Peirce and Einstein

[wood jim]

Albert Einstein said,     

I believe that the first step in the setting of a 
"'real external world" is the
    formation of the concept of bodily objects and of
bodily objects of various
    kinds.  Out of the multitude of our SENCE
EXPERIENCE we take, mentally and
    arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring
complexes of SENSE IMPRESSION (partly
    in conjunction with sense impressions which are
interpreted as signs for sense
    experiences of others), and we attribute to them a
meaning, the meaning of the
    bodily object.  Considered logically this concept
is not identical with the totality of SENSE
IMPRESSIONS referred to; but it is an ARBITRARY
CREATION OF THE HUMAN  (or animal)
MIND.  On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning
and its justification
    exclusively to the totality of the sense
impressions which we associate with it.
    Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that
suits him best a simplified
    and intelligible picture of the world; he then
tries to some extent to substitute
    this cosmos of HIS for the world of EXPERIENCE,
and thus to overcome it. 
    This is what the painter, the poet, the
speculative philosopher, and the natural
    scientists do, each in his own fashion.  Each
makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of
his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace
and security which he can not find in the
    narrow labyrinth of PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. 

Oedipa goes to Mexico City. She looks at the Varo
painting. She is overwhelmed by the cosmos and its
construction. 

Einstein again, 

"The individual feels the nothingness of human desires
and aims and sublimity and marvelous order which
reveal themselves both in nature and in the wold of
thought. She looks upon individual existence as a sort
of prison and wants to experience the universe as a
single significant whole." 

It is tempting to develop this further, to consider
what appears to be the Pythagorean language of
Einstein, the existential prison, the women in the
tower weaving the world, Oedipa's malignant and
anonymous magical force. The women, the humans in
Varo's paintings, seem to be automata, but they are
not. In Varo there is magic and there is cosmic spirit
not unlike Einstein's. 

What has this to do with Peirce? 

"God doesn't throw dice" (or something like that). 

		--Albert Einstein

















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