“Signs Becoming Signs”
I. THE NEVER-QUITE-PRESENT “REAL.” Peirce’s intriguing “Cosmos ≈ Sign ≈ Mind” equation must be taken yet a step further in order more adequately to see through the Grand Dichotomies discussed in chapter 6. Having denied intuition in his essay on our “four incapacities,” while attacking the Cartesian paradigm, Peirce put forth the rather unexpected claim that we are all signs, and therefore something general (CP:5.264-317). By extension, as has been noted, the universe itself would be a developing sign, and the ideal and unlimited community of knowers would finally come into possession of the final self-referential, self-contained, self-sufficient Interpretant mirroring the entire universe, that is, mirroring itself—the Mirror of Nature, the Sublime Hologram. Throughout his life, Peirce, in spite of his antifoundationalist leanings, seemed “quite obviously attracted to such a semiotic Absolute Idealism” (Savan 1952:188; also Stearns 1952:198).
But, as we have also noted, from a strictly logical point of view, just as a knife cannot cut itself, so the universe, like Wittgenstein’s eye scanning its world, cannot logically see itself without artificially separating itself from itself. The notion of a finite individual knowing the universe as an object of knowledge is thus inextirpably contradictory. Nevertheless, such notions have been the very cornerstone of Western philosophy, theology, and science. “Objective knowledge” is firmly embedded in the either and the or of a plethora of dualisms, which have their origin primarily in Greek thought. I cannot overemphasize my point that the dilemma inherent in this binary thinking is that the more it succeeds, the more it fails. Whatever is known of the universe—i.e., whatever a severed portion of the universe knows of its other—the more it becomes a fable in Nietzsche’s conception. Whether we consider Popper’s falsification (strangely related to Buddhism’s “neti, neti”—“not this, not this”) or a variant of “negative theology” recently the vogue in certain circles according to which every interpretant is a misinterpretant, it boils down to the same: whatever we think or say a thing is, it is not.
In this respect, Korzybski (1941) hit the target dead-center. It is perhaps unfortunate that his discipleship became a rather obscure cult engaged in little more than an ongoing litany to its master. One problem might be that Korzybski wrote during those euphoric times of positivism’s confidence-building program of indoctrinating eager students with the power of positive thinking, binary thinking, that is. Positivism’s “Separate the men (scientists) from the boys (nonscientists)” approach has been especially elusive and illusive in that its dualistic roots are grounded in intellection, and it is therefore well-nigh impossible to dig them out by means of sheer intellection. Dualisms must nonetheless be doggedly pursued to their limits.
But this, as I have implied, is an interminable task. If the only way we can say what a thing is is by saying what it is not (i.e., refute it), then we can never say what it is, for saying what it is not cannot be exhausted. In other words, we must continue being wrong until hopefully we are right, but if somewhere along the tortuous route we were somehow to be right, we could never know it, for since we could not demonstrate its rightness, we would not know whether it was right or wrong. Yet the fact remains that we can only hopefully be right, in the long run of things, by being wrong. This is admittedly a cross-eyed look at Popper’s brand of “negative theology,” but what it boils down to nonetheless.1
Ultimate Truth allows of no dualisms; but little truths do. Little truths contain little falsities (lies, fables) within themselves: a privileging of one side of the virgule at the expense of the other side: this not that. Little truths as opposed to little falsities are nonetheless asymmetrical, in spite of this privileging; they serve to rev up the motor of Western linear binary thinking. Such thinking can do no more than lead to little truths rather than that hopeful absolute Truth, since Western systems of thought are invariably counterposed to, in reaction against, something else.
From Galileo’s falling stones to Newton’s falling apple, and from Rousseau’s Social Contract to Adam Smith’s Laissez Faire and Bentham’s Pleasure Pain principle, in the most general sense either dualisms have been tested negatively, they have passed out of fashion, or they have managed to survive up to the present. In the latter case, all Grand Designs are destined to collapse, since they are, themselves, the privileged side of some dualism or other. Abolition of any and all dualisms by Western methods of intellection is, to repeat, an interminable affair. Godel made certain of that, perhaps once and for all—if there can be in any form or fashion a “once and for all” for thought.
This quandary also appears endemic in Peirce’s philosophy of the asymptote. Nothing short of an ideal and hence an immortal community of knowers can reach the end of the trail without being ambushed at an interminable number of passes along the way. Of course, Peirce’s “economy of research,” as Rescher (1978) aptly reviews it, points out a few shortcuts along the road, but since the journey is infinite, any subtraction from it will leave it as it was, infinite.2 Although Popper’s bold conjectures should enable the scientist to make as many mistakes as possible in the shortest amount of time, Peirce’s limitation still applies: the dichotomy I have evoked time and again between the “semiotically real” and the “real” can never be completely eradicated. “Semiotically real” worlds consist of Umwelt-generated modes of sensing, acting on, and, regarding human semiotic, of perceiving and conceiving the universe. Indeed, most dramatically in the case of human semiotic, the twain “realities” shall never meet.
Given the insurmountable rift between these two “realities,” then, in the sense of Peirce, sign use, and thought, which consists also exclusively of signs, cannot be divorced from the mind—a sign as well—or from the self—whose existence depends on an inferential process, therefore it is also a sign. There can be no dualisms within such an all-encompassing realm of signification, nor can the “stuff’ of the world be anything other than some “semiotic reality” or other; hence this “stuff’ is composed of “semiotic” rather than “real” objects, with whatever overlap there may be between the two remaining at least partly indiscernible. And this seems to be the consensus of twentieth-century physics. The physicists’ conception of the world, Eddington tells us, “is only vivid so long as we do not face it. It begins to fade when we analyze it. . . . We have chased the solid substance from the continuous liquid to the atom, from the atom to the electron, and there we have lost it” (in Commins and Linscott 1947:448).
What is perhaps the ultimate dichotomy of modern Western thought, mind and matter, seems to have been led to the annihilating edge of the abyss and given a quick shove. It has disappeared, though most of us tend to continue along our pathways of least epistemological resistance as if the defunct paradigm were still alive and kicking. Bertrand Russell provides a cryptic epitaph along these lines: “The world may be called physical or mental or both or neither as we please; the words serve no purpose” (in Commins and Linscott 1947:387). And Schrodinger (1967:136) puts it bluntly, as only he can:
It is maintained that recent discoveries in physics have pushed forward to the mysterious boundary between the subject and object. This boundary, so we are told, is not a sharp boundary at all. We are given to understand that we never observe an object without its being modified or tinged by our own activity in observing it. We are given to understand that under the impact of our refined methods of observation and of thinking about the results of our experiments that mysterious boundary between the subject and object has broken down.
In fact, the very idea that the observer-observed barrier has been broken down is yet another illusion, for, Schrödinger (1967:137) continues, “Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier did not exist.” The barrier was, in other words, from the very beginning a figment of the imagination—or as Peirce would have put it, the result of an inference: the dichotomy is itself a sign. Mind and sign are now properly seen to be one, as are mind and matter.
On the other hand, from various angles—twentieth-century process philosophy, general systems theory, synergistic thinking, ecology, the “new physics” (particularly that of Bohm, Prigogine, and Wheeler)—dualistic thinking in general is on the wane. At present this seems to be occurring at the expense of the universe as a Great Clock fading out to become a Vague Cloud, which can, in light of the “new physics,” be construed in many forms, potentially an infinity of forms. Eddington (1958b:319) writes, much in the spirit of Wheeler, that
we have torn away the mental fancies to get at the reality beneath, only to find that the reality of that which is beneath is bound up with its potentiality of awakening these fancies. It is because the mind, the weaver of illusion, is also the only guarantor of reality. That reality is always to be sought at the base of illusion. Illusion is to reality as the smoke to the fire.
Eddington is certainly not urging the hoary untruth that there is no smoke without fire. Simply stated, smoke as such is interminably deceptive. Like any other sign, smoke presumably—or hopefully—refers to the “real.” As an index, a Second, a pointer, it invariably turns out to be something veering off from that which it might otherwise have been, though there can never be any guarantee that that “otherwise” is the “real” either. Any given sign, any given “semiotic reality,” consequently, both promises and bamboozles, or it does either one or the other, but we cannot absolutely know which. The best we can do, ultimately, to cite Eddington (1958b:291) once again, is concede that
something unknown is doing we don’t know what—that is what our theory amounts to. It does not sound a particularly illuminating theory. I have read something like it elsewhere—
The slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
Indeed, jabberwocky creates the image of some nebulous sort of uncertain activity, since for us it can start and finish only in medias res. Whether we contemplate electron-signs (that is, “object”-signs) or thought-signs, as icons, indices, or symbols, it’s the same ultrapliable batch of dough: “The slithy nicos gyre and gimble with the dincies and transmute themselves into bymslos.” By introducing a few logical notations here and some numbers there, along with a dash of geometrical figures and a dose of topological images, a “bymslo” does a slam dunk in a “dinxe’s” face, seduces a “nico” in the park, and everything presumably becomes a matter of natural language—which is ultimately the bread and butter of physics anyway in Wheeler’s conception (see also Gregory 1988). Natural language is actually as deceptive as it is destructive, for it is helplessly inadequate to the task, as we shall soon note.
On the other hand, if we switch our linguistic cargo to another vessel and navigate along a tangential route, we can arrive at what have often been considered two modes of knowing, two levels of consciousness.3 For example, William James (1968:155) tells us that
there are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively. Although such things as the white paper before your eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically.
Juxtaposing this quote with another from Eddington (1958b:321-22), in a comparable vein:
We have two kinds of knowledge . . . symbolic knowledge and intimate knowledge. . . . [T]he more customary forms of reasoning have been developed for symbolic knowledge only. The intimate knowledge will not submit to codification and analysis; or, rather, when we attempt to analyse it the intimacy is lost and it is replaced by symbolism.
One might at the outset speculate that, regarding this distinction between intimate or intuitive and representational or symbolic knowledge, we have Peirce’s distinctions between feeling and form, quality and law, contingency and regularity, vagueness and generality: that is, Firstness and Thirdness (see, for example, Savan 1952:187). As such the two modes must be separated by an increment of time, a duree, a specious present, commensurate with Peirce’s distinction between immediacy and mediacy. To an extent this appears to be the case. Witness, for example, Peirce’s words on quality, Firstness. We are told that we can never think “This is present in my consciousness,” because as soon as we reflect on the event, our consciousness of it is past. Once it is past, we cannot “bring back the quality of the feeling as it was in and for itself, or know what it was like in itself’ (CP:5.289; also 1.348, 7.351-52). That is to say, whatever is present to the mind is invariably a mediation of what was present in the previous moment, which is only at this present moment available. In this sense what is called the immediate “runs in a continuous stream through our lives; it is the sum total of consciousness, whose mediation, which is the continuity of it, is brought about by a real effective force behind consciousness” (CP:5.289).
