 1980), what is most important is not the autopoietic entity but the autopoiesis, not the “thing” but “happenings,” not being but becoming—that is, not the sign but semiosis. The entity maintains itself in the processual stream of events by constantly balancing the need to guard against self-destruction (a molar catastrophe, total dissipation, death) and the need to remain open to its environment such that it can perpetually renew itself. It is like a sprinter who thrusts his body forward at the finish line and, losing his balance, can maintain himself upright solely by continuing to stumble forward. Order is generated in an impending sea of chaos, there is becoming without stable being, semiosis without any final interpretant that can be nailed down in the here-now. As for the sprinter, there is no turning back; the process is irreversible.

Examples of order out of chaos are legion, from micro- to macro-levels. From the “collapse” of a complex wave amplitude into a “particle,” to atoms, to molecules, and finally to bio-molecules generated out of dissipative structures. From the most primitive of cells—prokaryotes and eukaryotes—emerging from their environment as autopoietic entities, to slime molds which act as an aggregate of individual cells, but in the scarcity of food merge into a single corporate being which moves across the forest floor; from insect colonies, to animal herds, to primate societies, and to human communities: order is successively generated out of chaos. A city emerges in the desert, as if springing up spontaneously, its multiple arteries connecting it to other cities which serve to import energy and material and export waste, its massive landfill bearing witness to its constant expulsion of entropy. The move is invariably, with fits and jerks, toward the “semiotically ideal,” toward equilibration, stabilization, the ultimate pie in the sky being absolute order (see table 1, appendix 3). But the “semiotically real” and “real” worlds of broken symmetries, dissipative structures, and far-from-equilibrium conditions constantly beckon: eros is disrupted by thanatos, harmony by dissonance; what was hopefully to be one becomes many, and vice versa.

Thus, interpretants emerge from signs, and they in turn pass away into their successor signs along the semiosic stream of things. The flow continues, as eddies and ripples unfold and die away, passing once again into the enfolded. At some region the process becomes turbulent. There is uncertain vacillation; a bifurcation point has been reached. The slightest change in external conditions—some interpreter becoming aware of a sign’s reverse side—pushes the fluctuation unpredictably in one direction or the other. Without warning a relatively autonomous semio-system emerges, an ordered system simultaneously apart from and part of the general flow: a sign has pushed itself, drawing in its interpreter, and at the same time its interpreter has pushed it, toward an ephemerally stable vortex, a whirlpool of signification, which is then faced with further fluctuation and change.

In the Prigogine sense, the sign can survive only by remaining open to the entire flow of signification. In fact, signification literally flows through it, allowing it to maintain a degree of self-identity while it is in perpetual becoming. Yet its very openness somehow endows it with a certain resilience: it changes but does not change. Its resistance to change is through the flow; it changes because of the flow. It is stabilized, for it allows the flow to flow through it; but it is only relatively stable, since the flow renders it unstable. Its very stability is instability in that it depends upon its environment, and without it, its environment would suffer a loss. It is and is not the same sign; it is and is not a different sign at each moment. Its signness is destined to remain caught in an incessant, reiterative coming into being and going out again.

V. THE PARTING OF THE WATERS. As a result of the work of Prigogine and others, that underlying current, the tradition of Heraclitus I have either indirectly or deviously alluded to, has been resurfacing over the past few decades. A tolerance for contradiction, inconsistency, indeterminacy, and paradox is on the upswing.

More in a Peircean vein, the Parmenidean-Heraclitean conflict is monism pitted against its age-old antagonist, pluralism. For the monist everything is continuous and “spacelike.” Within this “space,” something and its contradiction cannot coexist. In contrast, the pluralist, relying on a temporal perspective, retorts that something can be one thing at one time and another at another time. Hence there need be no restriction to noncontradictory fireworks, for time is capable of healing any and all distinctions: the vagueness inherent in the generation of particulars along the stream of time. According to the monist, spatiality implies dynamic relatedness between things consisting largely, though not exclusively, of symmetrical and asymmetrical relations such as larger than and smaller than, which lie outside the notion of temporal irreversibility. The pluralist argues that if one wishes to interject a single subject into a temporal framework, one must concede to asymmetry and irreversibility, which necessarily introduce becoming.

