According to Peirce, your sense of reality and of self are both grounded in the experience of difference between belief and external fact. Your acquaintance with facts about the external world is in turn based largely on the ‘testimony’ of others. Continue reading When worlds collide (and collude)
Author: gnox
Train of life
… life is but a sequence of inferences or a train of thought …
— Peirce (CP 7.583)
The train that can be expressed is not the express train. Continue reading Train of life
Are you talking to me?
Most likely you began (and continued) to use the word I to distinguish yourself from other selves, and you to distinguish another self (singular or collective) with whom you are engaged in joint attention from other things, any of which could be the object of your joint attention (i.e. could be referred to in the third person). Continue reading Are you talking to me?
The deep structure
This world is your world: that is, the immediate experience of having this (world) is nothing other than yourself. Yet the world in its appearing, the phaneron (Peirce), has elements common to all possible experience: some Quality, some Otherness, some Mediation (Peirce: Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness). Continue reading The deep structure
Minding, not minding
The ability to concentrate attention – to be oblivious to distractions – is a sign of mind. Darwin, for instance, in his study of earthworms, noted that ‘Their sexual passion is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light,’ and took this as an indication of mental power:
When a worm is suddenly illuminated and dashes like a rabbit into its burrow – to use the expression employed by a friend – we are at first led to look at the action as a reflex one. … But the different effect which a light produced on different occasions, and especially the fact that a worm when in any way employed and in the intervals of such employment … is often regardless of light, are opposed to the view of the sudden withdrawal being a simple reflex action. With the higher animals, when close attention to some object leads to the disregard of the impressions which other objects must be producing on them, we attribute this to their attention being then absorbed; and attention implies the presence of a mind. Every sportsman knows that he can approach animals whilst they are grazing, fighting or courting, much more easily than at other times. The state, also, of the nervous system of the higher animals differs much at different times, for instance, a horse is much more readily startled at one time than at another. The comparison here implied between the actions of one of the higher animals and of one so low in the scale as an earth-worm, may appear far-fetched; for we thus attribute to the worm attention and some mental power, nevertheless I can see no reason to doubt the justice of the comparison.
— Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with observations of their habits (Project Gutenberg e-text vgmld10.txt)
Playing the whole part
A living system is both whole and part. The whole is differentiated (into parts), and the part is individuated to play a specific role in the larger system. To be a self is to have a world, and to have a self is to be a world. Continue reading Playing the whole part
The web of relations
Eduardo Kohn (2013), in his ‘anthropology beyond the human’, describes the lives of the Runa people of Ávila, in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, as inhabiting an ‘ecology of selves’ Continue reading The web of relations
Explanations and complications
Being organisms ourselves, we often find it ‘simple’ – that is, easy and ‘natural’ – to interact with other organic entities, especially if they are closely related to us. This kind of ‘simplicity’ is transparent and implicit. But when we try to explain how complex systems work by naming their parts and their functions, the symbols we use often turn out very complicated. Continue reading Explanations and complications
Lend us your ears!
I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises toward the world.
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 87)
or the trees
The path is not the forest. Continue reading or the trees