Thus whatever we may say of thought-signs as they are in consciousness, Peirce remarks elsewhere, “is said of something unknowable in its immediacy.” The data of Cartesian introspection do not “directly reveal what is immediately present to consciousness, at all; but only what seems to have been present from the standpoint of subsequent reflection” (CP:7.425). Peirce maintained emphatically that, as with the data of introspection, so also with those of external observation. Thus against the Cartesian dictum that to know and to know one knows are for the gifted introspectionist part and parcel of the same thing, Peirce countered that whatever is immediately present to consciousness is not that which introspection supposedly reveals. In a sense somewhat commensurate with the notion of alternate frames of reference in the non-Euclidean space-time continuum of relativity, Peirce argues that
the things we observe in a physical science, say in astronomy, are not the elementary facts, at all. Kepler, for example, was not, as even J. S. Mill seems to fancy, provided, in the observations of Tycho, with the real places of the planet Mars, by the study of which he made out two of his three laws. No astronomer can directly observe the situation of a planet relatively to the sun. He only observes, the secondary and derivative fact, that the planet as viewed from the earth, and subject to aberration and the equation of time, is in such and such a direction at such a time. According to the method of observation, this direction will be more or less affected by refraction, etc. Moreover, the astronomer is forced to recognize that every single observation he makes is more or less affected by error. Those errors have to be corrected by reasoning whose only premises are the erroneous observations themselves. (CP: 7.419)
We cannot directly observe the world “out there” as it is in the absolute here-now, for there are no simultaneities. And we cannot observe it without there being a change, though ever so slight, from the moment we immediately “see” it to the moment we mediately see it as such and such with respect to something else. On so doing, we interpret it, and hence construct an interpretant of it, which is in turn part and parcel of the ongoing process of our (re)constructing ourselves. There are no unmediated facts. All facts are always already endowed with value, with culture-laden, language-laden, and private idiosyncratic meanings.4 By the same token, introspection for Peirce does not directly reveal what is immediately present to consciousness, but only what seems to have been present from the vantage of subsequent reflection. It is not even capable of telling us “what the normal appearance from this subsequent vantage is,” without “its testimony being falsified at all times with serious accidental errors” (CP:7-420).
II. CLOUDY KNOWING. Of the two modes of knowing, intuitive or intimate and representational or symbolic, Eddington calls the first intimate, for it unites subject and object. When subject and object are separated, however, the “intimacy” becomes tenuous, and symbolism threatens to take over.5 This is the all-too-familiar world of language, discourse, rhetoric, analysis: binary thinking. This realm of symbolism, of representation, necessarily edified upon the rubble of the subject-object mutilation of a once-proud continuum, was, is, and must remain to a degree illusory.
The vicissitudes of symbolism, of language, are, so to speak, of the sign’s own making: language, the human semiotic animal’s sign system par excellence. When detached from the concreteness of everyday life, language is mummified in abstractions; at times it even threatens to become virtually inoperative as an instrument of understanding. Yet every culture is firmly anchored in language: no language, no culture. “Without an instrument of symbolic expression and communication,” Aldous Huxley (1981:xii) observes,
we would be Yahoos, lacking the rudiments of civilization. It is because he starts by being Homo loquax that man is capable of becoming Homo sapiens. But this is a world in which everything has to be paid for. Language makes it possible for us to be more intelligent and better behaved than dumb brutes. But whereas the dumb brutes are merely bestial, we loquacious humans, who can talk ourselves into pure reason and almost angelic virtue, can also talk ourselves down into being devils, imbeciles, and lunatics.
Language is the universe, says Benjamin Lee Whorf (however, see note 14 of chapter 1). And it breeds a sense of self-confidence in us:
We all hold an illusion about talking, an illusion that talking is quite untrammeled and spontaneous and merely “expresses” whatever we wish to have it express. This illusory appearance results from the fact that the obligatory phenomena within the apparently free flow of talk are so completely autocratic that speaker and listener are bound unconsciously as though in the grip of a law of nature. The phenomena of language are background phenomena, of which the talkers are unaware or, at the most, very dimly aware. . . . The forms of a person’s thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language. (Whorf 1956:239)
Our thoughts, we are told, are to a degree controlled by inextricable laws of language pattern of which we are unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of our own language, which cuts “reality” up in partly arbitrary fashion at particular joints, which, for another language, might be the marrow making up the substance of the world. Our language is to us what water is to a fish: an implicit, implicate phenomenon so constant in our experience that though we are conscious of some of language’s functions—of manipulating and choosing symbols with which to convey ideas to others—we are only at most vaguely aware of its all-pervading functions as a self-sufficient, self-contained whole, that is, as a Monad.
This “conventionalist”6 view of language, and of symbolic thought, holds that, as Whorf (1956:253) puts it, “Every language contains its own metaphysics . . . each language performs this artificial chopping up of the continuous spread and flow of existence in a different way.” As a consequence, the knowers of human communities “are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can be in some way calibrated” (Whorf 1956:214). Nature is dissected along lines laid down by particular languages. If the conventionalist view is tentatively embraced, language being acknowledged as actively contributing to a given community’s knowledge, then the active role of the mind must also be acknowledged. And if so, then a given “semiotically real” world must also be “constructivist” (from various perspectives; see Arbib and Hesse 1986; Baer 1989; Layzer 1990:238-44; Watzlawick 1984).
But this is actually not so radical a posture as it appears at the outset. The “new physics” recognizes the mind (observer) as an active contributor to our picture of the world. Peirce in a roundabout manner took a step toward meeting this challenge with his notion of abductive leaps as tentative conjectures later to be backed up or refuted by induction and deductive arguments. Abductive leaps are acts of mind, think-signs in addition to, or in place of, thing-signs. The mind shoulders the responsibility of tuning in on the “real” as a result of, but not in total dependence upon, the experienced world. Hence any given “semiotic reality” is Umwelt-generated “mind-stuff.” Einstein (1949:81), in a comparable vein, tells us that “physics is an attempt conceptually to grasp reality as it is thought independently of its being observed. In this sense one speaks of ‘physical reality.’” To so grasp “reality” conceptually and independently of, but not in total separation from, the empirical world—since in the beginning was the mark or cut distinguishing the observed from everything else—implies, as we have already heard from Eddington, that this “reality” is “mind-stuff before it is “thing-stuff.”
Anglo-American philosophy, by holding onto the tenets of empiricism, has remained in large part firmly anchored within the Cartesian-Newtonian corpuscular-kinetic world view. In contrast, extrapolation of the implications of the “new physics” allows for no existence of “thing-stuff’ without mind. Some of these physicists are prepared to go so far as to propound the virtually unthinkable idea that without mind there is no world, Wheeler being one of the most outspoken in this respect. The notion of an active, constructivist mind becomes the basis for knowledge which in turn becomes the basis for ontology. The theory of mind and the theory of knowledge converge at some point to become the reverse side of one another. We are in a “participatory universe,” as Wheeler has stated repeatedly.
If we peruse the writings of some of the most seminal scientists of the twentieth century, we shall discover that their expression, while above all poetic and occasionally not without a mystical tinge, is grounded in an obsessive quest for the relationship between mind (or consciousness) and the world by way of language. From James Jeans (1958:186), often maligned for his unchecked speculation, though of recent some of this thought can be viewed as prophetic, we have the following: “The concepts which now prove to be fundamental to our understanding of nature . . . seem to my mind to be structures of pure thought. . . . The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”
Like Eddington’s footprints in the sand—note 18 of chapter 4—the mind sees what the mind constructed in the first place. That is to say, the intellect and matter are correlatives. The one exists only for the other, and either both stand or they fall together. They are in fact really one and the same thing, considered from distinct points of view.
This leads us once again to Einstein’s classic reminder that concepts which have been useful in ordering the universe surrounding the physicist soon begin to exercise authority over her to the extent that she forgets their human origin and begins accepting them—an artificial linguistic construct—as the genuine article. Subsequently, “they become ‘necessities of thought,’ ‘given a priori,’ etc. The path of scientific progress is then, by such errors barred for a long time” (in Born 1949:176). One must bear in mind, Einstein (1949:13) counsels further, that
the system of concepts is a creation of man together with the rules of syntax, which constitute the structure of the conceptual systems. . . . All concepts, even those which are closest to experience, are from the point of view of logic freely chosen conventions, just as is the case with the concept of causality, with which this problematic concerned itself in the first instance.
If we accept these premises, we are forced to the conclusion that a vast range, and perhaps an infinity, of possible conceptual frameworks and formal expressions of the “real” world “out there” may be adopted. The “new physics” apparently reveals that there are alternative ways of perceiving and conceiving the world, each couched in its own language. Black holes and white holes, quarks, leptons, and hadrons, are essentially façon de parler. They compose one story, classical physics is another tale, and Aristotle’s hierarchy of elements is yet another one. Language says what a particular world is, not because it is capable of capturing an independent world “out there” but because it lies at the heart of our confrontation with the world. When a new way of talking about the world is created, virtually a new world comes into existence (see Gregory 1988).
And in the sense of Peirce, each and every one of these language-dependent worlds represents the characteristics of mind or consciousness in interaction with its surroundings. Ultimately, to say one is to say the other, for “the same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds” (Heisenberg 1971:101). Indeed, Heisenberg revealed an inherent limitation on the precision of observation or localization of any pair of conjugate properties such as position and momentum, or energy and time. Bohr followed up with the philosophical impact of this limitation, complementarity, which eventually became a panacea for some and a thorn in the side of others, and he subsequently extended his complementarity principle to other areas of application, to the chagrin of more than a few of his colleagues. The ultimate extrapolation of Bohr’s principle must entail awareness, he suggested, that “we must, indeed, remember that the nature of our consciousness brings about a complementary relationship, in all domains of knowledge, between the analysis of a concept and its immediate application” (Bohr 1934:20). Heisenberg (1971:114) expressed his approval in a conversation with Bohr: “There can be no doubt that ‘consciousness’ does not occur in physics and chemistry, and I cannot see how it could possibly result from quantum mechanics. Yet any science that deals with living organisms must needs cover the phenomenon of consciousness because consciousness, too, is part of reality.”
A chief interpretation of this irreducible complementarity—though it has often been contested—postulates that it is not so much the physical world that imposes such apparently intransigent dichotomies as particle/wave, subject/object, position/momentum, and so on, on the mind (consciousness); it is the mind (consciousness) that interacts with the physical world to reveal particle cum wave, and so on. Such being the case, it is reasonable to assume that the mind (consciousness) exercises the option of taking on either wave characteristics or particle characteristics, the nature of the implicate as well as the explicate domains, to reevoke Bohm’s complementary images. In this light, Jeans (1943:204) remarks: “It seems at least conceivable that what is true of perceived objects may also be true of perceiving minds; just as there are wave-pictures for light and electricity, so there may be a corresponding picture for consciousness.”
Finally, this knowledge hopefully possessed by a given investigating mind (consciousness) is not knowledge of something, in much the sense that, as I argued above, there is no immediate consciousness of the “semiotic object,” for everything is always inexorably mediated by a temporal increment. As Louis de Broglie (1955:131) puts it:
The ψ function [from Schrödinger’s wave equation], in fact, does not represent something which would have its place in a point of space at a given instant; it represents, taken in its entirety, the state of knowledge of an observer, at the instant considered, of the physical reality that he studies; there is nothing surprising, therefore, in the fact that the function varies from one observer to another.
In view of the discussion of the semio-eigen-state in chapter 5, Schrödinger’s equation replaces the classical corpuscular-kinetic dynamics by patterns of probability of superposed waves. Complex nodal patterns are a potential, a tendency or propensity to behave in such and such a way given certain conditions (Thirdness), from the domain of possibilities (Firstness). Transition of an atomic structure from one state to another (Secondness) is brought about by direct interaction with neighboring atoms, which involves communication (information transfer) between all entities of a particular system. Ultimately the physicist’s measuring apparatus and her observation (interaction of consciousness) enter the scene, testifying to de Broglie’s remark that “the function varies from one observer to another.” Reinforcing the mind-dependent universe idea propounded above, de Broglie (1962:221) goes on to reveal elsewhere his profound sense of the controversial role of the mind (consciousness): “Science is therefore a strange sort of penetration into the world which through human consciousness and reason has learned to become aware of itself.”
