Any trouble that may come my way
_
A precautionary tale… to yet be played out.
…or maybe never.
Removed
Removed for reasons that the crossing of boundaries can occur, instentaniously but impossible to prove, as the hypothesis fails (of time travel) when lreduced to a total inclusiveness into boundaries that need to cross boundaries that requires to prove such crossings as actual movement.
Since ta hypothetical begs that very question, the idea of time travel becomes contingent on such equilavalances, as crossing boundaries involves conventionally use of speech, whereas such crossings need not involve tha analogy that a movement ( through time is involved.
So I withdraw the hypothetical for the possibility of time-travel.
If you’re skeptical I can prove it .
As there are two images firmed between two people, of considering what they can mean, where the value of the meanings are dependent on mutual interpretation of mutual understanding, the way how relationships develop , in a parallel way, the more meaningful does the mutual agreement becomes, and less a matter of how they are compared to by their singular image( first impressions lasting). Those impressions never really detach from the over all singular re-flecked feeling of the other, and the singular person always tries to originate the impression of the other, and only with the passage of an imaginary time, dies original impressions fade.
The idea of an imminent hypothesis based on feeling or empathy of the other person counters a negative mutual crosse-impression , which may or may not result in a convergence into an understood and mutually agreed ‘silent agreement’ of a singularity forming out of both persons.
The thing that leads to this view is that there really is only an imminence, and transcendence is always caused by the transcendetial being only as a foreward pushed idea, that is retrospectally understood, in a ‘backward re-search into the idea, through a seyuentially effort to re-attach the forgotten parts that have been faded from memory.
It is precautionary prior to crossing the border, that does not allow a crossing through other than a trans-e dental, crossing literally from the brain to the mind. The mind’s immediate realization of time is always imminent and timeless, but in order to convey this sense, a transcendental ‘movement’ has to reason the need to ‘look back’ sequentially, and literally break apart time, into the parts of which they were organized.
The This may or may not happen, you’ right, depending on ia conscious ‘realization’ or a look back deconstruction of the elements they were made up out of.
Drugs? Some Mariana, last nigh, that’s all, and trying to unscramble the not so preposterous searc into time travel, and why and how it has been taken up as a real possibility, especially with the coming race between what’s seen as the human mind and it’s simulated ‘articuffially ‘created’ component. pierce is one who tries to configure God within thes Epoché Philosophy Monthly
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Issue #19 January 2019
The Continuity of Being: C.S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Synechism
by Brian Kemple
Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis — Sonata of the Sea. Finale (1908) [section]
“Nor must any synechist say, “I am altogether myself, and not at all you.” If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of wickedness. In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity.”
— C.S. Peirce, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” (1893)
The unbearable presence of discontinuity
Humankind cannot bear very much discontinuity. This is not an a priori postulate, but an observationally-derived truth, and one which a study in attitudes towards so-called postmodern art will confirm, a form of art which is deliberately discontinuous. Presented with a fragmentary visage or a lack of musical harmony or with any prolonged experience of aesthetic rupture, we seek out meanings — whether by invention, authorial biography, social context, etc. — which may serve as a common foundation in which the disparate presented minima may be unified, or, at least, cobbled into a coherent object-narrative.
If the meaning found in one experience does not fit that found in another, we struggle to maintain our personal coherence to the degree that those experiences have importance and inversely to their evident disparity. When we cannot resolve the objects of our experience into a unified narrative, the result is any number of psychological disturbances: perhaps as mild as a momentary outburst of anger, of disgust; or as severe as a spiraling mania or a schizophrenic break. It is not an unreasonable conjecture that the seeming proliferation of mental ailments in the contemporary West is neither the result of capitalist pharmacological greed nor improvement in diagnostic abilities, but a creeping encroachment of unresolved cultural (and therefore psychological) fragmentation. The superficial bandage holding together the pieces of the shattered Western psyche has been the promise of illusory-realization — the belief that we can live out all our fantasies, no matter how incoherent it all seems — a bandage which has only obscured the subcutaneous hemorrhage.
But what if this fragmentation is not — despite the still-echoing voices of Eliot, Heidegger, Ellul, Tolkien, Postman, and many others whom we ought to heed — the exclusive provenance of modern industrial and now digital technology (which latter, if anything, is tearing off the bandage of illusion), but more deeply rooted in the theoretical underpinnings of modern philosophy?
Modernity’s presumed chasm
While questions of the mind’s relation to the world, and vice versa, are at least as old as Plato, there occurs a radical break with René Descartes in how those questions are pursued. Most medieval and ancient philosophers had taken it for granted that the mind truly knows the world (or at least substances in the world) — questioning how they are known, and not if — where Descartes presumes instead that the mind knows its own ideas, and only through their mediation does it, can it, have a grasp on what exists independently of the one cognizing. This presumption becomes the founding belief of all modern philosophy, not only as a chronological era but as an intellectual epoch. For centuries, it was thought we could not know how the world outside the mind is known, let alone what is known, unless we could first answer whether and how such a knowledge was possible; how it is that we could transcend the divide from the mental existence of an idea to some existence of the extramental correlate. This cart-before-the-horse approach rests upon the belief that our intellectual lives begin “inside” the mind, and only later do we transcend to the world outside. Even the empiricists of modern philosophy held that while the external world may generate the ideas, the ideas themselves are the direct and immediate objects of knowledge — retaining, therefore, the presupposed chasm between the mind and the world and prolonging the question as to how we know extramental reality as true.
This presupposed chasm between the mind and the world further diverges: if not into explicit dualism, then either into a materialist reductionism or an idealist reductionism (which ends as a de facto implicit dualism anyway); to a denial of either any reality insensate or of the accessible intelligibility of anything not intellectually-conceptualizable. Its inheritors are not only Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, but Churchland, Dennett, and Harris. On either side of this divide we find, typically, culture and nature, subject and object, philosophy and science, opinion and truth.
This is not to say modernity has not attempted to bridge the chasm — indeed, modern philosophy, from Descartes up through contemporary analytic philosophers, has made little else its goal — but only that it has started from an impossible presupposition. Any dualist stance–the philosophy that performs all its analyses with an axe, leaving unrelated chunks of being (Peirce 1893: “Immortality in the Light of Synechism”, in The Essential Peirce, vol.2, p.2)–begins with incommensurability of its dual parts as the basic premise. If mind and body, or thought and thing, are cut of entirely different substance with no common third to unite them, transcending from the mind to the world is an impossibility.
A question of metaphysics
It was just this default position leading inevitably towards fragmentation that Charles Sanders Peirce sought to overcome. Though he produced no magnum opus — indeed, never completing any of the many books he intended to author — Peirce sought his whole life to produce an architectonic view of human knowledge which corralled not only the insights of philosophy but also those of science; a comprehensive theory of thought which united empirical investigation with speculative inquiry.
