Discussing C. S. Peirce's "A Guess at the Riddle" with Tim Jackson

My written reflections upon reading Peirce’s “A Guess at the Riddle” (1888):

A video of our dialogue:

A rough transcript:

Matt Segall: Hey, Tim? One sec. Just getting my earmuffs on here.

Timothy Jackson: Oh, good!

Matt Segall: There we go! Hey! How's it going?

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, not too bad, man. How are you?

Matt Segall: Doing well. Good morning.

Timothy Jackson: Evening to you.

Matt Segall: Yeah. Super excited to talk about Peirce. Haven't read Peirce for a long time, and it was a real treat. So suggestive, this particular essay. You know, I thought I had when you recommended it, A Guess at the Riddle, I thought I had read it before, but I don't think I have actually.

Timothy Jackson: It's kind of a prelude, I think, to this famous series that he published in The Monist a few years later. I can't recall the exact dates, but where he kind of lays out his cosmology in more detail and in a slightly more refined way than in this essay. But this is what underpins that, I think, and I felt like it would be a really good place for us. I mean, maybe we will do some of those essays in later discussions. You know, someone mentioned Evolutionary Love, which is one of those essays, and I think, you know, we can make reference, perhaps, to some of that today. Because that's where he defines, in particular, the modes of evolution. But yeah, this is a really rich one because we can see that thought process all developing, I think.

Matt Segall: Yeah. So you recommended this article or this essay by Peirce. I wonder, is it because you wanted to sort of give a sense of him in the act of generating these ideas? Because it does feel like he's very much, you know, maybe not writing these down for the first time, but trying to communicate them for the first time. And so he's very clear that he's making a hypothesis about the nature of this triadic relationship, that it can apply across all these different domains. Not only in logic but in physiology and physics and psychology. But he seems he's somewhat tentative. He's very cautious. He's like, you know, this could... He seems surprised that it's applied so widely, this triadic relationship. But he's open to being... He's a fallibilist, right? So he's open to this not actually playing out. So it makes it a joy to read because you really feel like you're exploring this possibility with him.

And of course, as a Whiteheadian, I can't help but feel the convergences on a number of points. But that might also be a function of me reading Whitehead into what Peirce is saying. And so there are a few areas where I think it'd be interesting to hear whether you felt there was a true convergence there or not. I mean, I'll just say one of those questions is on continuity. I know continuity is really important for Peirce. But I wonder if it's... He talks about the emergence of time and space at one point in this essay and seems to me to be putting forward some kind of a version of what Whitehead's formula for this would be, that there is a becoming of continuity and not a continuity of becoming. So that there's a kind of epochal nature to process. It comes in these pulses, as it were. And I think I was reading Peirce as affirming that, so we don't have to drop right into that now. But it's an area where I wasn't...Yeah, cause I had thought of a difference between the two of them. That at first was his synechism, suggested more like Bergson's position of process as continuous and unbroken, which would just be distinct from Whitehead's view of that. But...

Timothy Jackson:  Yeah, I don't think that that's exactly his view. I think, you know, like a lot of philosophers who... or just, you know, people who wrote over a long period of time and developed their ideas over a long period of time. And I mean, you know, Peirce... There are like, I don't know, thousands of pages of Peirce, right? The collected papers, and then, you know, all of these other essays that were published, you know, in different forms and anthologized in the essential Peirce collections, in the philosophical writings of Peirce. So I've got here as well with some overlap there. And so, you know... I'll have the usual disclaimer: I'm not a Peirce scholar, right? Like I've, you know... very much not familiar with the majority of his work, you know.

But I think synechism... So he'll talk about synechism maybe in slightly different ways, or there'll be different... So synechism is this principle of continuity that we're talking about, and he'll talk about that maybe in slightly different ways in different essays. But he's clear in some places that this isn't a like an ultimate metaphysical principle. He's not saying that everything is necessarily continuous in that sense, which I think might be more Bergsonian in the way you're talking about it. It's a regulative principle in the Kantian sense, like it should regulate our thought without us, you know... He says something very interesting about hypothesization, which I think we should talk about as well, but without us reifying or hypothesizing this particular principle of continuity.

So he actually thinks of the principle of continuity as very closely related to both fallibilism and, you know, evolution. And of course, fallibilism is a kind of evolutionary epistemology, so that's not surprising. But he says things like, a true continuum is something whose possibilities of determination no multitude of individuals can exhaust. So, no matter how a continuum might be discretized, might be divided, and he says like, no matter how many decimals, you know, decimal points you add when you are trying to divide this thing into discrete points, you'll never exhaust the continuum. So, you know, he's a big utilizer of arguments, you know, that make use of infinities, right? So we may talk about that as well, like the infinite past and the infinite future play a huge role in his vision of the evolution of the universe as being a continuum. So then he's also thinking here in terms sort of like the infinitesimals of calculus when he's talking about, you know, you can't divide the continuum into actual discrete parts. And he says also, you know, the principle of continuity is the idea of fallibilism objectified. So this is very, very close. This is why it's a regulative principle. It's like an epistemological principle, right?

