at least tangentially P-related. C. S. Peirce infulence on TRP?

[Mark Kohut]

W. James, of co-consciousness [as in atD] origination, wrestled with the problem of freedom ---our 'free will' vs. determinism (if ALL states of the universe were known--as the Western God is purported to have known them always---then how can we act freely?..He convinced himself, it seems, that to believe in 'free will' was an unpredetermined act of freedom.....and so were other some other acts...
   
  C.S. Pierce anticipated, philosophically, quantum physics by arguing that some 'chance' had to be a basic quality in the universe or entropy would have suffocated it, so to speak, forever ago. [I am extending and paraphrasing an argument that I think is correct]
  (Pierce, by the way, did believe in God conceived differently than most theologians and philosophers.)
   
  --------from wikipedia
  Peirce asserted the reality of (1) chance (his tychist view), (2) mechanical necessity (anancist view), and (3) that which he called the law of love (agapist view). They embody his categories Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, respectively. He held that fortuitous variation (which he also called "sporting"), mechanical necessity, and creative love are the three modes of evolution (modes called "tychasm", "anancasm", and "agapasm"[46]) of the universe and its parts. His found his conception of agapasm embodied in Lamarckian evolution; the overall idea in any case is that of evolution tending toward an end or goal, and it could also be the evolution of a mind or a society; it is the kind of evolution which manifests workings of mind in some general sense. 

Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
      Mark Kohut suggests:
  > ' chaos' as chance, in the largest senses, in AtD? 
  > yashmeeen: a sort of "chaotic" movement of character, an open-ended character  
  >  not a character-armored one.....a personality of hope, in your connections....? 
   
  Close enough. As I've said before, the poster child in science for Mean Old Stone-Cold Determinism has long been Laplace's speculation c. 1800 that if we knew the mass and position and velocity of every particle in the universe, we could use mathematical physics to run the movie forward or backwards at will; that data would specify the whole history of the universe. (Cf. the parallel Mean Old Stone-Cold Predestination of Calvin, with God knowing who would be elect, who preterite, from the moment of creation.) 
   
  The Laplace version captured the confidence -- abundantly justified confidence -- of more than a century of really amazing success in the Newtonian enterprise. And ever since, the romantics (small and large R) have been taking that tossed-off, "in principle" statement as The Way All Scientists Think All the Time, Because They Have No Poetry in Their Souls or Appreciation of Human Freedom. (In fact, I've never met such a scientist; I suspect they're as rare as true hardcore, consistent Calvinists.)
   
  Hence all the woo that has accreted around quantum theory, which seemed to be a crack in determinism... and hence the buzz in the last few decades around "chaos." 
   
  Forget the old, formless, no-rules-at-all meaning of "chaos." Forget "chance" or "randomess" as sloppy kinda-synonyms. To a scientist today, "chaos" characterizes a system that *does* obey deterministic rules -- which can be mathematically very simple, no more than the basic algebra and calculus 101 Newton used -- but in which those rules generate very different outcomes from two or more very similar starting points. And "very similar" can be arbitrarily close -- giving rise to the "butterfly effect" meme: a hurricane could form or not form today depending on a flap or not-flap weeks ago and thousands of miles away, In non-chaotic systems, tiny variations like that are quickly smeared out and lost in averages. In chaotic systems, their consequences keep growing. 
   
  Which plays hell with prediction, a touchstone ever since Newton's pal Halley said "that comet in the astronomical records should be back in NN years" and was right. Because in some chaotic systems of great interest, such as weather, you'll *never* have initial data precise and fine-grained enough to capture every flap or no-flap. (Any more than there was ever any real possibility of satisfying Laplace's prerequisite.)
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
        


       
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