This reconfirms Peirce’s notorious idea that mind acts upon mind and matter upon matter, and mind upon matter and matter upon mind (MS 936), and that all matter is really mind, and mind is continuous (CP:6.301). His suggestion—introduced in chapters 5 and 6—that just as mind, sign, and being are basically one, so are “man” and nature, cannot but lead to the conclusion that in the final analysis, a person “is only a particular kind of general idea.”7 The terms particular and general must be emphasized. This is no contradiction: generality (Thirdness) in a given particular instantiation or actualization can take on the form of a human organism. To reiterate Peirce’s often-cited remark:
There is no element whatever of man’s consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word. . . . The word or sign which man uses is the man himself . . . that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign . . . the man and the external sign are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought. (CP:5.314)8
And elsewhere: “Every reality, then, is a Self; and the Selves are intimately connected, as if they formed a continuum. Each one is, so to say, a delineation—with mathematical truth incongruous as the metaphor is, we may say that each is a quasi-map of the organic aggregate of all the Selves, which is itself a Self’ (CP:8.125).
Given Peirce’s continuity thesis, not only is self-other-Other artificial—i.e., inferential in character—but in addition, there is no absolute “man-sign” separation. Both partake of “signness,” so to speak. All this leads to Peirce’s remark that each self is a map of the organic aggregate of all selves, of the community, and by extension, of the physical world. Significantly enough, Peirce once evoked, following Josiah Royce, the map paradox: a map covering the entire territory is thus complete, but if so, it must contain itself, and that replica must in turn contain itself, and so on, ad infinitum. The map “is therefore,” Peirce observes, “the precise analogue of pure self-consciousness. As such it is self-sufficient” (CP:5-71).9 In the first place, in order for Peirce’s words to apply, he must have reverted back to Firstness, to the Monad. That is to say, the self as a microcosm mapping the community or the individual organism as microcosm mapping the universe creates the image of immanence.
But there is a problem here. Like a piece broken from the holographic plate which is capable of reconstructing the entire image, though there is a loss in precision, these microcosmic entities can no more than vaguely map their respective wholes—there is no Mirror of Nature, in all its glassy essence, here. As generalities are piled upon generalities, as more and more is taken into a given purview, the whole, as grasped by a finite, fallible, and extremely limited individual, stands a chance of becoming progressively less cloudy, though without the possibility of there being absolute clarity. De Broglie (1939:280) puts the dilemma—which from another perspective is a liberation—nicely: “May it not be universally true that the concepts produced by the human mind, when formulated in a slightly vague form, are roughly valid for Reality, but that when extreme precision is aimed at, they become ideal forms whose real contents tend to vanish away?”
In Peirce’s terms, gravitation toward generality brings one to an awareness of the incompleteness of one’s conceptualization; gravitation toward vagueness reveals the inextricable inconsistency underlying any and all of one’s holistic accounts. That is one part of the story. The other part is a more antagonistic mind-bender. At the pole of vagueness where the law of noncontradiction has made a hasty retreat, everything is there, as we noted in chapters 4 and 5, in superposition. It is nothing yet it potentially is everything. At the opposite pole of generality, the excluded-middle principle has been pushed under the rug. This implies that with the successive actualization of more and more particulars—i.e., like points along a dense line—until somehow we hopefully have a continuum—staccato having become legato—our inherent limitations force themselves into our awareness.
Here also we find a counterpart to the quantum uncertainty-complementarity of particle manifestations and wave manifestations. For example, a beam of light is directed toward a half-silvered mirror. Half of the photons gain entrance into the beyond and the other half are rejected, but there is no determining a priori which have and which do not have a legitimate passport. Newton’s corpuscular theory of light merely attributed the problem to fortune’s wheel. Fate separates the sheep from the goats. Now if we turn to the wave manifestation of light, we find the comfort of a deterministic framework. Yet this determinism has little to do with actual events. The superposition of a set of waves provides no indication of future events following from present events. On the contrary. It merely shows “the imperfections of our future knowledge following inexorably from the imperfections of our present knowledge” (Jeans, in Commins and Linscott 1947:365). One is reminded of Heisenberg’s words (1958a:81): “Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is a part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning.” This method of questioning depends upon one’s imperfect knowledge of past and present moments, which can do no more than generate imperfect knowledge for future moments. Questioning and knowledge, I would suggest, are in language and in the mind, thus they are the product of, and at the same time the author of, “semiotically real” worlds.
Once more we are forcibly returned to conceptualization and its embodiment in symbolic forms as the other side of our Janus-faced desire to know.
III. ON THE OPAQUE WALLS OF THE CAVE. The upshot of the previous section is that the customary Western forms of reasoning have been especially developed for and adapted to “symbolic” (“representational”) knowledge rather than “intuitive” (“intimate”) knowledge. However, the symbolic universe, symbolic language, and symbolic knowledge itself eventually become shadowy. This shadowy character of an artificially contrived body of discourse is by no means a recent development. It has been with us, Schrödinger (1967:130) notes, “ever since Democritus of Abdra and even before, but we were not aware of it; we thought we were dealing with the world itself; expressions like model or picture for the conceptual constructs of science came up in the second half of the nineteenth century, and not earlier, as far as I know.”
“Model” or “picture” for the constructs of science, “representation” for art and philosophy, “denotation” and “reference” for logic and language, are at the outset, as symbolic (i.e., linguistic) formulations, at least one remove from the concrete world of (immediate) experience. If this were the end of the story, perhaps the labyrinth would be two-dimensional instead of many-dimensional. But the tale goes on. As symbols accumulate, it is not simply that we are no longer dealing with the world itself; we eventually lose awareness that we are no longer doing so. The forest, so to speak, replaces the trees, and what we deludedly take to be trees are mere shadows. The symbols are about symbols about symbols . . . about nothing at all. The shadows are identified with that longed-for “reality,” and attention is glued to the abstracted movements on the walls of the cave with the belief that “reality” is thus understood at its lowermost level. There is no longer any awareness of that other mode, Peirce’s felt or sensed qualitative intimacy with immediate experience, which, though it cannot be represented symbolically, is more in tune with the universe (see Rochberg-Halton 1986).
Western disciplines have not been dealing directly with the “real”; they have been operating through the dualistic mode of knowledge couched in the symbolic mode. However, this mode is both the bane and the boon, the blind spot and the beauty, of Western intellectual endeavors. The mind has effectively generated highly sophisticated, though at the same time exceedingly abstract, “pictures” of the world. “One thinks that one is tracing the outlines of nature over and over again,” Wittgenstein (1953:114-15) tells us, “and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at her. A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” But they can be no more than that: “pictures.” There is no faithful representation to be had via “pictures”; even when on their best behavior, “pictures” do not stand a chance of becoming mirrors. From within the twentieth-century analytical tradition, Wittgenstein, Quine, Goodman, and Rorty, from pragmatics, James and Dewey, from phenomenology and beyond, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida, and from hermeneutics, especially Gadamer, not to mention the ruminations of mathematicians, logicians, scientists, and philosophers of science, we are painfully forced to become aware of this limitation. We simply cannot conquer the territory armed with nothing but a partly arbitrary map.10
Now, the problem with all this is that, as Peirce scholars are well aware, I have been addressing myself regarding the two modes of knowing to yet another binary opposition. In contrast, Peirce predicated triadism throughout his writings. How can we reconcile this apparent contradiction? The two legs of the Peircean trio to which I refer above are Firstness and Thirdness. Secondness, which has been largely absent, must now be integrated into the scheme. Secondness is that which makes “inner” and “outer” otherness possible. Like the other two categories, Secondness is defined in relational not formal terms. These others, in this sense, are crucial.
In brief, otherness is necessary to the existence of thought itself, and “inner” otherness depends for its existence upon “outer” otherness. The “inner” is created when the self becomes aware of a distinction between itself and something else, some other—the shock of, or surprise with respect to some aspect of, the “outer” world (CP: 1.334-36). But Firstness and Secondness, as quality or feeling and this-hereness, would remain outside any significance one with respect to the other without Thirdness (CP: 1.337, 5.104). Thirdness unites all of that which without it would have remained in arbitrary and unmediated alienation: Firstness and Secondness without Thirdness would remain disjointed.
Yet, Thirdness in turn depends upon Firstness and Secondness for its very raison d’être. Its existence is defined in and through its mediary operation alone. At the same time it always projects beyond that which it mediates: it is potentiality, futurity. Pushing at the walls of actuality, it incessantly moves on toward ever greater generality and regularity, toward completion, which, if realized, would bring about a conjunctionis oppositorum. The fabric would finally double back upon itself as the Ultimate Interpretant, and at the same time its continuity would be coterminous with the continuity of Firstness. Peirce’s process philosophy is in many respects quite obviously a philosophy of growth. But it necessarily stems from an inconsistent bedrock of perpetual incompleteness.
An illustration. Your senses pick up the call of a bird outside your window as a mere feeling. Then the image of a cardinal enters your consciousness. At this stage in the development of a sign there is a connection, though it is dim, a mere skeleton idea between the sound and the image of the particular species of a genus. The visual illustration of this connection between two things is given by Peirce as a line connecting a pair of points (CP:7.426). The line, of course, is infinitesimally thin, a nothingness, a fiction. Only its contrived physical manifestation is visible. In other words, there need be no necessary relation or connection at all between the cardinal-sound and the actual cardinal. It is there either by instinct—in the case of a hungry cat perceiving the bird—or by convention—eventually producing an image in your mind of a particular type of bird.
But I am racing ahead of myself; there is still no acknowledgment on the part of your emerging consciousness of the bird in question as a cardinal or as represented by the word cardinal. There is merely a fuzzy relation between two sensations, one in the “out there,” the other in your mind. The “outer” representation (object) of the bird call, the sign representamen, is not directly sensed. It is not “actually real,” for it is not immediately present to your mind. That is, there is no this-hereness in the now of things, hence the object can be no more than a “semiotic object,” its existence as such remaining dependent upon the “inner” image you conjured up. Yet this bird call (representamen) and this “semiotic object” are already in the process of being symbolized (i.e., mediated) by the creation of the sign’s interpretant. Thirdness, a cardinal-idea, brings the original relation into a triad, like the three points of a triangle connected by three lines (CP:7.426). Now, this cardinal-idea as a first-level legisign can evolve, by way of greater complexity, into the term cardinal, say, with your remarking to your spouse, “He’s singing our song.” And the two of you may then begin deliberating whether the feathered vertebrate in question is indeed a cardinal or some other species.
At each stage of this signifying process there is development, or growth, which is accelerated vastly by the process of symbolicity through increasing abstraction. The aloof, partly arbitrary nature of the symbol endows it with such a capacity. If we recall that most simple of rules, “The symbol at least in part is what that of which it is a symbol in part is not,” we begin to grasp the semiotic power of symbolicity. It breaks away from the “thingness” of things and goes off on a tangential tap dance, constantly threatening to drag us along with it. Thus Schrödinger’s observation that our artificially contrived symbolic knowledge is of a shadowy character, which is, to repeat, both the bane and the boon of symbolicity.
