What condition is your condition in'?

[Glenn Scheper]

I will be re-reading this lecture many times, but some
salient points may be reported, ripped out of context.
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/cyber/espout.html

        ---

Frequecy of "condition" in the Pierce lecture and links
reveals a philosophical heritage in GR's "conditioning".
I thought to catalog these occurences, save many light
uses not freighted for inferences, but became exhausted.
(I might still.)

        ---

Schiller is an interesting source on freedom/alterity:

 The theme of [Schiller's] "Letters"
 is the resolution of the struggle between Nature and Reason,
 manifested in man as a completed being
 through which beauty and goodness become incarnate.

 philosophic insight--the polarity of sensuality and reason,
 as essential components of struggle between particularity
 and transcendence in human experience
 [...individual & social]

        ---

"lovers who have lost their separate identity" !

 Peirce next asks:
 'What is the regulation that makes language express meaning?'
 The answer is: a capacity or element of a langauge that is
 unaffected by the meaning the language is formalizing.
 Perfect regulation -- 'normality' Peirce calls it --
 is the regularity of a meaningless language,
 if we may conceive of such an absurdity.
 It is the limit of the most abstract system of relations,
 comprising a formal system, that itself is meaningless,
 or incapable of conveying meaning.

 It would be a language without grammatical forms, Peirce says.
 Or lovers who have lost their separate identity and become one.

cf. GR:

 And there've been the moments,
 more of them lately too times when face-to-face
 there has been no way to tell which of them is which.

 Both at the same time feeling the same eerie confusion ...

 something like looking in a mirror by surprise but...

 more than that, the feeling of actually being joined ...

 when after who knows?

 two minutes, a week?

 they realize, separate again, what's been going on,
 that Roger and Jessica were merged into a joint creature
 unaware of itself....

        ---

Also I see a strong teleological causation viewpoint which
could inform the possibility of foreknowledge, as is in GR.

 Locke and Hume relied upon common sense and narrow-minded
 empiricism and failed to think or theorize historically,
 while the Germans, and particularly Hegel, viewed history
 as a process unfolding according to rational and moral rules
 and the "universal law' that no tendency has been implanted
 in any created thing, but sooner or later shall receive its
 accomplishment ....
 Accordingly,
 the philosophical idea of the history of the world will be
 that it is to exhibit the gradual unfolding of all the
 faculties of man's intellectual and moral being ....
 coming forward first singly, and then conjointly;...
 In a word,
 the purpose and end of the history of the world is to
 realize the idea of humanity.

far later

 Peirce conceived creation as a systematic unfolding
 of abstractions combining to produce forms of fact
 combining to produce manifestations combining to produce a
 heavenly world.
...
 But it is a big leap to teleological causation for the
 post-Cartesian mind.
...
 Scotus's answer is that generality is a product of the
 immutable mind of God,
 and that it is particularized in order for lesser minds to
 use it as stepping stones toward communion with God.
 Thus, all knowledge pursuits are really moral and ultimately
 theological pursuits.

And!

 Fate then is that necessity by which a certain result will
 surely be brought to pass according to the natural course
 of events however we may vary the particular circumstances
 which precede the event.
 ...
 It is therefore an essential property of an idea that it
 should address itself to the mind at another time.
 ...
 So Peirce believed that although forces may dissipate on
 local levels, chance is in the long run concentrative.
 ...
 if there are signs, then the universe is teleological.
 ...
 [A]n interpretation has as its very essence something
 teleological.

'Final'ly,

 Thomas'
 analysis of signification in terms of final causation,
 an obligatory treatment for any Medieval philosopher:
 The active mode of signifying,
 since it may be a property of the significative expression,
 is materially existent within the significative expression
 even as it is empirically valable;
 moreover,
 it is materially existent in the property of the thing even
 as some effect is materially existent in the original and
 abstract cause which effects it in the first place;
 and it is materially existent in the intellect even as an
 effect is materially existent in the most immediate cause
 that effects it;
 and it is materially existent in the construction,
 even as a cause capable of being effective is materially
 existent in its own particular effect.

 One way to look at what is said here is that it describes a
 kind of 'backward causation',
 the influence of the future on the past through a latency
 of a future condition in the past.

 Peirce called it a being in futuro or a form of real
 generality.
 The effect is "materially existent"
 in the "original and abstract cause."
 The cause is 'original and abstract'
 prior to producing its effect.
 Once the effect is caused the cause is changed by the
 actualization of the effect;
 it is the effect that makes the cause an actual cause,
 realizing its potency.

Wow!

 At the end of the "Four Incapacities"
 essay Peirce reveals his radical view of man's glassy
 essence,
 that we exist within a stream of thought-signs and not that
 signs exist within us,
 that "men and words reciprocally educate each other."
 Of course,
 not the same men.
 We come into the world of existing signs,
 and if we invent signs we may do so only to serve signs we
 have not invented.
 Peirce rejects the common-sense view that signs are created
 and exist exclusively within individual minds and that if
 all human life were extinguished so would all semiosis.
 Instead,
 he has described an atmosphere or environment of semiosis
 that has its own weather patterns.
 Signs appear to fly at us;
 they force a focus on what is unfolding and incomplete
 through an energy coming from outside the individual mind.
 The active individual mind resists and reinterprets;
 but it cannot create a world of its own.
 The flow of energy is from the future to the past;
 future signs are the condition for existence of present
 signs:
 ...
 So thought is what it is,
 only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which it
 is in its value as thought identical with it,
 though more developed.
 In this way,
 the existence of thought now,
 depends on what it is to be hereafter;
 so that it has only a potential existence,
 dependent on the future thought of the community.

More,

 Now this movement of attention from a bare subject to its
 content has the character of fate,
 Peirce noted,
 calling this view a "strange and paradoxical" one.
 Mental action was "an extraordinary exception to the
 ordinary laws of mechanics."
 Peirce described how the effect of an idea was "part of
 the idea which produces it.
 In other words,
 it is really a reproduction of a part of that idea"
 so that effects are contained within causes when it comes
 to the production of ideas.

QM b4 QM:

 A would not affect B and would not be affected in the first
 place unless B is affected and affects A, as in (3).
 This illustrates the 'backward causation' of mutual affection.

 Here (7) indicates that if A is affected by B it will be
 affected by its own affect upon B.
 Thus B creates in A an affect and a condition whereby A is
 placed in a state 'indicating' or 'representing'
 the affect it has on itself as a result of the affect it
 had on B.

 So biconditionality and self-reflection are at the heart of
 mutual affection.

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.