As the focal text is to its context, so body is to environment, model is to mind, and mind is to the reality beyond it, what Peirce calls The Truth.
Imagine, if you can, a mind without an external world to offer resistance to its intentions – a mind to which all phenomena were entirely internal. You might call it “the mind of God.”
Such a god would fit the description left us in the fragments that survive from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Xenophanes. Here are the key points of his theology (translated by Kirk and Raven, 1957):
- One god … in no way similar to mortals either in body or in thought.
- Always he remains in the same place, moving not at all; nor is it fitting for him to go to different places at different times, but without toil he shakes all things by the thought of his mind.
- All of him sees, all thinks, and all hears.
- Sitting, he nevertheless at once accomplishes his thought, somehow, from his holy resting-place.
One way to make a unified sense of these fragments is to take ‘his holy resting-place’ as the universe itself, which of course does not go anywhere, as there is noplace else for it to go to. This universe is identical with the god’s body, while his ‘thought’ is identical with what happens in the universe, so there is no gap between the two (except in our minds, defined by their limitations). Now, clearly this god-thought cannot be conscious, nor can it include any kind of ‘plan,’ because those would involve some delay between thought and realization, and some effort; but this god at once accomplishes his thought without toil, and has no need of a ‘future.’ Consciousness and planning are signs of human (or ‘mortal’) limitations; god accomplishes his purpose (fulfills his intention, expresses his meaning, ….. ) without having to imagine it first as we do with ours. In this case our conscious planning, or purposing, or meaning (assuming they occur in the universe and not elsewhere) would constitute a minuscule part of the god’s mindbody. The god’s knowledge of events cannot be separate from the events themselves – not unless the god is out of his mind (i.e. external to the universe, which is none other than himself).
The upshot of this thought-experiment is that cosmic purposes or final causes, though they may be real, cannot be conscious purposes, nor can they be symbolized, recorded or stored externally. As Peirce remarked, ‘it is impossible ever actually to be directly conscious of thought’ (EP2, 269); consciousness of a thought requires another thought, and is therefore indirect.
Being an organism in an environmental context means that you need an internal model to guide your actions. A universal mind or will, however, having no context to contend with, no territory to navigate or map, has no model, no ‘inside’ or ‘outside,’ and no need (or possibility) to represent causality by inference as we do in the meaning cycle.
This thought-experiment has a parallel in physics. We begin with a classic scenario of thermodynamics: a closed container of two chambers filled with a gas at different temperatures, in which the gas can pass freely from one chamber to the other. The second law of thermodynamics predicts that the temperature gradient will dissipate itself: heat will distribute itself uniformly through the whole container, thus achieving equilibrium, which is equivalent to maximal disorder or ‘entropy.’ In 1871, James Clerk Maxwell imagined a way that this law could be violated: set up two containers connected only by a microscopic gate just big enough to allow passage of a single molecule at a time from one side to the other. Now suppose a tiny ‘demon’ can detect the speed of any particle and open the gate momentarily to let fast particles through in one direction only, and slow particles in the other direction only. This would increase the temperature gradient, and thus reverse the entropic process, without using any energy to do the work – supposing that the actual opening and closing of the gate uses no energy.
In 1922, however, Leo Szilard wrote a paper showing that in order to know enough about the particles to sort them out in this way, the demon would have to create at least as much entropy as was eliminated by the sorting process (Campbell 1982, 49). That’s because it takes work to assemble and represent the information needed by the demon in order to discriminate between fast and slow particles, and the amount of energy it takes to accomplish this knowledge of any particle is no less than the energy of the particle itself. So if we look at the whole system containing those representations (or symbols) as well as the particles being sorted, its entropy is increasing even as the smaller system inside the container is growing more orderly by creating a gradient.
Our scenario above is similar in that any explicit knowledge (or purpose, or meaning) of any entity or event in the universe (the god’s mindbody) would have to be another entity or event in the universe. This could add nothing to its ability to function implicitly, but something else would have to function implicitly in order to explicate (symbolize) the implicit function; and we can’t go outside the universe to find that something else, because the universe has no ‘outside’ (by definition). In short, there’s no room for explication apart from events themselves. On the whole, then, the only explication of the implicit purpose or meaning of events is the events themselves. In a more partial view, events may explicate or represent each other’s purposes – which is what happens in consciousness – but only at the cost of converting (dissipating) some of the implicit functioning to symbolic functioning, without which there can be no explication.
Our scenario, then, presents consciousness as a small part of the cosmic mind, arising from local limitations, which can therefore serve some cosmic purpose, though it can only guess at what that purpose is – for as Xenophanes also said, ‘No man knows, or ever will know, the truth about the gods and about everything I speak of: for even if one chanced to say the complete truth, yet oneself knows it not … ’ and ‘the gods have not revealed all things to men from the beginning; but by seeking men find out better in time.’ This sounds very much like the essentials of scientific method as Peirce and Popper saw it; and indeed Popper credited Xenophanes with the first clear formulation of ‘the true theory of knowledge’ (Popper 1968, 205).