String theorists claim that the universe has many dimensions: 10, 11, or 26, but that all but the four are curled up so small that we can’t detect them.
In discussing the role of Charles S. Peirce’s “rediscovery” of the early Modern (17th century) doctrine of signs espoused by the Portuguese philosopher John Poinsot, late philosopher John Deely in his *Four Ages of Understanding* relates that in regard to German Idealism,
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. . . I am sure that no greater mistake was made than the assumption by some of its principal figures that *ens ut primum cognitum *(“being as the object distinctive of human understanding”) could simply be equated with *ens reale sensibile* (“sensible physical being”), or at least with mind-independent being as such (*ens reale*) first given by sense, and that is the end of it. They thought there was no need to pause, nothing here to pause over, so that they could move on from there to what really interested them, the “being” which metaphysics has as its object, “being as such”.
Along the way they ran afoul of Heidegger, and the end of the modern era. The dispute between realism and idealism at a stroke was superseded, and the champions of realism, locked in a struggle to the death with modern idealism, awakened to find that their problematic had died with the modern age. For the requirements of postmodernity, their preoccupations were not wrong but too narrow; their polemics were not misguided but out of date; their positions were not too dogmatic but insufficiently fundamental. [p. 341]
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Peirce characterized his own philosophy of *pragmaticism* as being *objective idealism*, which Deely presents as a more adequate grasp of realism vested in a triadic doctrine of signs, *semiosis*.
Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman asserts (*The Case Against Reality*) that no one, not even a quantum theorist, engages directly with “reality”, but rather with cognitive surmise taken in the psychosomatic interface we have evolved to survive actual threats. But perhaps any dimensionality in question resides not in “reality”, but among orders of relational complexity that our organic limitations require in compensation for limited working memory available to cognition? Then we must work in terms of signifying construction, Peircean semiosis, adequately to attend recursions of semiotic operations that express such attended fields of interacting cognized objects. More at www.manifestorders.com/overview
Thanks Tim, when I was in primary school eighty years ago in a primitive village, I dreamed of, and covered my school desk with drawings of rocket ships.
Circumstances (war, the great depression, remoteness) drove me in another more prosaic direction.
But your writings have triggered that old itch: so also, have UFO's, which I keep on trying to marry the vast distances involved with other dimensions or alternate realities: great stuff, Tim.
In discussing the role of Charles S. Peirce’s “rediscovery” of the early Modern (17th century) doctrine of signs espoused by the Portuguese philosopher John Poinsot, late philosopher John Deely in his *Four Ages of Understanding* relates that in regard to German Idealism,
“””
. . . I am sure that no greater mistake was made than the assumption by some of its principal figures that *ens ut primum cognitum *(“being as the object distinctive of human understanding”) could simply be equated with *ens reale sensibile* (“sensible physical being”), or at least with mind-independent being as such (*ens reale*) first given by sense, and that is the end of it. They thought there was no need to pause, nothing here to pause over, so that they could move on from there to what really interested them, the “being” which metaphysics has as its object, “being as such”.
Along the way they ran afoul of Heidegger, and the end of the modern era. The dispute between realism and idealism at a stroke was superseded, and the champions of realism, locked in a struggle to the death with modern idealism, awakened to find that their problematic had died with the modern age. For the requirements of postmodernity, their preoccupations were not wrong but too narrow; their polemics were not misguided but out of date; their positions were not too dogmatic but insufficiently fundamental. [p. 341]
“””
Peirce characterized his own philosophy of *pragmaticism* as being *objective idealism*, which Deely presents as a more adequate grasp of realism vested in a triadic doctrine of signs, *semiosis*.
Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman asserts (*The Case Against Reality*) that no one, not even a quantum theorist, engages directly with “reality”, but rather with cognitive surmise taken in the psychosomatic interface we have evolved to survive actual threats. But perhaps any dimensionality in question resides not in “reality”, but among orders of relational complexity that our organic limitations require in compensation for limited working memory available to cognition? Then we must work in terms of signifying construction, Peircean semiosis, adequately to attend recursions of semiotic operations that express such attended fields of interacting cognized objects. More at www.manifestorders.com/overview
Thanks Tim, when I was in primary school eighty years ago in a primitive village, I dreamed of, and covered my school desk with drawings of rocket ships.
Circumstances (war, the great depression, remoteness) drove me in another more prosaic direction.
But your writings have triggered that old itch: so also, have UFO's, which I keep on trying to marry the vast distances involved with other dimensions or alternate realities: great stuff, Tim.