Best known as the American father of semiotics (in distinction from the semiological school of thought founded by Ferdinand de Saussure and promulgated in the work of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, et al.), Peirce is also recognized as a seminal figure in pragmatism, being credited with the name and the general gist of the movement — though Peirce would deliberately distance himself from those more famously associated, Dewey and James, and rename his own theory “pragmaticism”, a name so ugly no one would hijack it into a nominalist track, he thought. But less recognized is that both Peirce’s semiotic thinking and his pragmaticism depend intrinsically upon his metaphysics: the first metaphysics which can truly be called “postmodern”, in the sense of no longer following the modern presumption that what we know directly are our own ideas.
A biography in sketch
Peirce’s life, as artfully depicted in Joseph Brent’s biography, fits the profile of tortured genius more than most. Born the son of a Harvard professor of mathematics, he was precocious, brilliant, unsure of himself, erratic, temperamental, by turns abstemious and lascivious. He suffered all his life from the pains of trigeminal neuralgia — which he treated by various chemical concoctions, including morphine and cocaine — and likely had bipolar disorder. He was, moreover, convinced that his left-handedness was a physiological deformity that rendered him at odds with the rest of society, and would experience agonizing paralytic spells to which no diagnosis fit. He believed in God seemingly more from philosophical conviction, and perhaps mystical (or drug-induced) experience, than from any religious habit or practice.
At the age of 74, he died in abject poverty — despite the repute of his father and the renown in which he was held by established thinkers, such as William James and Josiah Royce — having never held a permanent academic position. When the young Johns Hopkins University, influenced by the machinations of Simon Newcomb, wanted to diplomatically remove Charles from a lecturer position, they cited budgetary cutbacks, laid off all contingent faculty — and then re-hired everyone but Peirce. Much of his income was through loans and gifts of family and friends, as well as irregular payments for various odd bits of writing. He was a victim of not only himself, but the malice of others, who saw to it that his moral profligacy impeded the success of his career. But for a handful of faithful adherents, his immense but disorganized body of work would likely have been buried forever in the archives of Harvard, if not incinerated.
Though versed in Hume, Kant, and Hegel, the deepest currents in Peirce’s thought flowed from Aristotle and Scholasticism. Though he references them rarely, one finds traces of Johannes Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and the lesser-known Modist, Thomas of Erfurt (whose most important work, Tractatus de modis significandi sive Grammatica speculativa, was mistaken to be Scotus’ until 1922) throughout Peirce’s oeuvre.
Where his personal life was marred by interruptions — mania and depression, pain and addiction, rejection and isolation — his thought was marked by continuity. Not to say that Peirce never changed his mind or even that he was steadfast and consistent in his writings; but what more than anything else what he sought was the coherence of thought. Such a search for coherence stems, I believe, primarily from the Scholastic background, from immersion in the thought of men who saw the universe as an essentially continuous and essentially intelligible whole. But, although he well-understood the importance of knowing the history of philosophy, Peirce was far from repeating the theories of ages past. He was a truly original thinker, who saw in the thought of his forebears truths that they themselves had not recognized, truths which allowed him to bring new and unique insights into the world.
Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis — Sparks II (1906)
Three Universes of Experience
Much like Aristotle and Kant before him, the singularity of Peirce’s thought germinates in a system of categories. Whereas Aristotle’s categories were, arguably, ontological predicates designating distinct ways things can be, and Kant’s categories were, inarguably, psychological predicates signifying ways things may be understood, Peirce’s categories fall into neither category. Indeed, they capture neither what belongs to things nor what belongs to the mind, but the essential structure of the universe as a whole, both as it exists dependently-upon and independently-of any cognitive activity. This essentially suprasubjective nature of the categories might be missed insofar as they are termed categories or “universes” of experience, which to our ears sounds a subjective designation. But what Peirce shows through these categories is that every experience is construed by openness to relations, such that not only can the subjectivity of species-specifically human experiences be “transcended”, those experiences cannot not be open to the world outside the subject.
Over the decades from 1867 — when he first authored “On a New List of Categories” — until his death in 1914, Peirce mused over, refined, revised, and altered his terminology for the categories; for the most part, however, he simply named them Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. These categories, Peirce says, are derived as the irreducible, ineradicable elements of what he called the “phaneron”: that is, of an experience, hence the three categories occasionally being called “universes of experience” (e.g., cf. 1908: “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”). Because this is not experience, however, understood as what happens subjectively in the individual, but as essentially suprasubjective — the universes are each by themselves innately related to one another and always situate the human individual in particular as already self-transcendent — Peirce is thus starting not from a presupposition of divided subject and object, but the inverse. This can only be made clear, however, by examining the three categories themselves.
The Category of Firstness
Characterized by an absolute simplicity — admitting no parts — Firstness defies easy exposition. Perhaps the easiest explanation of it which may be given is this: strip back an experience you have to its most basic constituent, and what is left? A “quality of feeling” (cf. Peirce 1903: “The Categories Defended”), such that it is what it is regardless of anything else. In other words, Firstness is the feeling we have that a thing is what it is, making no judgment upon it. Before we judge that red is a color, we experience red; before we judge that color generically is the refraction of light, we experience generic color.
This experience, notably, is neither something belonging to the subject — the self — nor to the object, the thing experienced. It does not discriminate between the two. It is a singular undifferentiated vagueness — an indeterminacy which admits of infinite possibility for discrimination, but which contains none in actuality, not even between who is feeling and what is being felt.
For this reason, Peirce also calls Firstness the conception of the present, in general; or, even more simply, IT in general (1867: “On a New List of Categories”). But seldom, if ever, do we experience a raw, naked Firstness: while we could conceive of some entity having a singular and unvarying feeling of a singular, unaltering experience, such is not our lot.
The Category of Secondness
That is, the Firstness of our experience is invariably joined by Secondness. This, Peirce claims, is the easiest category to comprehend: for it is the category of reaction and struggle, of being up against the resistance of the world which we habitually encounter. To strike against the other is to experience Secondness.
This dimension of experience is not two separate acts, or two separate awarenesses — of oneself and of the other — but rather a “double-sided” consciousness: awareness of effort is intrinsically awareness of resistance, just as awareness of the self is intrinsically awareness of the other, and vice versa. We may recursively separate the two, considering each as a First; but their Secondness consists in the unity of being against one another, the unity of opposition — two things mutually opposed to one another must be united in that over which they are opposed, after all.
This experience of resistance against effort introduces the conception of the other, the non-self; which is the proper sense of the object, in the sense of the Latin obiectum (from ob-, meaning “against” and iactum, meaning “thrown”) and the German Gegenstand (from gegen meaning “against” and “stand” signifying its English cognate). Secondness, in other words, is the experience of worldly interruption in the otherwise smooth continuum of presence — and thus, is the first differentiation of presence.