Regarding symbolicity further, and commensurate with Peirce’s categories, three semiotic paths toward the “real” stand out—the journey is “semiotically real,” of course, though the inconceivable end of the road is that union of all opposites, the “real.” These paths are (1) analogy, (2) injunction, and (3) postulation through negation, which correspond respectively to Firstness and iconicity, Secondness and indexicality, and Thirdness and symbolicity. Significantly, all three paths are in one guise or another crucial to Western scientific thought and practices as (1) metaphors and analogical models (Hesse 1966; Leatherdale 1974), (2) instructions to carry out operations such as in the activity of generating mathematical proofs, assembling a bicycle, baking a cake, conducting scientific experiments, or whatever, in order to obtain certain results (Spencer-Brown 1979; Lakatos 1976), and (3) refutation, a becoming of consciousness that something does not coincide with expectations (Popper 1972).
The analogical mode potentially rendering that portion or all of an unintelligible and unsayable domain at least partly describable, is most commonly shared by the arts and sciences. As one moves along the road toward the “actually real,” analogical thought is capable of encompassing larger and larger domains. Roughly speaking, it might be said that the larger the domain, the more vague—and hence the more contradictory—the analog. The end product of the analogical mode, of course, is the ultimate self-contained Monad. In religious discourse it is tantamount to God, Buddha, the Tao, and so on. The finite mind is no match for such omniscience evoked by this analogical totality. Consequently, religious icons such as paintings, sculptures, narratives, mythological images, crosses, and mandalas vary greatly from religion to religion and from time period to time period (MacCormac 1976, 1985).
One might conjecture that scientific analogies or models do not suffer from the same de-generation of precision and form as the mapped domain increases. However, though scientific discourse may be embedded in formal language, and though this language may appear to describe reality with “unreasonable effectiveness,” to use Wigner’s (1969) words, the analog itself is not necessarily any more exact than that of any given line of poetry. This is true especially when the domain, like that of God, is unobservable. In modern times, for example, metaphors for unobservables such as machines for the universe, solar system for the atom, elastic balls for gas molecules, and ether for the propagation of light, have proved either scandalously inadequate or extremely limited.
The second mode, that of injunction, is an invitation, in the form of a set of rules, to become aware of some aspect of the “semiotically real,” as one navigates, hopefully, toward one’s destination. I have mentioned mathematical proofs and scientific experimental procedures. These activities, Spencer-Brown (1979:77) points out, are
comparable with practical art forms like cookery, in which the taste of a cake, although literally indescribable, can be conveyed to a reader in the form of a set of injunctions called a recipe. Music is a similar art form, the composer does not even attempt to describe the set of sounds he has in mind, much less the set of feelings occasioned through them, but writes down a set of commands which, if they are obeyed by the reader, can result in a reproduction, to the reader, of the composer’s original experience.
By the same token, a painting, sculpture, or architectural display contains within itself the tacit injunction to its viewer that she experience for herself something in line—though there is always a necessary difference—with what its maker originally experienced. A poem, on the other hand, is already couched in language. Nonetheless, the poem itself embodies an equally tacit injunction something like “Come, my dear reader. I invite you to share with me this unforgettable moment” (Levin 1976). It is as if the original creator were to grab her audience by the senses with the evocation: “Look!” “Listen!” “Feel!” “Experience!” and so on, which serves indexically as an indirect pointer. In all such cases, the action and experience are left to the audience; if they fail, that is not necessarily the fault of the author.
However, the injunctive mode contains inherent pitfalls. One often wanders up blind alleys leading to hero worship and unthinking adulation of authority figures, as Imre Lakatos (1976) takes pains to demonstrate. In mathematics, for example, methods and procedures, as well as overwhelming lists of axioms, lemmas, and definitions, are in doctrinaire fashion handed down to the student who is obliged
to attend this conjuring act without asking questions either about the background or about how this sleight-of-hand is performed. If the student by chance discovers that some of the unseemly definitions are proof-generated, if he simply wonders how these definitions, lemmas and the theorem can possibly precede the proof, the conjuror will ostracize him for this display of mathematical immaturity. (Lakatos 1976:142)
The third mode, postulation by negation, is by no means the exclusive brain child of Peirce, of Popper, or even of science. It is also, from a distinct vantage, the via negativa of St. Thomas according to which the believer must proceed by successive cancellation of everything the finished product is not, chipping away the unnecessary stone to leave the perfect statue. In Vedanta this same process exists in the phrase, cited above: “Not this, not this, . . . n.” Popper’s method of “falsification” and Peirce’s “refutation” bear witness to the fact that the symbol, or symbolic discourse, in fact, everything sayable, is not what the domain said is.
In its inception analogy is qualitative, something sensed or felt. It is at once fullness and emptiness: fullness, for something is in comparable fashion to what something else is, and emptiness, for that something in part is not what that to which it is related is. The intuitive grasp of an analogy selects part of something while the rest remains nonselected, but the nonselected shares equal importance with the selected, since the two are related by complementarity. Injunction establishes what is, when that which is selected is foregrounded vis-a-vis that which was not. And falsification, the via negativa, reveals the inherent emptiness of all conceptualization, of symbolicity: signs taken as surrogates for the “real” thing of process, of event (like a snapshot of a turbulent river). That is to say, symbolicity tends to breed a false sense that knowledge by way of partly arbitrary and artificial signs has been realized or is just around the next bend in the road.
For example, you said to your spouse, “He’s singing our song.” This utterance, coupled with the fact that your spouse can decipher it and either agree or develop a counterproposition, is the result of a vast web of significance. Two human animals have intersected at a spatio-temporal “cardinal” node in the semiosic fabric, which involves their entire life history to that point. “Cardinal” is for each of them a singularity resulting from their evolution and training, from the appearance of the token of a particular type having entered their consciousness. But to say “cardinal” is to use a symbol which applies not merely to that cardinal but to all cardinals, independently of any specific time and place. When a symbol is so used, it threatens to take on the attributes supposedly of the thing itself—it becomes embedded in consciousness—such that it is regarded as a separate thing, autonomous, self-sufficient: it has become “indexicalized” and then “iconized.” The semiotic triad has become a dyad, as the relation between symbol and object wanes, then a monad, as awareness of the sensation “cardinal” abates; the necessary relations of semiosis fall from consciousness. The word cardinal as such tends to be rather automatically associated with other signs; it has become a giant step removed from the “real,” from physical existence, yet it is still generally taken to be “real.” It has, in short, become an abstracted item of the “semiotically real.”
And negation has a bearing in all this. “Cardinal” is not the affection between lovers but a mediated symbol of it. A flag is not the motherland when desecrated—thus provoking an outburst of indignation. A hammer and sickle is not the “beast,” as the fundamentalist Protestant might conceive it, but a symbol of his paranoid mentality. Becoming aware of such negation, when expectations are met with surprise, involves consciousness that certain conditions are not what they were taken to be. Symbols fulfill a necessary social and communal function, enabling us most effectively to promote mutual understanding in our community. The “real,” however, during such moments when one becomes aware of the negative function of the symbol, must be experienced in a very personal and direct manner, not merely through the medium of symbols themselves. This more immediate awareness allows us to view the world without the distorting medium of symbolism, especially regarding the arbitrary nature of symbols, the oftentimes presumed intentional nature of reference to the “semiotic object,” and the influence of symbols on our attitudes and behavior. It is worthy of note that in the three modes of “symbolic knowing” I have summarily described there is a progression in good Peircean fashion from Firstness to Thirdness. Of the three, Firstness lies closest to the ideal of “intuitive knowledge,” that which is immediately sensed. This marks the initiation of a process of development, of growth, the ultimate extrapolation of which carries Thirdness to its logical end.
I close this section, reiterating in the first place the impossibility, as far as Peirce is concerned, of any absolute knowledge for the finite, fragile, and tenderly fallible human semiotic animal, and in the second place the inadequacy of binary thinking as illustrated once again through triadicity. Fortunately, one is always susceptible to abductive leaps, free flights of the imagination, peak experiences, or whatever. These, however, are little doublings back, micro-epiphanies, which endow one at least ephemerally with some sense of omniscience. They are, nonetheless, paltry shadows of what is, which remains beyond even the most multitudinous sequence of experiences.
IV. FROM THE UNIFIED CLOUD OF VAGUENESS, THAT IS, FEELING. Once again, merely to point out the pitfalls of symbolic (dualistic, bifurcative) thought by juxtaposing it with intuitive (holistic, integrative) thought does not necessarily do more than erect yet another dualism. This is also the general fallacy of the right-brainers who call for an end to left-hemisphere dominance and a return either to right-minded thinking or to a balance of the two poles of the opposition. But the opposition remains. What we need is a corpus-callosumer capable of a legitimate unification, of integrating the parts of figure 3 into a whole. Actually, on the one hand, the sort of brain localization that seemed to be the wave of the future a couple of decades ago is now looked upon as exceedingly more problematic than was supposed, and on the other hand, Pribram’s holographic brain has fallen from grace somewhat. Yet the general movement seems to be toward a holistic conception of the brain-mind. Howard Gardner (1987:393-99) remarks that he is struck by a paradox: the sort of problems the leading-edge brain scientists are currently working on bear closer relationship to the mind set of scientists on the eve of cognitive science’s birth than to work being carried out a decade or two ago.
Early cyberneticists such as Ashby, Karl Lashley, McCulloch, von Neumann, and Wiener envisioned computation and the understanding of the brain to be essentially the same. It was presumed that modeling entailed neural networks and logical calculi to account for their functioning. The early cognitivists, Jerome Bruner, Noam Chomsky, George Miller, Herbert Simon, and on the other side of the Atlantic, Jean Piaget and Claude Lévi-Strauss, had little patience for such tinker toy models. They focused on introspection and higher cognitive processes, more at the software than the hardware level. The pendulum swing has once again changed directions over the past few years:
As the limits of the serial digital “von Neumann computer” became clearer, and as alternative views of computation gained in persuasiveness, there has been a shift to a different “modal view” of cognition—a view in which psychological, computational, and neurological considerations are far more intricately linked. (Gardner 1987:394)
The emergent concept seems to be “parallel distributed processing” according to which knowledge inheres in brain connections themselves. Instead of a set of facts or events stored in the brain, memory is viewed as the set of relationships that obtain between various aspects of the facts and events as they are encoded in groupings or patterns of units. The what of the storage does not consist so much of things as it does of interconnections between units which allow patterns to be called up and re-created. “Parallel distributed processing” thus operates in a manner more reminiscent of cybernetic brain models than the mind models of the early cognitivists.
If this recent turn proves to be of significant value, it may help dissolve the age-old brain-mind dualism, but more important, it can point the way toward a holistic view of things: the furniture of the world as “mind-stuff,” or conversely, the mind as merely a particular aspect of just another piece of furniture. To reiterate Russell’s words: “The world may be called physical or mental or both or neither as we please.” The same, of course, has been observed in quantum theory—and Peirce’s signs—as either “thing-stuff’ or “mind-stuff,” depending on the vantage. At any rate, whatever we decide to call this “stuff,” it’s a pretty safe bet that it is, at that final point in the infinite horizon toward which all lines converge, One.