A car, the monist declares, is considered in everyday discourse to be the same car even though ten years past it was new and now it has been totaled in a wreck. Temporally speaking, however, there is an irreversible facet of the car’s existence which cannot be accounted for in the monist’s framework. The wrecked car was a new car. That much is generally assumed. But when the car was new there was no absolute certainty that it would become on this particular date a wrecked car. The monist attempts to destroy directional order by claiming that just as the wrecked car has been a new car, so the new car will have been a wrecked car, which evokes Wheeler’s (1984) (and Lyotard’s [1984]) use of the future anterior. The past but not the future is in principle (disregarding obvious human limitations) knowable in detail.

This, then, is an important aspect of the temporal versus spatial distinction in Peirce (for further discussion, see Hartshorne 1970:chap. 9). The problem is that, from the broadest possible vantage capable of including both conceptual frameworks, things seem to be placed in a timeless frame wherein the universe, as an always already completed whole, is looking at itself. It thus creates itself—it has created itself, will have created itself—by lifting itself (which is always already a foregone conclusion) by its own bootstraps—also Wheeler’s assumption, it would appear. Be that as it may, we are, all signs are, immanent, and as far as we can be concerned, we are participating with the universe in its self-organizing enterprise. Indeed, Wheeler’s apparently timeless image coupled with Bohm’s dynamically fluctuating but nontemporal holomovement appears at the outset to be a far cry from the temporal irreversible, processual characteristic of Prigogine’s view of things.

Although each is preoccupied with his own set of problems, nonetheless the work of Prigogine and Wheeler is united by two common, rather Peircean threads: (1) rejection of empiricism in favor of a mindlike universe, and (2) acceptance of an open, nondeterministic, participatory universe (recall note 7 of this chapter). In this respect, Peirce’s categories evince, apparently contradictorily, a static view of Firstness, but it perpetually cedes ground to Secondness and Thirdness, hence to temporality. Iconicity is roughly commensurate with a static point in a phase space, a collection of points, or the entire trajectory as a line (cf. column B of table 1 in appendix 3). It is all there; it simply is as it is, atemporally one of an infinity of possibilities that could have been but are not. Temporal irreversibility in the full sense begins with indexicality, the generation of particulars involving action and reaction, which are two-way, yet linear, as are vectorial forces. Temporality of a sort is at least introduced here, though it remains cyclical and reversible.

True irreversibility in the Prigogine sense is the playground of symbolicity, which, following from the asymmetry principle developed in chapter 4, is capable of breeding random, unpredictable, infinitely differentiated oscillation. Granted, it is law, habit, regularity, but with each reiteration there is always a degree of difference. Each reentry introduces variation, change, and change of change. Nonlinear, n-dimensional, and temporally irreversible, symbolicity paves the way for differences that make a difference. This is no counterpart to mere memory, reiteration, identity, or rote learning but, in a manner of speaking, creative deutero-learning (Bateson 1972). Just as symbols grow, so they constantly resubmerge in the semiosic soup. And just as “life,” whether speaking of Prigogine’s reactions (as a result of dissipative structures) or Manfred Eigen’s (1971; Eigen and Schuster 1979) hypercycles, is also characterized by the universe’s general signness in the Peircean sense, so also “senescence” and “death” are inevitable stages of all phenomena, whether of life or of signs. Yet the exact path (i.e., of some hoped-for teleology) is never exactly known. When a given change of change will occur is never predictable; when the end will arrive nobody can foresee.¹¹ Hence in the Prigogine and “chaos physics” conception of irreversibility, Peirce’s illative relation implied by a set of initial conditions cannot be determinate.

Peirce was privy to this idea, but he did not take the final leap. His failure in this regard is evidenced further in Tursman’s third category, the mind-body interface constraints. Peirce attempted to substantiate his belief that mind acts on matter as well as vice versa with the image of mind as an endless series of events and matter as a beginningless series of transformations, with an infinite series between the two (CP:4.6II). He illustrated his point with the graph of a spiral whose curve starts at r = 1 (which for practical purposes is beginningless when conceived from “within” the spiral, since there is an infinity of spiraloidal differentiations) and coils outward toward r = 2, describing an endless series of revolutions before it reaches that point (hence r = 2 can be construed as an endlessly receding horizon). The “outer” series depicts mind (“representation”) and the “inner” series depicts matter (“being”). Although there is an infinity of real gradations between “being” and “representation,” this, Peirce asserts, “shows that although it be true that Being immediately acts only on Being and Representation immediately acts only on Representation, still there may be two endless series, whereby Being and Representation act on one another without any tertium quid” (CP:8.274).