The Category of Thirdness
If the phaneron comprises both the undifferentiated presence of Firstness and the differentiating interruption of Secondness, it also comprises, of necessity, a third element, an element of governing generality. In other words, we never simply experience a First and a Second without experiencing them as …, such that between the First and the Second, uniting the experience of Firstness and Secondness, is something reducible to neither. This is Thirdness.
To make this admittedly abstract concept more concrete: the smooth continuum of presence is interrupted, and this interruption is shocking, or irritating, or pleasant. This being shocking, or irritating, or pleasurable is neither Firstness or Secondness, but the governing relation between the two, the relation which says how the two are related. That one feels shock, or irritation, at the interruption is an interpretation of the interruption; a “taking-it-as such-or-such”. This interpretiveness is no less true of the ordinary: seeing a rock dropped, we take it as quite natural that it should fall. These relations — ordinariness, shockingness, etc. — are inherently general (or universal, if one likes), in that one and the same relation may govern entirely different individuals and conversely, the same individuals may fall under the governance of different relations. What is shocking when seen the first time becomes, by the regularity of its presence, by being observed again and again, rather ordinary. But the shocking still exists, albeit in requirement of a different Secondness.
In other words, Thirdness is the category of regularity, of habit, and — as Peirce maintains as vital to understanding not only the categories but the universe at large — of thought.
Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis — Sparks III (1906)
Unity of the Universes
What is thought, however? Our tendency today is to relate this term to the experience of mental language, or perhaps mental operation more broadly. But what does that comprise? Where does mental operation begin or end?
We cannot, of course, answer these questions here. But we can point out that the boundaries of thought, as Peirce conceived it, were far broader than the limits by which it is ordinarily circumscribed. Much in the way that Aristotle thought of virtue — such that, to become virtuous, one must act virtuously, but to act virtuously, one must have virtue — Peirce recognized that what is “thoughtful” need not be a complete thought, and need not even belong to a mind (properly speaking), just as an action may be virtuous, even if the actor does not have virtue.
Thought is never complete; that is, every thought we have either actually leads to or at the very least remains perpetually open to further thought. It possesses a twofold indeterminacy: both of vagueness, to the degree that it is imprecise, and of generality, insofar as it may comprise instances of greater particularity than itself.
Tychism and Synechism
These two indeterminacies of thought reflect the indeterminacies of the universe at large: for they are the indeterminacies belonging to the essential openness of Firstness and Thirdness, respectively, and which allow for a truly evolutionary universe — as opposed to an incidentally evolutionary universe, where advance is naught but the result of dumb happenstance — that progresses from the more chaotic to the more organized.
A truly evolutionary universe is one where by nature the constituents are disposed to evolve, to advance, to become fuller in their being. Peirce’s metaphysical cosmology has, for this reason, often been considered (cf. Houser 2014: “The Intelligible Universe” in Romanini and Fernandez, Peirce and Biosemiotics) something of an embarrassment, the sign of mental dissolution, and an odiferous elephant in the room that many who otherwise admire Peirce have striven to ignore or dismiss as best they can — pretending there is no smell whilst pinching their noses. But to admire Peirce’s logic, say, or his views on the relationship between science and philosophy, and simultaneously disdain his cosmology is to ignore the common roots in which all his thinking was grounded. For Peirce not only saw knowledge as grounded in the common understanding of signs, but all the universe — mental or otherwise — as belonging to one and the same whole; thus, he argued that even the lawlessness of chance, the principle of indeterminacy he called tychism, is itself governed by the lawfulness of regularity, the principle of continuity he termed synechism.
Synechism is named the enemy of dualism (1893: “Immortality in the Light of Synechism”), the corollary of fallibilism (c.1897: CP.1.172), the growth of reasonableness (1902a: CP.5.4), and the synthesis of tychism and pragmaticism (1906a: CP.4.584). It is the principle not of any one thing in the universe to grow, but the common root of all diverse entities that enables them to grow together. Tychism — far from being synechism’s opposite — is rather the indeterminacy of the individual which by nature seeks completion through something more than itself; just as doubt is not the opposite of belief, but the irritation of mind which seeks resolution in belief, so too the indeterminacy of the disordered seeks fittingness in regularity — a seeking which is itself the first step of order.
Final causality and purpose
In one of his most systematic and simultaneously opaque treatments of evolution — his 1893 “Evolutionary Love” — Peirce divides evolution into three kinds: 1) by fortuitous variation; 2) by mechanical necessity; and 3) by creative love. The first of these is the Darwinian process of natural selection, where the evolved variation’s fittingness to a context was a matter of pure chance. The second was advocated by Carl Nägeli, Albert von Kölliker, and Albert Weismann (despite his self-identification as a Darwinian) and attributed the impulse to improvement to some or another principle within the evolving. The third Peirce associates with the idea — present most notably in Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s presentation of soft inheritance — that habit shapes the generation-by-generation development of traits; not by a physical force, but rather by what we could call a relational-patterning-after.
These three varieties of evolution Peirce renames, respectively, as: tychasm, anancasm, and agapasm (using the related Greek roots to provide a technical terminology). The first two, he claims, are degenerate forms of the agapastic: that is, while each is a real evolutionary force, the reality of the evolutionary universe as a whole is comprised by the third form. While tychasm finds growth from the lower into the higher a matter of luck (as well as “lower” and “higher” being purely circumstantial adjectives), and anancasm sees it as a matter of internally-driven necessity (and is thus a Whiggish theory of nature, at heart), agapasm sees it as “a love which embraces hatred as an imperfect stage of it”; which seeks elevation of the lesser through a not-yet-realized better. That is: “Love, recognising germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely. That is the sort of evolution which every careful student of my essay ‘The Law of Mind’ must see that synechism calls for.”
This, as Peirce calls it, is creative love. It is not a love which seeks fulfillment of itself, but which calls out for as-yet-unrealized perfection. It is love as a final cause: first in intention, last in execution, the cause that makes anything to be at all. It is the cause that answers the question “why?” for anything.
Few people already convinced that evolution proceeds through random chance will be persuaded of its inherent purposiveness, let alone that this purposiveness is not itself the product of chance — it echoes too loudly of a theistic hand guiding the universe; and natural purposiveness implies all sorts of normative consequences, including moral ones.
The challenge that Peirce’s synechism issues us, however, is this: if the universe really is found to be continuous, such that between any two things there is no unbridged gap but a gradient of infinitesimal degrees of difference — in at least potency if not actuality — if this continuity exists in fact and not only in theory (and a careful examination, I think, can only lead one to the former conclusion): what then explains this continuity, if not agapasm?