And we are once again confronted with the problem of the one and the many, or, so to speak, of monism and pluralism. There is solace to be had in variety rather than in an unknowable one. Yet the one is suggested by Peirce and Bohm, Wheeler and Schrödinger, among a host of others. Schrödinger, in commenting on what he calls the “Arithmetical Paradox,” has a few remarkable words in this respect. He begins: “The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture” (Schrödinger 1967:138).
He then continues, observing that this ego, this consciousness, is identified with the whole, its whole. Therefore it cannot be contained in it as a part of itself. In our world we find ourselves among innumerable individuals whose physical attributes and behavior appear to pattern ours. This leads each of us to the inevitable conclusion, following a basic human penchant for association, that every individual possesses a mind comparable to our own, with comparable faculties. Such a conclusion also breeds the paradox by which the one is identified with the many. Each of us has constructed a world map, and each map is to a greater or lesser degree different from all other maps. Nevertheless, the collection of these maps, however faithfully they represent the “real world,” in their composite represent an attempt to align perception and conception with one world. In other words, just as the multiplicity of conscious egos is one, and just as the multiplicity of map-worlds is one world, so also the collection of “semiotically real” worlds generated by each individual of the entire sign-using community is one.
As Schrödinger (1967:138) puts it, “the several domains of ‘private’ consciousness partly overlap. The region common to all where they all overlap is the construct of the real world [i.e., the ‘semiotically real’] around us.” There is no absolutely individual mind. There are only many conscious egos and map-worlds that can be accounted for solely by the fact that the many domains of consciousness must overlap to produce some “common region” which constitutes the Umwelt-generated “real world” for a particular species or one of its subgroups.
What we have here, it seems to me, is Thirdness. I will illustrate this via Schrödinger (1967:138), who notes, after introducing the paradox in question, that
an uncomfortable feeling remains, prompting such questions as: Is my world really the same as yours? Is there one real world to be distinguished from its pictures introjected by way of perception into every one of us? And if so, are these pictures like unto the real world or is the latter, the world “in itself,” perhaps very different from the one we perceive?
Such questions are ingenious, but in my opinion very apt to confuse the issue. They have no adequate answers. They all are, or lead to, antinomies springing from one source, which I called the arithmetical paradox; the many conscious egos from whose mental experience the one world is concocted.
Schrödinger outlines two ways out of the arithmetical paradox, depending on whether we incline toward the many or the one: (1) Leibniz’s solipsistic, windowless monads united by some mysterious “pre-established harmony,” and (2) the unification of all minds or consciousnesses. The second way, it is now quite obvious, is Schrödinger’s preference. That multiple consciousness is illusory conforms to the teachings of the ancient Upanishads, among other doctrines, which have had little appeal in the West, though Western thought could profit from an amendment along these lines, “perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought” (Schrödinger 1967:140). Schrödinger observes further that the oneness doctrine is supported by empirical evidence that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. This holds true even in pathological cases of split personality: the two or more persons alternate, never appearing jointly, though they may or may not be familiar with each other.
Neither is there absolute distinction, Schrödinger argues, between the self and the physical world “out there.” Consider any sensory image, for example, that of a tree. It has traditionally been held that the perception one has of a tree must be distinguished from the tree “in itself’: the tree does not enter the observing self but only certain effects from it. Another way of putting it is that the tree is perceived if, and only if, certain events, unknown to the observer in detail, occur in the observer’s central nervous system. And if these events were known they would not describe the tree, be equal to the tree, or even be a faithful map of the tree. The perception is not the thing perceived. In other words, the tree “in itself’ is colorless, tasteless, and odorless; it remains beyond experience. The phenomenalist Ernst Mach, roughly in line with Hume and British empiricism, believed that the tree is cognizable to the observer solely in terms of his bundle of perceptions of it. And since all humans are endowed with essentially the same perceptual faculties, there is no fundamental distinction between one person’s sensations and those of somebody else.11 That is, what constitutes a single complex of sensations—of the tree—is the complex which several observers observing the tree at the same instant hold in common. The content of consciousness of the various observing selves is not qualitatively identical, but in conjunction, the perceptions of these selves enjoy a common content, which is numerically one.
“This conclusion, though it is the only logical one,” Schrödinger (1964:16-17) writes,
immediately strikes us Westerners as thoroughly bizarre. We . . . have accustomed ourselves to thinking (though there is nothing to prove it, and the most primitive daily experience demonstrates the contrary) that each person’s sensation, perception, and thought is a strictly segregated sphere, these spheres having nothing in common with each other, neither overlapping nor directly influencing each other, but on the contrary absolutely excluding each other. In my opinion, the idea of elements of consciousness which are quite simply common to several human individuals is, in itself, neither self-contradictory nor in contradiction with other known facts of experience; rather, it does very properly restore the state of things which in fact exists for a really naive human being.
The body, of course, offers the most clear-cut case of separation between this and that, inside and outside, myself and other. But, Schrödinger asks, why is it precisely at this intermediate level in the vast hierarchy of superposed unities (cell, organ, body, community, world) that the separation is made? And why is it at this level that a unitary form of self-consciousness comes into existence? It seems that regarding Peirce on mind and matter, consciousness and nonconsciousness, we are confronted by difference of degree rather than kind, by continuity rather than discontinuous breaks.
Let us return to a more primitive level of organization, to Maturana and Varela’s (1987) first-, second-, and third-order entities, in search of an answer. The first order includes individual cells (icons, Firstness) consisting of autopoietic, relatively autonomous systems. An individual cell as a domain of life processes stands out against a background of molecular soup by distinguishing and indicating its own boundary that sets it apart from what it is not. This indication of a boundary is exercised through molecular productions made possible by means of the boundary itself, which is a permeable membrane: there is a mutual indication of chemical transformation and boundary conditions. The cell, so to speak, lifts itself by its own bootstraps within its environment, and if the boundary it indicates for itself is interrupted, it diffuses back into the molecular soup from which it emerged. Thus far we have considered the life-system equivalent of Peirce’s blank sheet of assertion and a cut-as-unaryicon, as Firstness, though the cell’s indication of its boundary has already set the stage for indexicality, Secondness.12
This second order corresponds to “structural coupling”—i.e., “binary coupling,” much in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari—which occurs when there is a history of ongoing interaction between two (or more) systems eventually leading to a structural congruence, and in concert they take on a function that would have been impossible for the individual cells in isolation. An example of structural coupling in its most basic form is that of a group of single-cell organisms called myxomycetes, fungi consisting of amoeboid individuals combining to form a fructiferous aggregate. The cells at the upper end of the aggregate generate spores, whereas the cells at the base become vacuoles and walls providing mechanical support to the entire multicellular complex. The structural changes each cell undergoes during its lifetime are complementary with the structural changes of all other cells in the system. While this dyadic structural coupling is indexical, that of Secondness, nonetheless, the role of complementarity sets the stage, as did indication for the first-order system, for a higher order. Complementation demands, like the quantum wave/particle pair, a larger context in order that its role be fully realized.
If the entities of the second order of structural coupling call for a higher level (context) of functioning for the multicellular organism, the entities of a third-order structural coupling demand yet higher relations (of symbolicity, Thirdness) between multicellular organisms themselves. And just as second-order coupling creates a new phenomenology of multicellular organisms, so third-order coupling creates a new phenomenology of trans-multicellular organisms, which includes sexual reproduction and family, community, or society. The classic example of third-order coupling is that of social insects, where there is a variety of forms among the participating individuals. Most are barren females whose task is to store food and defend the colony, take care of the eggs, and in general maintain the nest. The males are secluded inside, where there is usually only one fertile female, the queen, who is charged with the task of reproduction.
The most complex manifestation of third-order structural coupling is found in human societies and their natural language, which is symbolicity, or Thirdness, par excellence. The immediacy of Firstness and the thisness of Secondness are mediated by the third order, which unites individual organisms and individual cells into a larger corpus, the community or society, whose couplings now become increasingly “mindlike,” or like “mind-stuff,” so to speak. Human communities are closed physically, as are multicellular and cellular systems, regarding their nature as autonomous entities in the Maturana-Varela sense. But their role is not limited to autonomy. The community, as a collection of entities open to their environment, is dissipative in the style of Prigogine: it takes in material and energy and exports entropy in order to swim against the cosmic stream of increasing disorder. Moreover, in addition to the entity’s conservation as an individual physical organism, conservation also depends on the mental domain: the organism reads information from its environment and responds accordingly, which enhances its capacity to maintain a relatively low level of entropy production. The evolutionary history of human beings and more complex organisms is thus associated with mental behavior to an increasing degree. Proportionate with Peirce’s cosmology, this evolutionary history tends toward mind, Thirdness, which synthesizes increasingly complex parts into wholes. The push is toward nootemporality, the “semiotically real,” which becomes progressively mindlike—an increase of thought-signs and a concomitant decrease of thing-signs (in general, Jantsch 1980).
In these more complex communities, when consciousness and self-consciousness enter the scene, there must be some account of self-knowledge. And this places us squarely in the crux of the issue. What sort of self-knowledge are we speaking of? What sort of self-knowledge is possible? And does it presuppose prior knowledge of the world “out there”? Varela (1984a, 1984b) would respond that we do not and cannot know the world “out there.” In spite of our openness to it, both physically and mentally, we will always remain at least a step removed from it because of the inevitable breach between any and all Umwelt-generated “semiotic realities” and the “real.” The best we can do is know our internal states, or perhaps we should say that our internal states are somehow capable of knowing themselves—in keeping with Maturana and Varela’s bootstrapping operation. But these internal states are in a process of constant change, which is triggered by our constant interaction with our “semiotic realities” and the “real.” Maturana and Varela (1987) provide the analogy of an airline pilot reduced to zero visibility because of a storm. His landing the plane by relying solely on his instruments is no different from the procedure he has followed many times in his training cabin with a simulated storm. He has done it a hundred times before, and he is now engaged in merely doing it once again. The central nervous system, like the automatic pilot, responds to its environment by altering its own internal states which are at the same time constrained by their structure and the history of previous pathways it traversed in building up its habits of response.
Thus the single-cell doctrine of sensory perception according to which a brain-to-world connection is mediated through the activity of a collection of single cells is soundly rejected. The logic of the operations of the brain is more adequately described as, following Hofstadter (1979), a tangled hierarchy of surface-to-surface comparisons. This, Varela (1984b:216) argues,
means a radical change in our views of the functioning of the brain. For us, it means moving away from viewing the brain as a device which takes input in the form of information to act on. Rather, it means moving towards viewing the brain as a system characterized, not by its inputs, but by the operational closure of its dynamics of states, defined as a relative balance of activity between neural surfaces in a manner such that every change of state in the system can lead only to another change of state in the system itself.
Varela makes a plea for a “dialectical middle way” between representationalism and solipsism. This entails a taking explicitly into account of the conditions of description: a constant switching back and forth between the organism as a system operating according to its own internal logic and as a unit in interaction with its environment. This is, so to speak, the “electron” as “wave” according to the Schrödinger description and as “particle” after “collapse” (interaction) according to the probability function. In such oscillation between one complementary vantage and another, the observer can investigate the organism’s internal logic and the fundamental constraints as a result of its environment. Consequently, a given organism’s Umwelt-generated world neither becomes an arbitrary selection, construction, or invention, nor is it merely an expression of an organism’s optimal fit with its environment. It is an account of the organism’s “dynamics of states as a result of one of the possible viable phylogenic pathways within many others realized in the evolutionary history of living systems” (Varela 1984:218).