The indeterminable extremities of Peirce’s example possibly testify to the lack of information regarding initial conditions which ultimately renders his illative relations conditional. The problem is more complex than immediately meets the eye, however. During Peirce’s latter days, Henri Poincare, a sort of predecessor of “chaos physics,” observed that, given classical mechanics, if the initial conditions of the universe were known, the conditions of the universe at a given succeeding moment could be predicted. But even if all natural laws no longer held any secret for us, those initial conditions could be known in no more than approximate fashion. If such an approximation

enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that is governed by the laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible and we have the fortuitous phenomenon. (Poincaré 1914:68)

On an exceedingly less complex scale, this is the pendulum problem. Assuming one begins measuring the swings in medias res without knowledge of the set of previous swings, the first swing measured is slightly deviant from the previous swing, though the investigator cannot be aware of it. But she does notice that the second swing is slightly deviant with respect to the first, that the third is also deviant with respect to the second, and that this second deviation is slightly larger than the first one, and so on, such that the last swing measured will result in a greatly magnified deviation when compared to the first few measurements. The oscillations have become, in a word, unpredictable, chaotic.

This conclusion appears to contradict Peirce’s belief that the universe is becoming more lawlike and less contingentlike. It could be said in Peirce’s defense, however, that regarding the pendulum problem, we are speaking of islands of exception to phenomena that generally follow classical rules—and Peirce, we must be mindful, was understandably prone to follow classical mechanics, though he often broke rank. Such islands are necessary for a universe of becoming, for life itself: life as an aberration, a deformity in an otherwise well-oiled cosmos. Thus it appears that along the great chain of command between living and nonliving entities, and between brain processes and mind processes, there must be, to use Douglas Hofstadter’s (1979) terms, a conglomerate of “strange loops” (his counterpart to “strange attractors”) along a “tangled hierarchy.” In short, just as Poincare’s timely observation plays havoc with the orderly classical universe, so does life as aberrant behavior, as semiosis. Peirce’s spiral model is wise in at least this respect. Aware that the mind-body interface was little understood during his time—and the same can be said today—the model suggests that there is no discernible distinction between mind processes and body processes. All are of the order of autopoiesis, of dissipative structures. If, as Peirce asserts, matter is effete mind, then mind, like the organic system giving rise to it, is also self-organizing, as are signs in general.

Finally, Tursman refers to Peirce’s limitations at the atomic (or we might say in the context of the present discourse, the particulate) level, category four. Tursman rightly notes that the classical atom either has or does not have a particular property. Thus the excluded-middle principle and noncontradiction apply. Peirce’s logic approaches the atom from another vantage: its properties consist of a set of “real” possibilities which become partly actualized at a given point in time and space (compare to Bohm’s implicate and explicate). Since actuality cannot exhaust possibility, any and all observations are selections as a result of choice. And given indefinite time and possibilities of actualization, an atom subjected to successive perceptual grasps can be expected to display unexpected states, growth, development, and decay. It will be in a state of incessant change; as pure possibility it will have no true identity, for identity pertains to Secondness (NE, 111:758). Consequently, Tursman (1987:130) observes,

the properties of the atom are not expected to obey the law of excluded middle or the law of non-contradiction. The properties of the atom are expected to obey the law of continuity. Peirce frequently pointed out that no part of a continuum has to be or is wholly A or wholly not -A. Neither the law of excluded middle nor the law of non-contradiction applies to anything general and the atom is general except at that moment of observation at which point it becomes fully determinate. The atom is, then, except at the moment of observation, a general or collection of real possibilities. Upon the occasion that the atom is observed, that is, upon the occasion that an actually existing state of the atom is observed, then there is a discontinuity and the laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction apply to the atom.