Brian Kemple is the author of Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition (Brill: 2017) and The Intersection of Semiotics and Phenomenology (forthcoming, De Gruyter: 2019). He received his PhD in Philosophy with the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston TX, in 2016, and is the only student ever to complete a dissertation under the direction of John Deely. He currently consults as a Research Fellow with the Center for the Study of Digital Life (digitallife.center) and operates a private philosophical consulting and education service, Continuum Philosophical Insight (cp-insight.com).
Epoché Philosophy Monthly
#19 January 2019
Introduction
The Continuity of Being: C.S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Synechism
by Brian Kemple
Against Ontology: A Naturalist Critique on Two Varieties of Mathematical Structuralism
by Jio Jeong
Some Notes on Foucault on Discourse
by John C. Brady
What is Vitalism?
by Timofei Gerber
Drugs? Some marijuana last nigh, that’s all, and trying to unscramble the not so preposterous searc into time travel, and why and how it has been taken up as a real possibility, especially with the coming race between what’s seen as the human mind and it’s simulated ‘artificially ‘created’ component. Pierce is one who tries to configure God within,
Epoché Philosophy Mo
Issue #19 January 2019
The Continuity of Being: C.S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Synechism
Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis — Sonata of the Sea. Finale (1908) [section]
“Nor must any synechist say, “I am altogether myself, and not at all you.” If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of wickedness. In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity.”
— C.S. Peirce, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” (1893)
The unbearable presence of discontinuity
Humankind cannot bear very much discontinuity. This is not an a priori postulate, but an observationally-derived truth, and one which a study in attitudes towards so-called postmodern art will confirm, a form of art which is deliberately discontinuous. Presented with a fragmentary visage or a lack of musical harmony or with any prolonged experience of aesthetic rupture, we seek out meanings — whether by invention, authorial biography, social context, etc. — which may serve as a common foundation in which the disparate presented minima may be unified, or, at least, cobbled into a coherent object-narrative.
If the meaning found in one experience does not fit that found in another, we struggle to maintain our personal coherence to the degree that those experiences have importance and inversely to their evident disparity. When we cannot resolve the objects of our experience into a unified narrative, the result is any number of psychological disturbances: perhaps as mild as a momentary outburst of anger, of disgust; or as severe as a spiraling mania or a schizophrenic break. It is not an unreasonable conjecture that the seeming proliferation of mental ailments in the contemporary West is neither the result of capitalist pharmacological greed nor improvement in diagnostic abilities, but a creeping encroachment of unresolved cultural (and therefore psychological) fragmentation. The superficial bandage holding together the pieces of the shattered Western psyche has been the promise of illusory-realization — the belief that we can live out all our fantasies, no matter how incoherent it all seems — a bandage which has only obscured the subcutaneous hemorrhage.
But what if this fragmentation is not — despite the still-echoing voices of Eliot, Heidegger, Ellul, Tolkien, Postman, and many others whom we ought to heed — the exclusive provenance of modern industrial and now digital technology (which latter, if anything, is tearing off the bandage of illusion), but more deeply rooted in the theoretical underpinnings of modern philosophy?
Modernity’s presumed chasm
While questions of the mind’s relation to the world, and vice versa, are at least as old as Plato, there occurs a radical break with René Descartes in how those questions are pursued. Most medieval and ancient philosophers had taken it for granted that the mind truly knows the world (or at least substances in the world) — questioning how they are known, and not if — where Descartes presumes instead that the mind knows its own ideas, and only through their mediation does it, can it, have a grasp on what exists independently of the one cognizing. This presumption becomes the founding belief of all modern philosophy, not only as a chronological era but as an intellectual epoch. For centuries, it was thought we could not know how the world outside the mind is known, let alone what is known, unless we could first answer whether and how such a knowledge was possible; how it is that we could transcend the divide from the mental existence of an idea to some existence of the extramental correlate. This cart-before-the-horse approach rests upon the belief that our intellectual lives begin “inside” the mind, and only later do we transcend to the world outside. Even the empiricists of modern philosophy held that while the external world may generate the ideas, the ideas themselves are the direct and immediate objects of knowledge — retaining, therefore, the presupposed chasm between the mind and the world and prolonging the question as to how we know extramental reality as true.
This presupposed chasm between the mind and the world further diverges: if not into explicit dualism, then either into a materialist reductionism or an idealist reductionism (which ends as a de facto implicit dualism anyway); to a denial of either any reality insensate or of the accessible intelligibility of anything not intellectually-conceptualizable. Its inheritors are not only Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, but Churchland, Dennett, and Harris. On either side of this divide we find, typically, culture and nature, subject and object, philosophy and science, opinion and truth.
This is not to say modernity has not attempted to bridge the chasm — indeed, modern philosophy, from Descartes up through contemporary analytic philosophers, has made little else its goal — but only that it has started from an impossible presupposition. Any dualist stance–the philosophy that performs all its analyses with an axe, leaving unrelated chunks of being (Peirce 1893: “Immortality in the Light of Synechism”, in The Essential Peirce, vol.2, p.2)–begins with incommensurability of its dual parts as the basic premise. If mind and body, or thought and thing, are cut of entirely different substance with no common third to unite them, transcending from the mind to the world is an impossibility.
A question of metaphysics
It was just this default position leading inevitably towards fragmentation that Charles Sanders Peirce sought to overcome. Though he produced no magnum opus — indeed, never completing any of the many books he intended to author — Peirce sought his whole life to produce an architectonic view of human knowledge which corralled not only the insights of philosophy but also those of science; a comprehensive theory of thought which united empirical investigation with speculative inquiry.
Best known as the American father of semiotics (in distinction from the semiological school of thought founded by Ferdinand de Saussure and promulgated in the work of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, et al.), Peirce is also recognized as a seminal figure in pragmatism, being credited with the name and the general gist of the movement — though Peirce would deliberately distance himself from those more famously associated, Dewey and James, and rename his own theory “pragmaticism”, a name so ugly no one would hijack it into a nominalist track, he thought. But less recognized is that both Peirce’s semiotic thinking and his pragmaticism depend intrinsically upon his metaphysics: the first metaphysics which can truly be called “postmodern”, in the sense of no longer following the modern presumption that what we know directly are our own ideas.
A biography in sketch
Peirce’s life, as artfully depicted in Joseph Brent’s biography, fits the profile of tortured genius more than most. Born the son of a Harvard professor of mathematics, he was precocious, brilliant, unsure of himself, erratic, temperamental, by turns abstemious and lascivious. He suffered all his life from the pains of trigeminal neuralgia — which he treated by various chemical concoctions, including morphine and cocaine — and likely had bipolar disorder. He was, moreover, convinced that his left-handedness was a physiological deformity that rendered him at odds with the rest of society, and would experience agonizing paralytic spells to which no diagnosis fit. He believed in God seemingly more from philosophical conviction, and perhaps mystical (or drug-induced) experience, than from any religious habit or practice.