Returning to Schrödinger, we are confronted with a somewhat paradoxical conclusion. If we are to think in a natural way about what goes on in a living, thinking, feeling entity, then “the condition for our doing so is that we think of everything that happens as taking place in our experience of the world, without ascribing to it any material substratum as the object of which it is an experience” (Schrödinger 1964:61). Which seems to place us, contra Varela, squarely in the solipsist’s ballpark.
Indeed, Schrödinger asks how it is that despite the obvious privacy, at times bordering on the hermetic, regarding different spheres of consciousness, there can nevertheless be a remarkable degree of understanding between them, which can reach the level of subtlety encountered among multilinguistic, multicultural human beings. At first sight the task appears as impossible as deciphering Mayan hieroglyphics or Egyptian documents before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. One gets to know the “world” through one’s own sense perceptions, and the same applies to everyone else. The “worlds” thus produced share many commonalities, which compel us in general to use the singular term world. But each person’s sense-”world” is strictly a private affair, and inaccessible to anyone else. This agreement might have appeared commonsensical from within the framework of Cartesian-Newtonian objectivity according to which all subjects perceive the same world. But given the now-prevalent notions of relative frames of reference and observer participance, it is especially strange that a community of organisms of the same species, particularly humans with their complex private idiosyncrasies, would enjoy such a common world. In the terminology of this inquiry, no one perceives two “worlds,” the “semiotically real” and the “real,” in order to check one against the other. Everyone perceives solely his or her own “semiotically real” world.
Granted, that “semiotic world” is Umwelt-generated by individual members of a particular species. However, at a time when it is being increasingly proposed that “reality” is a social construction, the age-old empiricist hope that we all see the same world “out there” and arrive at a consensus by way of the analogies between our perceptual grasps tends to prevail. To the question, “Isn’t there in fact an extremely strict correspondence, even to the very details, between the content of any one sphere of consciousness and any other so far as the external world is concerned?” Schrödinger (1964:69) asks: “And who enjoys the privileged position from which to establish this correspondence?”
Schrödinger argues against the empiricist (and by extension behaviorist) idea that a self arrives at a comprehension of other selves by analogy, that is, similarity of substance and behavior, and that a self takes on self-identity by its continuity of existence. If, according to nominalism (modern empiricism), a genus as general enjoys no “reality,” nor does a species, but only individuals, why stop there? The logic that pushes us from genus to species to individuals is the very logic we should extrapolate to the event or momentary state of an individual in question. That is, an individual can be subdivided into the myriad events, each representing it at a given point in time and space of its historical coming into existence and passing away. In this sense we should consider event-signs rather than thing-signs; all are ephemeral comings and goings in the cosmic dance of things. There is, then, no analogy or similarity of things or of mind but of patterns, relations, the process of thinking, all of them fleet happenings.
And we can extrapolate further, to the lowermost level of happenings. According to Bohr’s interpretation of quantum events, detection of micro-world “particles” presupposes the existence of an empirical macro-world. But even at this level “particles” enjoy no detectible self-identity, if by identity we mean that an “object” can be traced continuously along its trajectory from one location to another, and its alteration from one state to another. The best that can be said, according to Schrödinger (1951:17-21), is that sometimes subatomic “particles” arrange themselves in such a manner that they can be construed as things, as substance, as at least an approximation to that which they really are, though at other times their behavior appears to falsify the very idea of their “thingness.” If substance there be, it is determinable only as events, and any determination of events suggests that substance most likely lurks somewhere nearby in the shadows. Schrödinger points out that for physics, any recognizable sameness involves patterns and relations in sequences of happenings. Happenings can be discerned (i.e., now this, now this), as are changes of patterns and relations, and persistence of patterns and relations from past events to present ones. But the same cannot be said of things. They simply do not remain the same over time. So over the long haul Schrödinger has no real bone to pick with Varela. For both, each individual stands alone as a partly autonomous system, but in concert with other systems of the same class their collective harmonics compose one indivisible whole.
To recap, in chapter 6 we noted the correlation between semiostates, collapses, and aggregates, on the one hand, and Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, on the other, as well as the transition from atemporality to prototemporality to eotemporality and the possibility of entrance into bionootemporality . In this section Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness have been correlated with Maturana and Varela’s three orders of biological entities. Let us now extrapolate these considerations to the biological sphere of cells and aggregate organisms, and more particularly to the individual-community and the self-other-Other relationships.
V. TOWARD THE UNITY OF MIND, THAT IS, GENERALITY. First and foremost, an additional word on the individual as an organic entity will be necessary. Eugene Rochberg-Halton (1986:230-72) calls the modern Western mind the product of “cultural nominalism,” of the idea of rugged individualism. He argues at length how Herman Melville and Peirce, among other prophets in the wilderness, rebelled against what they conceived to be the devastating consequences of modern nominalistic culture, and particularly against the onslaught of American rugged individualism. On a comparable note, Hartshorne (1970:190) tells us:
For what is culture if not certain things which individuals do to themselves and other individuals? But all parties were assuming “identity” through time as unproblematic. To add “culture,” as identical—though also changing—through time, to the individuals as also persistent changing identities is not sufficient. What is really “in the last analysis” there in social reality is neither culture nor individual people, but certain rather highly-ordered sequences of events characterized by the high level of symbolic functioning and creative freedom that is found on this planet only in those event-sequences which we call human beings. . . .
Our whole Western tradition is warped and confused by the concept of individual taken as ultimate. The results are ethical and not just theoretical. . . . The individual who now acts creatively is not simply I, or you, but I now, or you now. I yesterday, you yesterday, did not enact and can never enact our today’s actions; only today’s selves can do that. And since there is a new agent each tenth of a second or so, the actual momentary freedom cannot be very large. At a given moment, we are almost entirely a product, not a producer. And what productive power we have would be totally vacuous without inheritance from past actions, our own and those of countless others.
From this vantage—as from that of Peirce—the self-identical self is a vain notion, the vulgarist illusion of vanity. There is no absolutely isolated existence. The individual is a micro-level of the community, which is a loosely compacted individual; the community is a macro-individual. Just as one brain cell cannot know precisely what the whole brain is doing, so one mind cannot with certainty know the community mind. However, to reevoke the hologram trope, just as the consciousness of a portion of the brain and even of an individual cell is a dim image of the whole, so the individual can be at least dimly aware of the community mind. All this leads to the notion that there is no “real” plurality, no individuality, as the long-standing Western tradition has it. And it evokes the monist alternative implying the “reality” of the One only. Yet this One consists of a myriad plurality of entities in constant transition, the collection of which pushes the One along the path of its evolutionary development.
“Foul! Now you definitely are propagating sheer mysticism,” one might retort. Yet Schrödinger, among other physicists instrumental in completely overturning the apple cart of classical mechanics, without reservations or apologies squarely confronts the issue. He establishes first that the hypothesis of a material world “out there” directly perceived by everybody as the cause of a common ground of experience cannot give us any guarantee that we can be aware of that shared common ground, but that it has to do as much with thought (mind) as with experience. Second, he stresses repeatedly that the hypothesis of a causal connection between the material world and our experience regarding both sense perceptions and volition is not empirically verifiable, in light of the ruminations of Berkeley and Hume. They demonstrated conclusively that these causal connections are not really observable propter hoc, but only post hoc. Schrödinger (1964:94) concludes that
the first of these considerations makes the hypothesis of the material world metaphysical, because there is nothing observable that corresponds to it; the second makes it mystical because it requires the application of an empirically well-founded mutual relation between two objects (cause and effect) to pairs of objects of which only one (the sense-perception or volition) is ever really perceived or observed, while the other (the material cause or material achievement) is merely an imaginative construct.
Schrödinger states quite bluntly what other leading twentieth-century scientists have occasionally intimated: to embrace the notion of an existing material world, as the ultimate explanation, and even proof, of the fact that we discover in the final analysis that we empirically share the same world, is both mystical and metaphysical. Rather than societies as aggregates of solipsists or monads, if we now openly embrace Schrödinger’s “mystical-metaphysical” posture, we must admit that there is but one Monad. This ultimate Monad is at once many and one, discontinuous and continuous, depending on the vantage. Understandably, it can be said that certain representations of the Eastern tradition have produced the most radical of monisms and the most radical of pluralisms (Hartshorne 1970:177). According to Hindu thought, all things are, apart from their multifaceted manifestation as the Maya, simply one; at the same time, Buddhist thought stipulates that the very unity or identity of something through time is illusory, for it is but a multiplicity of momentary states (events) or ephemeral flashes, pulsations, of reality. Schrödinger highlights the Monadic aspect of Eastern philosophy, especially as presented in the ancient Upanishads. This is the ultimate doctrine of identity: as living organisms we belong together insofar as we are all aspects of one organism. The plurality of sensitive organisms is appearance, Maya.
Peirce’s rather vague and ambiguous acceptance yet denial of pluralism takes on a special form: he argues, as I have suggested and will now discuss at greater length, against the nominalist doctrine that only individuals are “real.” Peirce first criticizes nominalism insofar as it embodies the notion of natural law that places it in a dilemma. If, as the nominalist claims, “no law subsists other than an expression of actual facts, the future is entirely indeterminate and so is general to the highest degree” (CP: 1.422). Peirce implies that the nominalist conception of law as a formula derived from the experience of a number of events perceived and conceived as analogous demands that the future is indeterminate, and since to say indeterminacy is to say generality, the future must be general, but this is a sin against the cardinal principle of nominalism that the “real” is thoroughly individual.
Of course, the nominalist could reply that the future is indeed indeterminate but “unreal,” sheer nothingness, for it has not yet been actualized into particulars, so the nominalist’s principle that what is “real” consists of individuals has not been violated. Peirce, subverting this response, assumes laws are fictions in good nominalist thinking, and the future is “unreal” because it is indeterminate. In this case nothing could exist except a series of “instantaneous states.” And “if we are going to be so free in calling elements fictions an instant is the first thing to be called fictitious” (CP: 1.422). Such a “series of instantaneous states” also contradicts Peirce’s time as continuous, which can be so only if the future is “real,” and it can be “real” only insofar as there is “real” potentiality (Thirdness) in nature, which nominalism denies. For Peirce both past and future are “real,” as is law (CP:7.666f.), and the present is not an instant but an increment, “its earlier parts being somewhat of the nature of memory, a little vague, and its later parts somewhat of the nature of anticipation, a little generalized” (CP:7.653). Thus—and this is much in line with Whitehead—“the present is half past and half to come” (CP:6.126).
The oneness hypothesis recalls Borges’s (1962:217-34) celebrated essay “The New Refutation of Time.” Borges considers his “refutation” to be the ultimate consequence of the combined doctrines of Berkeley and Hume. In a nutshell, Berkeley, Borges notes, denies the existence of an external reality independent of our perception of it, while he retains the notion of a perceiving subject. Hume discounts the existence of a perceiving subject; the subject is merely a bundle of sensations. That is to say, we cannot speak of the form and color of the moon; they are the moon. Neither can we speak of the mind’s perceptions; the mind is nothing more than a series of perceptions. When Berkeley and Hume are combined, both external reality and the subject disappear. Perception occurs solely in the present, and if there can be a single instant of repetition of two identical moments, then that will be evidence enough, Borges asserts, to deny time altogether. He then proceeds to give various examples of identical moments, observing that time is thus a mere figment. And he concludes with the remark that denials of temporal succession or of the individual self are “apparent desperations and secret consolations.”