Here, I believe we should take Tursman’s taking Peirce at face value at face value. As Peirce conceived it, classical logic, with its tenuous foundations and its delusions of grandeur, would be superseded at a deeper level by more general “logic of vagueness” which precedes the level of semiostates and allows for movement toward generality. Secondness imposes binary existence on forms, but the laws of the growth of signs permit existents, which, as Seconds, must conform to the laws of classical logic in order to evade those laws (CP: 1.488). And, outside even the laws of sign growth lies logic in the most vague sense, the logic of chance, spontaneity, freedom, and potentiality, which, Peirce proclaimed during one of his Hegelian moments, must ultimately annul itself: “For if it does not annul itself, it remains a completely idle and do-nothing potentiality; and a completely idle potentiality is annulled by its complete idleness” (CP:6.219).

In other words, at the “greatest lower bound,” given chance, spontaneity, and freedom—vagueness—it would appear (contra Tursman) that the constraints in the neighborhood of the atom as the juxtaposition of semiostates are hardly constraints at all. For (pace Wheeler via Bohr) the universe of signs is radically participatory: from the “completely idle potentiality” some-thing is spontaneously brought into signness. On the other hand, given habit, regularity, law—generality—in its final and complete form, the universe of signs is static, it annuls itself: regarding the totality, for every force (sign, argument) there is an equal but opposite force (sign, counterargument), such that in their composite they are “mutually cancellatory.” Hence if the potentiality is idle, it remains null; if it is active, the sum of all possible actions yields the null set—the Peircean counterpart, to be sure, of Wheeler’s (1980a, 1980b) cosmic equation, “o = o,” according to which everything cancels everything else to leave the pure Monad, that which is as it is. This, the equivalent of the universe as Utimate Interpretant, returns us to the beginning: Tursman’s conception of constraint by way of the illative relation. If every would be were to have reached finality, as such there would hardly be any chance, spontaneity, or freedom at all! How can this conceptual cul-de-sac be accounted for?

In the first place, we must bear in mind that what the Monad (implicate, idle potentiality) is cannot be known as any-thing. Only the plurality of actualized Seconds (explicates), perpetually in the play of action and reaction, bifurcating the world into thisness and thatness, can be known, albeit partially. Knowing, by extension, is semiosic, ongoing, and irreversible. But knowledge is not accessible through mere Secondness alone. What can be known is known through mediative Thirdness. That limited whole of knowing is the knowing itself, not the known, which implies an asymmetry between the (knowing) mind and (known) matter, and which can perhaps be understood solely through Peirce’s psychophysicalism. Mind and matter depend on one another asymmetrically. Mind depends upon matter asymmetrically for its very existence, and matter depends upon mind asymmetrically for the properties it may be endowed with at a particular time and place. All in all, we would like to conclude, asymmetry, irreversibility, temporality, plurality, ceaseless change must win hands down, for without it, we are back to complete generality, “o = o,” or the pure Monad, which as an absolute is also absolutely unknowable.

Assuming “o = o” were to be the case, either one of two situations would most likely be in effect. The first would be a static domain; the second would be a state of constant change without there being any change of change, which is to say the same thing from the totalizing perspective. Consider, for example, Schrodinger’s notorious Gedanken experiment concerning his live/dead cat. ¹² Suppose the experimenter wants to assure herself of a “democratic” state of affairs according to which the cat enjoys equal rights with any and all potential observers from outside the box. She screws some hinges on the inside such that the cat can open the lid inward to observe (actualize) his observer, and she puts another set of hinges on the outside such that the observer can lift the lid to look at the live-or-dead cat. The problem is that now the door can be opened from neither the inside nor the outside. Everything is as it is, without the possibility of any change. We have an uncanny meso-level thought experiment of a micro-level condition patterning the totalizing equation, “o = o.” This is tantamount to Peirce’s (or Spencer-Brown’s) undifferentiated domain before time and before ordinary logic, “the utter vagueness of completely undetermined and dimensionless potentiality” (CP:6.193). In this domain, the superposed “live cat/dead cat” is destined to continue on into the indefinite future without there being a “collapse” into Secondness.