At the age of 74, he died in abject poverty — despite the repute of his father and the renown in which he was held by established thinkers, such as William James and Josiah Royce — having never held a permanent academic position. When the young Johns Hopkins University, influenced by the machinations of Simon Newcomb, wanted to diplomatically remove Charles from a lecturer position, they cited budgetary cutbacks, laid off all contingent faculty — and then re-hired everyone but Peirce. Much of his income was through loans and gifts of family and friends, as well as irregular payments for various odd bits of writing. He was a victim of not only himself, but the malice of others, who saw to it that his moral profligacy impeded the success of his career. But for a handful of faithful adherents, his immense but disorganized body of work would likely have been buried forever in the archives of Harvard, if not incinerated.
Though versed in Hume, Kant, and Hegel, the deepest currents in Peirce’s thought flowed from Aristotle and Scholasticism. Though he references them rarely, one finds traces of Johannes Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and the lesser-known Modist, Thomas of Erfurt (whose most important work, Tractatus de modis significandi sive Grammatica speculativa, was mistaken to be Scotus’ until 1922) throughout Peirce’s oeuvre.
Where his personal life was marred by interruptions — mania and depression, pain and addiction, rejection and isolation — his thought was marked by continuity. Not to say that Peirce never changed his mind or even that he was steadfast and consistent in his writings; but what more than anything else what he sought was the coherence of thought. Such a search for coherence stems, I believe, primarily from the Scholastic background, from immersion in the thought of men who saw the universe as an essentially continuous and essentially intelligible whole. But, although he well-understood the importance of knowing the history of philosophy, Peirce was far from repeating the theories of ages past. He was a truly original thinker, who saw in the thought of his forebears truths that they themselves had not recognized, truths which allowed him to bring new and unique insights into the world.
Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis — Sparks II (1906)
Three Universes of Experience
Much like Aristotle and Kant before him, the singularity of Peirce’s thought germinates in a system of categories. Whereas Aristotle’s categories were, arguably, ontological predicates designating distinct ways things can be, and Kant’s categories were, inarguably, psychological predicates signifying ways things may be understood, Peirce’s categories fall into neither category. Indeed, they capture neither what belongs to things nor what belongs to the mind, but the essential structure of the universe as a whole, both as it exists dependently-upon and independently-of any cognitive activity. This essentially suprasubjective nature of the categories might be missed insofar as they are termed categories or “universes” of experience, which to our ears sounds a subjective designation. But what Peirce shows through these categories is that every experience is construed by openness to relations, such that not only can the subjectivity of species-specifically human experiences be “transcended”, those experiences cannot not be open to the world outside the subject.
Over the decades from 1867 — when he first authored “On a New List of Categories” — until his death in 1914, Peirce mused over, refined, revised, and altered his terminology for the categories; for the most part, however, he simply named them Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. These categories, Peirce says, are derived as the irreducible, ineradicable elements of what he called the “phaneron”: that is, of an experience, hence the three categories occasionally being called “universes of experience” (e.g., cf. 1908: “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”). Because this is not experience, however, understood as what happens subjectively in the individual, but as essentially suprasubjective — the universes are each by themselves innately related to one another and always situate the human individual in particular as already self-transcendent — Peirce is thus starting not from a presupposition of divided subject and object, but the inverse. This can only be made clear, however, by examining the three categories themselves.
The Category of Firstness
Characterized by an absolute simplicity — admitting no parts — Firstness defies easy exposition. Perhaps the easiest explanation of it which may be given is this: strip back an experience you have to its most basic constituent, and what is left? A “quality of feeling” (cf. Peirce 1903: “The Categories Defended”), such that it is what it is regardless of anything else. In other words, Firstness is the feeling we have that a thing is what it is, making no judgment upon it. Before we judge that red is a color, we experience red; before we judge that color generically is the refraction of light, we experience generic color.
This experience, notably, is neither something belonging to the subject — the self — nor to the object, the thing experienced. It does not discriminate between the two. It is a singular undifferentiated vagueness — an indeterminacy which admits of infinite possibility for discrimination, but which contains none in actuality, not even between who is feeling and what is being felt.
For this reason, Peirce also calls Firstness the conception of the present, in general; or, even more simply, IT in general (1867: “On a New List of Categories”). But seldom, if ever, do we experience a raw, naked Firstness: while we could conceive of some entity having a singular and unvarying feeling of a singular, unaltering experience, such is not our lot.
The Category of Secondness
That is, the Firstness of our experience is invariably joined by Secondness. This, Peirce claims, is the easiest category to comprehend: for it is the category of reaction and struggle, of being up against the resistance of the world which we habitually encounter. To strike against the other is to experience Secondness.
This dimension of experience is not two separate acts, or two separate awarenesses — of oneself and of the other — but rather a “double-sided” consciousness: awareness of effort is intrinsically awareness of resistance, just as awareness of the self is intrinsically awareness of the other, and vice versa. We may recursively separate the two, considering each as a First; but their Secondness consists in the unity of being against one another, the unity of opposition — two things mutually opposed to one another must be united in that over which they are opposed, after all.
This experience of resistance against effort introduces the conception of the other, the non-self; which is the proper sense of the object, in the sense of the Latin obiectum (from ob-, meaning “against” and iactum, meaning “thrown”) and the German Gegenstand (from gegen meaning “against” and “stand” signifying its English cognate). Secondness, in other words, is the experience of worldly interruption in the otherwise smooth continuum of presence — and thus, is the first differentiation of presence.
The Category of Thirdness
If the phaneron comprises both the undifferentiated presence of Firstness and the differentiating interruption of Secondness, it also comprises, of necessity, a third element, an element of governing generality. In other words, we never simply experience a First and a Second without experiencing them as …, such that between the First and the Second, uniting the experience of Firstness and Secondness, is something reducible to neither. This is Thirdness.
To make this admittedly abstract concept more concrete: the smooth continuum of presence is interrupted, and this interruption is shocking, or irritating, or pleasant. This being shocking, or irritating, or pleasurable is neither Firstness or Secondness, but the governing relation between the two, the relation which says how the two are related. That one feels shock, or irritation, at the interruption is an interpretation of the interruption; a “taking-it-as such-or-such”. This interpretiveness is no less true of the ordinary: seeing a rock dropped, we take it as quite natural that it should fall. These relations — ordinariness, shockingness, etc. — are inherently general (or universal, if one likes), in that one and the same relation may govern entirely different individuals and conversely, the same individuals may fall under the governance of different relations. What is shocking when seen the first time becomes, by the regularity of its presence, by being observed again and again, rather ordinary. But the shocking still exists, albeit in requirement of a different Secondness.
In other words, Thirdness is the category of regularity, of habit, and — as Peirce maintains as vital to understanding not only the categories but the universe at large — of thought.
Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis — Sparks III (1906)
Unity of the Universes
What is thought, however? Our tendency today is to relate this term to the experience of mental language, or perhaps mental operation more broadly. But what does that comprise? Where does mental operation begin or end?
We cannot, of course, answer these questions here. But we can point out that the boundaries of thought, as Peirce conceived it, were far broader than the limits by which it is ordinarily circumscribed. Much in the way that Aristotle thought of virtue — such that, to become virtuous, one must act virtuously, but to act virtuously, one must have virtue — Peirce recognized that what is “thoughtful” need not be a complete thought, and need not even belong to a mind (properly speaking), just as an action may be virtuous, even if the actor does not have virtue.
Thought is never complete; that is, every thought we have either actually leads to or at the very least remains perpetually open to further thought. It possesses a twofold indeterminacy: both of vagueness, to the degree that it is imprecise, and of generality, insofar as it may comprise instances of greater particularity than itself.
Tychism and Synechism
These two indeterminacies of thought reflect the indeterminacies of the universe at large: for they are the indeterminacies belonging to the essential openness of Firstness and Thirdness, respectively, and which allow for a truly evolutionary universe — as opposed to an incidentally evolutionary universe, where advance is naught but the result of dumb happenstance — that progresses from the more chaotic to the more organized.
A truly evolutionary universe is one where by nature the constituents are disposed to evolve, to advance, to become fuller in their being. Peirce’s metaphysical cosmology has, for this reason, often been considered (cf. Houser 2014: “The Intelligible Universe” in Romanini and Fernandez, Peirce and Biosemiotics) something of an embarrassment, the sign of mental dissolution, and an odiferous elephant in the room that many who otherwise admire Peirce have striven to ignore or dismiss as best they can — pretending there is no smell whilst pinching their noses. But to admire Peirce’s logic, say, or his views on the relationship between science and philosophy, and simultaneously disdain his cosmology is to ignore the common roots in which all his thinking was grounded. For Peirce not only saw knowledge as grounded in the common understanding of signs, but all the universe — mental or otherwise — as belonging to one and the same whole; thus, he argued that even the lawlessness of chance, the principle of indeterminacy he called tychism, is itself governed by the lawfulness of regularity, the principle of continuity he termed synechism.
Synechism is named the enemy of dualism (1893: “Immortality in the Light of Synechism”), the corollary of fallibilism (c.1897: CP.1.172), the growth of reasonableness (1902a: CP.5.4), and the synthesis of tychism and pragmaticism (1906a: CP.4.584). It is the principle not of any one thing in the universe to grow, but the common root of all diverse entities that enables them to grow together. Tychism — far from being synechism’s opposite — is rather the indeterminacy of the individual which by nature seeks completion through something more than itself; just as doubt is not the opposite of belief, but the irritation of mind which seeks resolution in belief, so too the indeterminacy of the disordered seeks fittingness in regularity — a seeking which is itself the first step of order.
Final causality and purpose
In one of his most systematic and simultaneously opaque treatments of evolution — his 1893 “Evolutionary Love” — Peirce divides evolution into three kinds: 1) by fortuitous variation; 2) by mechanical necessity; and 3) by creative love. The first of these is the Darwinian process of natural selection, where the evolved variation’s fittingness to a context was a matter of pure chance. The second was advocated by Carl Nägeli, Albert von Kölliker, and Albert Weismann (despite his self-identification as a Darwinian) and attributed the impulse to improvement to some or another principle within the evolving. The third Peirce associates with the idea — present most notably in Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s presentation of soft inheritance — that habit shapes the generation-by-generation development of traits; not by a physical force, but rather by what we could call a relational-patterning-after.
These three varieties of evolution Peirce renames, respectively, as: tychasm, anancasm, and agapasm (using the related Greek roots to provide a technical terminology). The first two, he claims, are degenerate forms of the agapastic: that is, while each is a real evolutionary force, the reality of the evolutionary universe as a whole is comprised by the third form. While tychasm finds growth from the lower into the higher a matter of luck (as well as “lower” and “higher” being purely circumstantial adjectives), and anancasm sees it as a matter of internally-driven necessity (and is thus a Whiggish theory of nature, at heart), agapasm sees it as “a love which embraces hatred as an imperfect stage of it”; which seeks elevation of the lesser through a not-yet-realized better. That is: “Love, recognising germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely. That is the sort of evolution which every careful student of my essay ‘The Law of Mind’ must see that synechism calls for.”
This, as Peirce calls it, is creative love. It is not a love which seeks fulfillment of itself, but which calls out for as-yet-unrealized perfection. It is love as a final cause: first in intention, last in execution, the cause that makes anything to be at all. It is the cause that answers the question “why?” for anything.
Few people already convinced that evolution proceeds through random chance will be persuaded of its inherent purposiveness, let alone that this purposiveness is not itself the product of chance — it echoes too loudly of a theistic hand guiding the universe; and natural purposiveness implies all sorts of normative consequences, including moral ones.
The challenge that Peirce’s synechism issues us, however, is this: if the universe really is found to be continuous, such that between any two things there is no unbridged gap but a gradient of infinitesimal degrees of difference — in at least potency if not actuality — if this continuity exists in fact and not only in theory (and a careful examination, I think, can only lead one to the former conclusion): what then explains this continuity, if not agapasm?
Brian Kemple is the author of Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition (Brill: 2017) and The Intersection of Semiotics and Phenomenology (forthcoming, De Gruyter: 2019). He received his PhD in Philosophy with the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston TX, in 2016, and is the only student ever to complete a dissertation under the direction of John Deely. He currently consults as a Research Fellow with the Center for the Study of Digital Life (digitallife.center) and operates a private philosophical consulting and education service, Continuum Philosophical Insight (cp-insight.com).
Epoché Philosophy Monthly
#19 January 2019
Introduction
The Continuity of Being: C.S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Synechism
by Brian Kemple
Against Ontology: A Naturalist Critique on Two Varieties of Mathematical Structuralism
by Jio Jeong
Some Notes on Foucault on Discourse
by John C. Brady
What is Vitalism?
by Timofei Gerber
Abstract
To Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) semiotics (or to use his own expression:’ semeiotic’) gradually became identical with logic in a broad sense. In defining this relation between semiotics and logic, Peirce was no doubt highly influenced by the way the scholastic realists understood science, as for instance demonstrated by Emily Michael [1977]. He got his inspiration first and foremost from the medieval juxtapositon of three of the seven free arts into the so-called trivium. The trivium consisted of the disciplines Grammar, Dialectics (or: Logic), and Rhetoric. As demonstrated by Max H. Fisch [1978], Peirce’s work from 1865 to 1903 shows a constant development of reflections on the content and application of this tripartition. In the Spring of 1865 he subdivided the general science of representations into ‘General Grammar’, ‘Logic’ and ‘Universal Rhetorics’. In May the same year he called this division ‘General Grammar’, ‘General Logic’, and ‘General Rhetorics’, and in 1867 it was presented as ‘Formal Grammar’, ‘Logic’ and ‘Formal Rhetorics’. Twenty years later, in 1897, it had become ‘Pure Grammar’, ‘Logic Proper’ and ‘Pure Rhetorics’. In 1903 Peirce — within his own now more matred framework — determined the tripartition as’ speculative Grammar’, ‘Critic’, and ‘Methodeutic’.