What is most frightful, however, is not that which is “unreal,” Parmenidean, the “block,” the abolition of time. Rather, for the sentient being the thought that the train of events is “irreversible and iron-clad” strikes the most disconcerting fear in the most stalwart of thinkers. But alas, there is no alternative, for Borges (1962:234) suggests at the close of his essay: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges” (recall note 5 of chapter 4).
The idea inherent in both Borges and Schrödinger is that there is a timeless, self-contained, and recursive but constantly fluctuating One. Yet for each individual, indeed, for the collection of individual conscious egos as a whole, temporality exists, hence the dynamo of history is real after all. Time, perhaps unfortunately, is real, yet time and space and all things are continuous with the whole, the One.
This problem of invariance versus transience, and timelessness versus temporality, introduces us to Peirce’s second criticism of nominalism. He argues that nominalists have no use for Aristotle’s doctrine of future contingency, yet it is logically implied by their concept of general, determinate, and invariant law. For example, a stone released from a height either will fall or it will not fall, but it is not necessary that either will occur if, as nominalism has it, the law of gravity is merely the mental product of inductive grasps of analogous falling stone events. If the law is merely in the mind, a formula with no necessary prototype in nature, then it is a fiction. As such it nonetheless has the power to predict future events, which for Peirce is absurd if the future is in no fashion “real.”
Peirce prefers to ground scientific concepts in a realist’s notion of law (CP:7.686-87). But this does not imply that laws are invariant, for no law can be final for the finite mind. The mind’s laws must always be subject to alteration, and thus they become more in tune with the universe, with universal law, which is itself also evolving as the mind’s capacity to comprehend it evolves. In this manner, Peirce denies that the “real” is absolutely independent of mind, and vice versa, for the simple reason that the “real” is the object of the final interpretant, of the final opinion of the community. Hence any given “reality” we can know is “semiotically real” and transient only, and it is relative to the mind, since there is “no thing which is in itself in the sense of not being relative to the mind, though things which are relative to the mind doubtless are, apart from that relation” (CP:5.3II). From this perspective, any speculation on invariant “real” law would appear fruitless, for there can be no invariant “real” law for the human semiotic animal. His/her “semiotic reality” is the product of an ongoing interactive give-and-take between the mind and the “real.”
The antinominalism of Peirce’s philosophy aside, his argument against “rugged individualism” (i.e., nominalism flying out of control, so to speak) is a reaction against that particular American attitude that was on the rise during the latter part of the nineteenth century. During the Lowell Lecture XI of 1866, expatiating on his notorious analogy between a “man” and a “word,” Peirce argued that every person is conscious of his own interpretant, of himself as interpretant, his other—this of course is not immediate but mediate consciousness. Moreover, he is conscious of his interpretant in another mind, since minds merge into one another; he feels at home in it, feels himself in some degree there—which is strikingly reminiscent of Schrödinger’s blatant “mystical” and “metaphysical” view. Peirce continues:
When I, that is my thoughts, enter into another man, I do not necessarily carry my whole self; but what I do carry is the seed of the part that I do not carry—and if I carry the seed of my whole essence, then of my whole self actual and potential, I may write upon paper and thus impress a part of my being there; that part of my being may involve only what I have in common with all men, and then I should have carried the soul of the race, but not my individual soul, into the word there written. Thus every man’s soul is a special determination of the generic soul of the family, the class, the nation, the race to which he belongs. Among the lower animals the generic soul is the greater part of their being—bees are more alike than men. (NE, 1:499)
Taking this concept to its limits, Peirce in 1898 propounded the doctrine of individuals as
mere cells of the social organism. Our deepest sentiment pronounces the verdict of our own insignificance. Psychological analysis shows that there is nothing which distinguishes my personal identity except my frailty and my limitations—or if you please, my blind will, which it is my highest endeavor to annihilate. (CP: 1.673)
Annihilation of this personal identity is “a generalized conception of duty which completes your personality by melting it into the neighboring parts of the universal cosmos” (CP: 1.673). This, Peirce readily admits, smacks of sentimentalism, but so be it. And though it is the supreme commandment of the “Buddhisto-christian religion,” we are told that no philosopher or logician should suffer any embarrassment upon evoking it, for in the final analysis, the ultimate goal should be
to generalize, to complete the whole system even until continuity results and the distinct individuals weld together. Thus it is, that while reasoning and the science of reasoning strenuously proclaim the subordination of reasoning to sentiment, the very supreme commandment of sentiment is that man should generalize, or what the logic of relatives shows to be the same thing, should become welded into the universal continuum, which is what true reasoning consists in. But this does not reinstate reasoning, for this generalization should come about, not merely in man’s cognitions, which are but the superficial film of his being, but objectively in the deepest emotional springs of his life. In fulfilling this command, man prepares himself for transmutation into a new form of life, the joyful Nirvana in which the discontinuities of his will shall have all but disappeared. (CP: 1.673)
Lest this proclamation fall on incredulous or indignant ears, recall Schrodinger’s remarks, coupled with Einstein’s humble testimony that “the most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. . . . The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest mainspring of scientific research” (in Barnett 1979:108). And Jeans (1943:204): “There is no longer a dualism of mind and matter, but of waves and particles; there seem to be the direct although almost unrecognizable descendants of the older mind and matter, the waves replacing mind and the particles matter.”
In the words of Maturana and Varela, the human semiotic animal has attained to the third-order stage of development, but this gives us no call to consider ourselves above and beyond that socially coupled system in which we are invariably submerged. For consciousness and mind “belong to the realm of social coupling. And as part of human social dynamics, mind and consciousness operate as selectors of the path which our ontologic structural drift follows” (Maturana and Varela 1987:234). Moreover, articulate animals that we are, we exist within the domains of discourse that we generate, they become part of our domain of existence, and we in turn become part of their domain of existence. Robinson Crusoe was well aware of this. He kept tabs on the days of the year and the seasons, read the Bible, dressed for dinner, and in general behaved as though he were in England. To the end he remained a part of his semiotic domain and it a part of him. Only thus could he conserve a modicum of self-identity vis-à-vis the myriad differences surrounding him.
When all is said and done, whether speaking of the Upanishads, Buddhist teachings, the Tao of Lao Tzu, the Judaeo-Christian world view, or a very important aspect of the “new physics,” a comparable conclusion inheres: individualism dissolves into the collection of the many, into the One. Consider, in this light, Martin Buber’s (1958) I-thou relationship. The I-thou as an asymmetrical, transitive, and irreversible relationship eliminates all semblance of an absolute subject, “I,” relating to an absolute object. The thou of the I-thou, according to my reading, is comparable to Peirce’s other and community Other, and the it of I-it is comparable to the Other to the exclusion of the community. In either case, as we are also told by Eastern sages, the dyads are intimately linked to compose one inseparable whole (Third)—much like Varela’s starred equations as elaborated in chapter 6. That is, they are complementary, wavelike and particlelike, mindlike and matterlike. Each member of the dyads, then, is relative rather than absolute, commensurate with Peirce’s logic of relatives to which he refers in the above citation. The question is: How does an individual consciousness come into existence in the first place if the dyads are indeed one rather then split? Sachs (1988:268), upon evoking Buber’s philosophy in his attempt to reconcile the rift between quantum theory and relativity, has this to say:
In the holistic interpretation, I appears in the sense of an approximation that an aspect of the whole, called “human consciousness,” is capable of establishing, making it appear that there are only two things—an “absolute subject,” I, and an absolute object, it. Still, this is an approximation that only gives the illusion of two, whereas I-thou is really one, a single entity. . . . [T]he I-it relation is not on the same ontological basis as I-thou; rather, the apparent objectivity of I-it refers to an idea of a component manifestation of the whole, the I, reached from “individual” reflection. It is only in the latter state of mind that I can have awareness of “other,” as is required to understand the world in terms of a scientific representation. Thus, it only seems to the “observer,” I, when in this state (of the whole), that it is in itself an absolute subject of the I-it relation—an “observer” of the absolute object, it.
Thus the two relations, I-thou and I-it (or self -other and self -Other), are complementary. When one is in charge, the other is subordinate, and vice versa.13 While I-thou is a subject1-subject2 or single objective relation (Peirce’s “interior” self-other or the self-community Other) and I-it a subject-object relation (Peirce’s self and “exterior” Other), they are nevertheless, according to Buber’s philosophy, on equivalent ontological footing. I take this to mean that commensurate with Peirce, there is no categorical distinction between mind and matter, “inside” and “outside.” I also construe Peirce’s notion that we first become aware of the self and its “interior” other with the shock of a surprise upon becoming aware that the “exterior” Other did not correspond to our expectations. And from that point onward the dialogic enterprise commences. In addition, Spencer-Brown’s remark that the universe, upon splitting itself into that which sees and that which is seen, becomes false to itself, accounts for the fact that there can be no more than an approximation toward an absolute subject and an absolute object. If the absolute object in question is deemed tantamount to the “real,” as I have used the term in this inquiry, then Peirce.’s asymptotic convergence theory applies. And if an approximation to the absolute subject, which is mere appearance rather than “reality,” is tantamount to the dialogic give-and-take between the self and its “interior” other, then Peirce fakes a pass and runs around the right end for yet another touchdown.
The only alternative to this complementarity-approximation model, it would seem, is the Eastern way according to which I-it is illusory (Maya) and all we can say about I-thou is that it is as it is: we are reduced to silence. It cannot be defined within the context of space, time, matter, or events. It is prior to all things and all languages. Sachs (1988:269) suggests that a metaphysical interpretation of Einstein’s relativity is close to the I-thou of the Eastern way, while the I-thou-it is comparable to the Bohr complementarity interpretation of quantum mechanics. The first system is holistic, continuous, nonlinear, nonlocal, and deterministic; the second is particulate, discontinuous, linear, local, and indeterminate. Realism rules the first; a positivist form of nominalism governs the second—though, as I have pointed out, they share the interconnected field concept. The first is mind-dependent and detached from any and all observers and relative frames of reference; the second is context-dependent and intimately linked to the observer.
Of course, as we have observed, this conflict has been with us for centuries in the guise of the “themata” of holism versus reductionism, or monism versus pluralism. Significantly enough, just as Sachs attempts to pull these antagonists of contemporary science together, so Peirce never ceased to mediate between the classical deterministic world view and the element of indeterminacy he conceived in the world.
VI. THE DEMON’S CRUCIBLE. Yet, the fact remains that, assuming the joint product (pace Wheeler) of all possible individuals, past, present, and future to come, were finally to reach fruition, chance (Firstness) would become necessity; all would be there, in the “block” for all time. There would be no I-thou-it. Semiosis would lose its very raison d’etre. With reason Schrödinger alludes to the inevitable and multifarious polychromatic antinomy flowering from this indecisive bud. Such fruition cannot come to pass, so in the final analysis, “why worry about it?”