Suppose another experimenter decides on an alternative “democracy” by removing the hinges altogether, thus endowing all parties concerned with complete freedom. But now the lid “collapses” on the superposed “live cat/dead cat” eigenfunction such that one of the two potentialities is actualized, but neither can be actualized in such a way that it stands for something to someone in some respect or capacity. In the sense of Wheeler, neither cat could be recorded and put to use for such and such a purpose by some observer. In fact, if the universe as perceived—interacted with—by any entity is nothing more than a mere bundle of disjoined events, then nothing in the universe could be as such: the originary cut leading to an interpretant could never have been made by someone. As the Eastern mystics have said for centuries, the universe, as unformed, unfixed, and uninterpreted by consciousness, is completely devoid of meaning. In other words, there could be no more than a buzzing array of unrelated sense-qualities (Firsts), which are no-thing definite. Peirce writes of this realm of precognition thus:

Even if you say it is a slumbering feeling, that does not make it less intense; perhaps the reverse. For it is the absence of reaction—of feeling another—that constitutes slumber, not the absence of the immediate feeling that is all that it is in its immediacy. Imagine a magenta color. Now imagine that all the rest of your consciousness—memory, thought, everything except this feeling of magenta—is utterly wiped out, and with that is erased all possibility of comparing the magenta with anything else or of estimating it as more or less bright. That is what you must think the pure sense-quality to be. Such a definite potentiality can emerge from the indefinite potentiality only by its own ritual Firstness and spontaneity. Here is this magenta color. What originally made such a quality of feeling possible? Evidently nothing but itself. It is a First. (CP:6.198)

Wheeler’s (1980a) own answer to the problem is to place a pliable hinge on the lid of the box housing Schrodinger’s eigenpussy so it can be opened from either side. Now there is no predefined hierarchy. But neither is there any symmetry. Rather, a decision is made by the community, there is a selection, something is distinguished from something else, the lid is opened from outside, the cat is observed as such and such, and a “semiotic world” comes into existence. The cat has no say in the matter. This appears fine and dandy for one near-instantaneous observer-observed interaction. However, since it appears that in Wheeler’s total picture everything in the universe has been, is, and will have been always already, the system, though in a sense asymmetrical, must be also atemporal. That is, when either the dead cat or live cat is put to use by the signifying community, the entire past history of Schrödinger’s feline fantasy will have been determined in the present by this solitary semiotic act. And if recorded, which it must be, future history will also have been jelled once and for all. There is no doubting that Wheeler’s alternative is “democratic,” but only if regarded as a cosmic whole: once again, “o = o.” Pluralism becomes, from the broadest possible vantage, monism, and monism has no true identity without pluralities. Chance becomes necessity and vice versa. The dilemma remains.

However, for both Wheeler and Peirce, the only “semiotically real” perspective is that of each member of the community and of the community as a whole from “within.” This immanent perspective gives a picture of the universe as ongoing, a self-organizational, irreversible, and temporal becoming. In another way of putting it in regard to table 1 of appendix 3, a particular individual or a finite community of individuals can at a given point in time and space be aware of no more than segments cut out of the middle of columns A through E, like the eye that is limited to a minuscule portion of the frequencies making up the entire energy spectrum. This image testifies to our fallible immanence as it does to our propensity constantly to push beyond.

It also returns us to Prigogine’s thesis. Given Heisenberg’s uncertainty, Bohr’s complementarity, Bohm’s infinitely complex holomovement of top-down and bottom-up mutual interaction and effectuation, and Wheeler’s participatory universe in view of Schrodinger’s Gedanken experiment, it is not possible to speak of constraints or limitations at Tursman’s atomic level but of an intricate web of interaction. Upon Prigogine’s entry onto the scene, the role of randomness and chaos in the creation of structure conjures up a universe in which the meso- and macro-levels are less determinate than in the classical, and even the quantum, pictures. Prigogine’s “new uncertainty principle” demolishes the last vestiges of classical predictability and control with the injection of randomness, fluctuation, symmetry breaking, and far-from-equilibrium conditions into a once neatly wrapped and tied package. There are no longer any linear cause-and-effect sequences. Rather, as we learned from Poincaré, a micro-level perturbation in a far-from-equilibrium state is capable of becoming magnified finally to throw the entire system into disarray. This is like a young lad who, from a bridge overlooking a flooding river, tosses his beer can into the water, which causes a slight perturbation, the ripples of which bring about a degree of turbulence some yards downstream, which increases finally to reach a threshold which is crossed, a dike gives slightly, then disintegrates, and a town is devastated.