Sorry for the double post
SPACE & PHYSICS
Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50
Gauging whether or not we dwell inside someone else’s computer may come down to advanced AI research—or measurements at the frontiers of cosmology
By Anil Ananthaswamy on October 13, 2020
Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50
Credit: Getty Images
It is not often that a comedian gives an astrophysicist goose bumps when discussing the laws of physics. But comic Chuck Nice managed to do just that in a recent episode of the podcast StarTalk. The show’s host Neil deGrasse Tyson had just explained the simulation argument—the idea that we could be virtual beings living in a computer simulation. If so, the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time—much like a video game optimized to render only the parts of a scene visible to a player. “Maybe that’s why we can’t travel faster than the speed of light, because if we could, we’d be able to get to another galaxy,” said Nice, the show’s co-host, prompting Tyson to gleefully interrupt. “Before they can program it,” the astrophysicist said, delighting at the thought. “So the programmer put in that limit.”
Such conversations may seem flippant. But ever since Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford wrote a seminal paper about the simulation argument in 2003, philosophers, physicists, technologists and, yes, comedians have been grappling with the idea of our reality being a simulacrum. Some have tried to identify ways in which we can discern if we are simulated beings. Others have attempted to calculate the chance of us being virtual entities. Now a new analysis shows that the odds that we are living in base reality—meaning an existence that is not simulated—are pretty much even. But the study also demonstrates that if humans were to ever develop the ability to simulate conscious beings, the chances would overwhelmingly tilt in favor of us, too, being virtual denizens inside someone else’s computer. (A caveat to that conclusion is that there is little agreement about what the term “consciousness” means, let alone how one might go about simulating it.)
In 2003 Bostrom imagined a technologically adept civilization that possesses immense computing power and needs a fraction of that power to simulate new realities with conscious beings in them. Given this scenario, his simulation argument showed that at least one proposition in the following trilemma must be true: First, humans almost always go extinct before reaching the simulation-savvy stage. Second, even if humans make it to that stage, they are unlikely to be interested in simulating their own ancestral past. And third, the probability that we are living in a simulation is close to one.
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Before Bostrom, the movie The Matrix had already done its part to popularize the notion of simulated realities. And the idea has deep roots in Western and Eastern philosophical traditions, from Plato’s cave allegory to Zhuang Zhou’s butterfly dream. More recently, Elon Musk gave further fuel to the concept that our reality is a simulation: “The odds that we are in base reality is one in billions,” he said at a 2016 conference.
“Musk is right if you assume [propositions] one and two of the trilemma are false,” says astronomer David Kipping of Columbia University. “How can you assume that?”
To get a better handle on Bostrom’s simulation argument, Kipping decided to resort to Bayesian reasoning. This type of analysis uses Bayes’s theorem, named after Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century English statistician and minister. Bayesian analysis allows one to calculate the odds of something happening (called the “posterior” probability) by first making assumptions about the thing being analyzed (assigning it a “prior” probability).
Kipping began by turning the trilemma into a dilemma. He collapsed propositions one and two into a single statement, because in both cases, the final outcome is that there are no simulations. Thus, the dilemma pits a physical hypothesis (there are no simulations) against the simulation hypothesis (there is a base reality—and there are simulations, too). “You just assign a prior probability to each of these models,” Kipping says. “We just assume the principle of indifference, which is the default assumption when you don’t have any data or leanings either way.”
So each hypothesis gets a prior probability of one half, much as if one were to flip a coin to decide a wager.
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The next stage of the analysis required thinking about “parous” realities—those that can generate other realities—and “nulliparous” realities—those that cannot simulate offspring realities. If the physical hypothesis was true, then the probability that we were living in a nulliparous universe would be easy to calculate: it would be 100 percent. Kipping then showed that even in the simulation hypothesis, most of the simulated realities would be nulliparous. That is because as simulations spawn more simulations, the computing resources available to each subsequent generation dwindles to the point where the vast majority of realities will be those that do not have the computing power necessary to simulate offspring realities that are capable of hosting conscious beings.
Plug all these into a Bayesian formula, and out comes the answer: the posterior probability that we are living in base reality is almost the same as the posterior probability that we are a simulation—with the odds tilting in favor of base reality by just a smidgen.
These probabilities would change dramatically if humans created a simulation with conscious beings inside it, because such an event would change the chances that we previously assigned to the physical hypothesis. “You can just exclude that [hypothesis] right off the bat. Then you are only left with the simulation hypothesis,” Kipping says. “The day we invent that technology, it flips the odds from a little bit better than 50–50 that we are real to almost certainly we are not real, according to these calculations. It’d be a very strange celebration of our genius that day.”
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The upshot of Kipping’s analysis is that, given current evidence, Musk is wrong about the one-in-billions odds that he ascribes to us living in base reality. Bostrom agrees with the result—with some caveats. “This does not conflict with the simulation argument, which only asserts something about the disjunction,” the idea that one of the three propositions of the trilemma is true, he says.
But Bostrom takes issue with Kipping’s choice to assign equal prior probabilities to the physical and simulation hypothesis at the start of the analysis. “The invocation of the principle of indifference here is rather shaky,” he says. “One could equally well invoke it over my original three alternatives, which would then give them one-third chance each. Or one could carve up the possibility space in some other manner and get any result one wishes.”
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Such quibbles are valid because there is no evidence to back one claim over the others. That situation would change if we can find evidence of a simulation. So could you detect a glitch in the Matrix?
Houman Owhadi, an expert on computational mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, has thought about the question. “If the simulation has infinite computing power, there is no way you’re going to see that you’re living in a virtual reality, because it could compute whatever you want to the degree of realism you want,” he says. “If this thing can be detected, you have to start from the principle that [it has] limited computational resources.” Think again of video games, many of which rely on clever programming to minimize the computation required to construct a virtual world.
For Owhadi, the most promising way to look for potential paradoxes created by such computing shortcuts is through quantum physics experiments. Quantum systems can exist in a superposition of states, and this superposition is described by a mathematical abstraction called the wave function. In standard quantum mechanics, the act of observation causes this wave function to randomly collapse to one of many possible states. Physicists are divided over whether the process of collapse is something real or just reflects a change in our knowledge about the system. “If it is just a pure simulation, there is no collapse,” Owhadi says. “Everything is decided when you look at it. The rest is just simulation, like when you’re playing these video games.”