I bring up the issue further to illustrate that Schrödinger’s enigmatic comments effectively create a pattern of Thirdness. The axis about which this pattern—or perhaps Mandala—revolves is generality (with its attendant concepts: continuity, abrogation of the excluded-middle principle, incompleteness). And it requires semiosis for its very existence. Indeed, the very concept of semiosis implies a community of knowers, a collection of individual minds, and their signs, all of which are nonlocalizable to the degree that, as Thirds, as interpretants, they spread and merge into one another. This spreading is not one-dimensional in the sense of a mathematical series; it is multidimensional, nonlinear, and asymmetrical. Rather than treelike, it is rhizomelike, or better, like grass. While trees, shrubs, and flowers stand out, grass does not. It grows between things and in the middle of things. Its growth is not linear but expansive. It knows no center, the center of its growth is everywhere: an interconnected web, a network. Yet this network is what ties things together (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Deleuze and Parnet 1987).
“Grass” as I use it here is no more than a metaphor, of course. But as metaphor it is the pattern that connects, to paraphrase Bateson (1972). What appears as things is in reality grass, interconnections. Hence to Schrödinger’s question, “Is my world the same as yours?” the answer is, “Yes,” for they both partake of the interconnected pattern, semiosis, Thirdness, generality. But it is also “No,” for there is separation in the sense of marks and cuts, and of a Maturana-Varela autonomy of autopoietic systems—generated from the domain of Firstness, vagueness. To the question, “Is there one world interjected into all minds?” the answer is affirmative: each individual is a general, though incomplete, micro-pattern of the total pattern; she is in this sense a self-contained, self-sufficient, recursive whole. But the answer is also negative, since each micro-pattern, unlike the whole, is capable of producing no more than an exceedingly dim and vague image, and it depends upon all other micro-patterns for its very existence. Thus it is possible to conceive of Schrödinger’s overlapping multiplicity to be like the signs of semiosis: a mergence of particulars in ever-increasing complexity toward generality, that continuous whole where there are no middles—they are filled with grass—and where nothing is excluded. But, given the asymptote, any given set of micro-patterns, no matter how over-populated, will inexorably remain incomplete, a schematization.
Visually we have something like figure 12. The relations inherent in I and II, as outlined by Whitehead (1978:294-97), are those of connection and inclusion. Regions A, B, C, D, E . . . n of I are mediately connected insofar as each of a given pair of regions (A, B) is connected by a third region (A ᑎ B). These connections are symmetrical and nontransitive. The oval, 1, of I, includes all regions (A, B, C, D, E . . . n). The relation between the included regions and this including region is asymmetrical and transitive. A, B, C, D, E, . . . n, as incompleteness, is destined perpetually to push toward 1, completeness. But it must necessarily remain incomplete, for there can be no all-encompassing framework, no view, sub specie aeternitatis, of the whole. Hence the ongoing and time-bound nature of semiosis. Moreover, I, qualified by generality, is schematic and incomplete in the sense of Rescher and Brandom (1979), as described in chapter 3, while II, qualified by vagueness, is inconsistent: it entails a superposition of disparate, and even partly to wholly incompatible, regions. That is, from within II, given the immanent perspective of any and all finite sign users, ABCDE . . . n, like A, B, C, D, E . . . n, cannot be grasped in toto.
FIGURE 12
Interestingly enough, while Schrödinger in part bases his assumption of the Oneness of everything on the work of his contemporary, biologist Charles Sherrington, physicist Henry Margenau (1987) extrapolates from Schrödinger’s meditations and relates them to the Minkowski “block” with its space-time manifold. His so doing implies a further degree of unity, that of the many in one and of space integrated with time. In other words, Margenau attempts precisely to account for the holistic perspective in question. He proposes a triad of approaches in his own effort to resolve Schrödinger’s arithmetical paradox. The first involves a Minkowski “world-line.” A given entity must move in three-dimensional space. But with the addition of time, a fourth coordinate enters the picture as if there were four dimensions of space, thus completing the familiar Einsteinian manifold which is hyperbolic, not Euclidean. The history of the entire universe, according to the “block” rendition of Einstein’s theory, is the composite of an enormously large sum of “world-lines” into what Margenau calls a “world formula.”
Supposing an ideal and impossible Laplacean superobserver to somehow be aware of all these “world-lines” in simultaneity, he/she would be in possession of the complete “world formula.” Margenau goes so far as to posit the existence of a Grand Designer, a clockmaker—God?—who created the universe and keeps tabs on its course, which for him/her implies that there are no happenings, no “world-lines,” or collection of “world-lines,” that are in principle unknowable. Margenau further proposes that this is ample justification for his introducing a “Universal Mind, a mind that knows, and is perhaps a personal manifestation of, the World Formula. The common term for it is God, and we should not hesitate to use it, except for this consideration” (Margenau 1987:119).14
The second approach stipulates that human understanding entails a goal (the “world formula”) which can, much in the Peircean sense, be approximated asymptotically—and which coincides with hyperbolic Minkowski space-time. And the third approach, which is most straightforward, simply postulates that all happenings are ruled by purpose, which presupposes a “Universal Mind” or cosmic consciousness capable of traveling back and forth in time at will. In other words, we are capable only of seeing the universe as one point at a time in the manifold, as if from the slit in the boxcar of a moving train, while the Universal Mind sees everything all at once (Margenau 1987:120).
Margenau’s approach is the inverse of that of Comfort (1984). The latter makes a Herculean effort to come to grips with the perception and conceptual faculties of the equivalent of the Universal Mind, a demon he jocularly dubs “Gezumpstein.” Margenau, in contrast, reveals our limitations vis-à-vis this Great Mind. Specifically, these limitations are, Margenau posits, (1) individual isolation, (2) temporal restrictions—Borges’s dilemma, and (3) probabilistic knowledge. Limitation (1), corresponding to Firstness, iconicity, stems from our existence as Maturana-Varelan largely autonomous, autopoietic entities. Although we are in essence one, in order that cognition be made possible at all, the universe must split itself up so as to see itself. The arithmetical paradox thus appears inevitable. Limitation (2), tantamount to Secondness, linearity, in-dexicality, involves our limited view of the world through a time-slit. Unlike the Universal Mind or Comfort’s Gezumpstein, we are limited to a linear one-thing-at-a-time movie, which gives us the illusion of a jolly good show such that we generally remain blissfully ignorant of our helpless state.
And limitation (3), which evokes thermodynamics as well as Peirce, Prigogine, and quantum theory, limits our knowledge to particular mediated state functions (Thirdness, symbolicity, what would be), while the World Formula at any given point in time spells out the probability distribution (superposition) of all possible happenings in simultaneity. This latter condition is somewhat akin to the Everett-Wheeler many-worlds interpretation of the cosmic superposition constantly bifurcating into myriad universes, comparable to Borges’s (1962:19-29) labyrinthine infinite book in his “Garden of Forking Paths” in which all possible events actually occur.15
Margenau (1987:123) concludes with a personal note, suggesting that his theory opens the door to a comprehension of “some parapsychological effects that have attained a sufficient degree of scientific credibility to make them interesting and challenging.” In this he goes much further than does Comfort, and he would certainly incur the wrath of Wheeler, who has no patience with parapsychic research. Nonetheless, his general view, disregarding its ties to contemporary physics, is mirrored in Eastern thought and much Western mysticism.
Schrödinger, in contrast, appears at least prima facie to remain closer to Wheeler’s current stance. Evoking Sherrington’s studies, he observes that his interpretation of the arithmetical paradox is “one world crystallizing out of many minds,” while Sherrington’s is “one mind, based ostensibly on the many cell-lives or, in another way, on the manifold of sub-brains [the two cerebral hemispheres] each of which seems to have such a dignity proper to itself that we feel impelled to associate a sub-mind with it” (Schrödinger 1967:145). Mind, Schrödinger concludes on a note reminiscent of Peirce, is always now. Much like a micro-model of Margenau’s Universal Mind, there is no before or after for mind, only expectations and memories. To combine Margenau and Schrödinger, it might be said that, regarding the Universal Mind, it has always been, while the human mind is a recent product. And the world the human mind contemplates and studies is also of relatively recent origin.
For example, an archeologist reconstructing a long-bygone city is interested in human life in the past. In contrast, the astrophysicist attempts to go back further, to the very beginning. “But,” Schrödinger (1967:146) asks,
a world existing for millions of years without any mind being aware of it, contemplating it, is it anything at all? Has it existed? For do not let us forget: To say . . . that the becoming of the world is reflected in a conscious mind is but a cliché, a phrase, a metaphor that has become familiar to us. The world is given but once. Nothing is reflected. The original and the mirror-image are identical. The world extended in space and time is but our representation (Vorstellung). Experience does not give us the slightest clue of its being anything besides that—as Berkeley was well aware.
That this universe eventually produced brains with which to look at itself is Schrödinger’s own equivalent of Dunne’s (1934) painter painting himself within the landscape painting himself within . . ., of Matte Blanco’s (1975) consciousness of infinite sets, of Spencer-Brown’s universe as a giant self-contained set of onion rings, of the infinite regress interpretation of Schrödinger’s own cat, and finally, of Peirce’s infinite regress of signs (and by extension, consciousness, mind, self). In each case the individual mind that has produced an image of the whole is but an insignificant accessory that could as well have been absent without detracting from the total effect. The mind has not succeeded in elaborating on an outlook of the whole without retiring itself to the periphery, thus producing a world picture which has no place for it, like Wittgenstein’s eye which sees its world from a circumference point but cannot see itself seeing its world. The paradox continues to elude us and at the same time remain enticing.
Indeed, Peirce’s “Cosmos ≈ Sign ≈ Mind” is at once subtler and knottier than initially meets the eye. Signs, in terms of their categories, present themselves in a disorderly confusion. Mind partly untangles them upon collaborating with them, freeing them of their fusion and confusion in experience. In this fashion mind separates signs from their possibility to their this-ness to their meaning as conditionality for future sign instantiations, but at the same time mind is immanent, within the field of signs. The universe itself is held by Peirce to be mind in the process of development, and it is a sign, the Cosmic Poem, an Argument—a sign of itself. The categories as such are more adequately defined as modes of becoming than modes of being; they are themselves in perpetual transition, from one to three, and back again; they also engage in the same self-referential, self-reflexive act as mind, the field of signs, and the universe itself. What is, the appearance of (explicated) things, provides the comforting illusion of a stable thing-ness of the world. But that would be the easy interpretation of the story. The deeper (implicate) substratum eludes and intrigues as well as it poses an ominous threat to that coveted security of appearances. Jeans makes the distinction thus:
When we view ourselves in space and time our consciousnesses are obviously the separate individuals of a particle-picture, but when we pass beyond space and time, they may perhaps form ingredients of a single continuous stream of life. As it is with light and electricity, so it may be with life; the phenomena may be individuals carrying on separate existence in space and time, while in the deeper reality beyond space and time we may all be members of one body. (In Commins and Linscott 1947:393)
Schrödinger (1964:21) considered this “one body” to be essentially “unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. . . . Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole” It is perhaps not mere coincidence that a number of contemporary physicists, as well as mystics the world over for centuries, have referred to “reality” as mind, consciousness, the One. This, to repeat, does not imply “subjective” but “objective idealism.” The world “out there” is not merely illusory and the world “in here” the “real” world. Both, as “actually real” and “semiotically real,” remarkably closely fit Peirce’s scheme of things. And both, from a certain vantage, indeed a totalizing vantage eternally inaccessible to finite and fallible beings, are in their own way illusory: there is, from this view, but One Reality.16
Yet, from the complementary view, what there apparently is presupposes some more primitive orb, to which I now turn.
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