This is not mere figment of the imagination, but a possible series of events according to Prigogine—and in his own way, Wheeler (1984), I might note. Like Heisenberg’s micro-level uncertainty, Prigogine’s uncertainty also plays havoc with classical reductionism, especially of the sort propagated by Jacques Monod (1971). This becomes less a limitation or constraint than a promise of creative possibilities. The open character of the universe or the universe of signs, its history, the possibility of an infinity of unexpected happenings—the “clash” of Secondness on consciousness—should generate anticipations rather than the vision of impending tragedy. Heraclitus has his day. The universe as ongoing flux takes precedence over the universe as oneness, stasis, order for all time.

“o = o,” fixedness, the Parmenidean way, is actually not of the living world but depends upon ab-straction, acts of the intellect divorced from the flow of experience, as if the ab-stracter enjoyed a position sub specie aeternitatis, completely divorced from the hustle and bustle of everyday living (recall the graph in figure 1). Here we reencounter the problematic collusion of time and timelessness, finitude and infinitude. In Prigogine’s view, life is continuity, invention, irreversibility, evolution. Intelligence (i.e., the mind), in contrast, fragments, isolates, abstracts, and stultifies process. Mind cannot comprehend life, and biology can do no more than caricature it. Solely intuition, feeling (Firstness), is capable of knowing it. Classical science was Medusa-like, converting the world into lifeless, inorganic, mineral substance. The “new science,” on the other hand, is process-oriented—which for Peirce was the principal characteristic of mind in the first place.

Relativity retains the classical propensity to spatialize time, to intellectualize or idealize process. Neither Einstein’s nor Schrodinger’s equations mark a fundamental distinction between past and future. A “world-line” within the “block” can proceed as easily in one direction as the other, and standing waves know no “time’s arrow.” In contrast, the ancient Aristotelian view places primacy on a tendency to become rather than static being, a propensity toward constant transience rather than that which eternally is (Prigogine 1983:65ff.).

Yet, in Peirce, Bohm, Prigogine, and Wheeler, there remains a strange conflict between process and that which is held timelessly in check. At each bifurcation point in a system’s past, a choice was made, a distinction marked out, and something was actualized, which canceled all the other possibilities forever. Time is inexorable, yet what is past is there, timelessly, what is future lies timelessly in wait, and what is present is what is. Briggs and Peat (1989:145) explain the apparent dilemma thus: “The dynamics of [Prigogine’s] bifurcations reveal that time is irreversible yet recapitulant. They also reveal that time’s movement is immeasurable. Each decision made at a branch point involves an amplification of something small. Though causality operates at every instant, branching takes place unpredictably.”

This mixture of necessity and chance, constraint and freedom, generality and vagueness, Thirdness and Firstness, constitutes the history of a system. A system dampens many macro-level variations—thus they appear to follow classical laws—but fortunately for us all, micro-level flexibility and creativity remain relatively unfettered. Small-scale changes, by amplification, stand a chance of becoming large-scale changes. Such amplification is a characteristic, par excellence, of sign systems. A bee enters a hive and does a dance which sets hundreds of insects in motion. At some unpredictable moment the proper signal is forthcoming, and the apparently random movements of a colony of termites become coordinated. Napoleon gives an order and an entire army is mobilized. An unexplained disorder is found on the U.S. president’s nose, and the stock exchange suffers a setback. Whether or not the mixture of timeless and temporal terms can be reconciled is not the question. It is a matter of abolishing these and other such dichotomies altogether—as we shall note in the following chapter. This, on a grand cosmic scale, is the thrust of Peirce’s fusion of matter and mind accompanied by the abolition of life against intellect, process against stasis, chance against necessity, and time against timelessness.

Yet, after all is said and done, one must concede that, given Peirce’s fascination with paradoxes of infinity, Bohm’s implicate order all there at once, and Wheeler’s self-reflexive, self-excited universe which somehow always already will have been constructed, a perhaps inevitable lingering inclination—nostalgia?—seems to remain toward the One.