To this end, Owhadi and his colleagues have worked on five conceptual variations of the double-slit experiment, each designed to trip up a simulation. But he acknowledges that it is impossible to know, at this stage, if such experiments could work. “Those five experiments are just conjectures,” Owhadi says.
Zohreh Davoudi, a physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, has also entertained the idea that a simulation with finite computing resources could reveal itself. Her work focuses on strong interactions, or the strong nuclear force—one of nature’s four fundamental forces. The equations describing strong interactions, which hold together quarks to form protons and neutrons, are so complex that they cannot be solved analytically. To understand strong interactions, physicists are forced to do numerical simulations. And unlike any putative supercivilizations possessing limitless computing power, they must rely on shortcuts to make those simulations computationally viable—usually by considering spacetime to be discrete rather than continuous. The most advanced result researchers have managed to coax from this approach so far is the simulation of a single nucleus of helium that is composed of two protons and two neutrons.
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“Naturally, you start to ask, if you simulated an atomic nucleus today, maybe in 10 years, we could do a larger nucleus; maybe in 20 or 30 years, we could do a molecule,” Davoudi says. “In 50 years, who knows, maybe you can do something the size of a few inches of matter. Maybe in 100 years or so, we can do the [human] brain.”
Davoudi thinks that classical computers will soon hit a wall, however. “In the next maybe 10 to 20 years, we will actually see the limits of our classical simulations of the physical systems,” she says. Thus, she is turning her sights to quantum computation, which relies on superpositions and other quantum effects to make tractable certain computational problems that would be impossible through classical approaches. “If quantum computing actually materializes, in the sense that it’s a large scale, reliable computing option for us, then we’re going to enter a completely different era of simulation,” Davoudi says. “I am starting to think about how to perform my simulations of strong interaction physics and atomic nuclei if I had a quantum computer that was viable.”
All of these factors have led Davoudi to speculate about the simulation hypothesis. If our reality is a simulation, then the simulator is likely also discretizing spacetime to save on computing resources (assuming, of course, that it is using the same mechanisms as our physicists for that simulation). Signatures of such discrete spacetime could potentially be seen in the directions high-energy cosmic rays arrive from: they would have a preferred direction in the sky because of the breaking of so-called rotational symmetry.
Telescopes “haven’t observed any deviation from that rotational invariance yet,” Davoudi says. And even if such an effect were to be seen, it would not constitute unequivocal evidence that we live in a simulation. Base reality itself could have similar properties.
Kipping, despite his own study, worries that further work on the simulation hypothesis is on thin ice. “It’s arguably not testable as to whether we live in a simulation or not,” he says. “If it’s not falsifiable, then how can you claim it’s really science?”
For him, there is a more obvious answer: Occam’s razor, which says that in the absence of other evidence, the simplest explanation is more likely to be correct. The simulation hypothesis is elaborate, presuming realities nested upon realities, as well as simulated entities that can never tell that they are inside a simulation. “Because it is such an overly complicated, elaborate model in the first place, by Occam’s razor, it really should be disfavored, compared to the simple natural explanation,” Kipping says.
Maybe we are living in base reality after all—The Matrix, Musk and weird quantum physics notwithstanding.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
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Anil Ananthaswamy is author of The Edge of Physics (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), The Man Who Wasn’t There (Dutton, 2015), and Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality (Dutton, 2018). Credit: Nick Higgins
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<<<<<<<< is this not analogous to Pascual’s wager, if not, that t Pierce’s argument is foreshadowed in this way?>>>>>>>>>>>>
Is AI not the necessary , final link to these to connect simultaneity, coincidence, repetition ?
and naturally, synchronicity, .
<<<<<><< azquotes.com/quotes/topics/self-taught.html>>>>>>>>
Sartre’s self thought man
Etch
Time travel to the past is theoretically possible in certain general relativity spacetime geometries that permit traveling faster than the speed of light, such as cosmic strings, traversable wormholes, and Alcubierre drives.
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The Time Machine Quotes
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Tags: human-nature, intelligence, science
We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Tags: change, progress
It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Tags: adaptation, change, intelligence, strength
And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existence, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
For after the Battle comes quiet.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
I
I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.
H.G. Wells,
© 2023 Goodreads, Inc.
What can I see in a monologue that can fork around of the bend and regain into his and through his being able to express from that fear
The monologue can contain more richness. Of the sorce of his passion, then those pretending of it, as some society for the prevention of some thing or another,
The boy is an encased sea shell, or, maybe there in nothing in there for him, upstairs anyway, might as well be demoted, then why he certainly not worried for loosing it downtIrs, on the man floor.
As a matter of fact lost something, then not to worry, packing from a pack of cards, is not the same as playing with them, constantly on the lookout, for a thought that someone might have tough the game rigged, maybe that someone thought someplace that he knew something, so he either bolted or was pushed downstairs, to justify the worth of monologue, .
so skip a minute from this rattle, about the guy trying single handedly live up to such over stialized and embellished the place, which admittedly draws attention for who Dorsey love style.
So needless to say that the love pain of loosing or even the possibility of loosing a friend
a chum. someone who can write
Someone special whose soul has a no loss policy.
That is I am looking for a friend, down there, when already down in the dumpsters, the head of thrown away stuff, Bob are you coming back?
I’ve melted my heart dailies, so sensitive to criticism, especially turns almost autisticalways thought that , well just recently, so he want the fialouge, but one with a silver lining.
Cut here, so hope you come back for a chat. Inconventially Yiurs
Just reread it what a bunch of crap, writing better with weed, no excuses to anyone, the fear, is downtrodden with a lot of new structure, and came somewhat learneddealing with demons no mean trick, but love stops this crumbling, this simultenious melting into a heap , rather diminishes it to a talked to neboulus monster, as he repeats mantrucally, I am a Vampire!
What a bunch of……
15 minute break folks, coffe and don ought available .Thanks for staying with it, sober for 1 month come on upMr , ahh , almost forgot, AA12srep meet’s, next week the speaker will be Ms. Menoette,.
Thank You, ( applause)
¿or is intelligence the condition for necessity of change? 
OK, 15 min up. Or has it been 15 hits? No matter when, but welcome back Cut, err.
Change,?one has to read not only the deal, in the fine print, on the middle of the third, or even 4 th book chapter two out of the final third chapter,
Then read that, and when you thought that’s the end of it, another fine print tell you there is a sequel.
By that time 15 years arrived and then bitten but not shy 169 years in the Ruins, where can not see anymore but hear every singular wird
At least proff of some kind ( of immortal message manage to drift down there) and the singularity of enlighten awareness bound in charming , exquisitive leather covers , ends of books, book of ends, and booking the ends, within an unbreakable deal of chance through magic.
Miracle me no here, but really no me no domino.