By Schubert Ogden
Hartshorne says: "Physical phenomena as we have them are simply our way of experiencing the most widely distributed low-level forms of mind" (DL: 28 f.).
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I say, on the contrary, physical phenomena as we have them are simply our way of experiencing the most widely distributed low-level forms of concreteness- – the concreteness of which mind is a high-level special case. That mind, in the relevant sense of experience creatively synthesizing previous experiences, is concrete in no way implies that anything concrete has to be mind in that same sense.
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Hartshorne says: " \[A\]toms act as they do because they sense and feel as they do, and so with animals" ("Can We Understand God?": 96). |
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I say, on the contrary, atoms act as they do because _they are internally related as they are (to the foturefuture as well as to the past)_, i.e., as concrete singulars that, as such, instantiate all three of Peirce's categories: Thirdness as well as Secondness and Firstness (Cf. _ClAP_: 79: "\[T\]here really is a third relation among events beside or intermediate between simple dependence and simple independence, and this third relation is real possibility, probability, or law . . . .Thirdness, then, is neither sheer dependence \[as in Secondness\] nor sheer independence \[as in Firstness\] but an intermediate relation\[:\] nondependence with respect to definite particulars, dependence with respect to more or less general outlines. Futurity, or real possibility (causality in the forward direction) contrasts alike to sheer necessity and pure possibility."). |
21 July 2008