Fallibilism is the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute, but always swims in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy. Now, the doctrine of continuity is that all things so swim in a continuum. So it doesn't mean things can't be separate in different ways. And, you know, he does talk about... He has that kind of image of epochal evolution and flashes and things branching apart and all that at the end of this essay, which I think you're referring to. It's really striking how many different thinkers we can see, you know, echoed in some sense, but also anticipated, you know, like we can draw a lot of connections here to everything from the Free Energy Principle to Wolfram, I think, you know, like there's a lot of just very, very deep evolutionary thinking going on here in Peirce. Even Everett, you could talk about, you know, because he talks about these branches that are irrevocably separated from each other in some sense.

Matt Segall: So importantly, Peirce would distinguish between actuals and possibles, whereas Everett does not, which is so...

Timothy Jackson: That...

Matt Segall: Peirce would have rejected many worlds interpretation, yeah.

Timothy Jackson: He would have. I think we can just see the way his thinking could encompass that kind of view. It wouldn't ever be, you know, synonymous to it or, you know, and this would be, you know, just to... Again, we're jumping right to the end of the essay here, and I think we should dwell on the physics stuff, but maybe we'll go back and get to there. But also, even though there's some real similarities, I think, with some of Wolfram's ideas there, I mean, he even gets to the point where he talks about in a spatial continuum, there would be a different dimensionality at different points in space. And that's one of the prime empirical predictions of the Wolfram Physics Project, so that's interesting. But, you know, Wolfram's fundamental posit, or that physics project's fundamental posit is, you know, discretization. That's what makes a, you know, a complete, like, a pan-computationalist perspective possible, is the fundamental posit of discreteness, and Peirce is precisely saying you can't have that.

Matt Segall: He's saying binary discreteness in particular, right? This kind of Boolean, like that all reality could be reduced to zeros and ones.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, and...

Matt Segall: Right, and that...Because there's always a third in Peirce's logic, that attempt to... And, you know, I don't know to what extent Wolfram in his concept of the Ruliad is necessarily thought of in binary code, in terms of binary code, but is it semiotic? I don't think he's thinking of computations as semiotic in Peirce's triadic sense. It seems more like a binary operation that he's ontologizing or hypothesizing. And, you know, so Peirce is wanting us to trust our abstraction enough to go all the way down in some sense. But he wants us to... You know, so he's not forbidding hypothesization, as you were saying.

Timothy Jackson: He's forbidding ultimate discretization, yeah, because that would imply a certain kind of certainty as well. You know, that... He says infallibilists believe that nature is fully discrete because that means you can have some, like, this atomistic idea, right? That you can have ultimate knowledge of a particular particle in some sense. And he just says that that's not possible because these things always partake of continuity to some degree. So you could have, you know... And he does, of course, in fallibilist, you know, classic fallibilist terms, he has this kind of asymptotic approach to some kind of certainty. And again, that will play out in his cosmological vision of the universe and its evolution towards the non-existent but real infinite future, which is dead, right? And again, we're gonna... We should really elaborate these ideas. But yeah, you can't have that. You can't have, as an ultimate sort of metaphysical principle, a discreteness because that would imply the possibility even of some kind of certain knowledge about this discrete packet, and that Peirce would consider that a block in the path of inquiry because you would get to a point and you would say, "Well, this is just how things are." This is his issue with kind of atomism, right? You get to a point, and you say, "This is how things are," and that's inexplicable in itself. This is just the discrete, absolute state that these things are in, and Peirce is like, "No, that's a block in the path of inquiry. You can never have a fact about which you declare it's inexplicable because that would be itself a hypothesis. Your hypothesis becomes, 'This is a brute fact. This is inexplicable,'" and he says that that is a violation of what a hypothesis is in the first instance because a hypothesis... The only value of a hypothesis or theory is its capacity to explain something observed. And if your hypothesis, therefore, is that it's inexplicable, this is a self-refuting hypothesis basically, or it's a violation of what a hypothesis actually is. I mean, his philosophy of science is very rich, right?

Matt Segall: Yeah, okay, so synechism or the Peirce's understanding of continuity sounds to me like the equivalent of the affirmation of a relational ontology, basically, in process terms. And the question that I was asking about the continuity of becoming versus the becoming of continuity, which is why Whitehead has an understanding of actual entities as the really real things which compose the creative advance and out of which the creative advance composes itself, if you want to put it that way. That seems to me to be a... It's a distinct issue. But, you know, what you're saying about the discreteness, it's like, there are these basic positions in Western metaphysics, let's say, monism and dualism. And it's like the dualists, sometimes they end up becoming reductionistic materialists or absolute idealists. And then you have, you know, the monists who often tend towards a kind of mysticism. And so you get... In other words, it's those who were stuck on only secondness. Those are the dualists. And then you have these degenerate positions of reductionistic materialism and absolute idealism. And then the monists are stuck on firstness and just in the sense of that, you know, immediacy, that as soon as you open your mouth to talk about it, you've spoiled it. And Peirce is trying to suggest, I think, a mediating position here that acknowledges the, in some sense, the irreducibility of firstness and secondness, but he's finding some way to resolve the opposition between identity and opposition.

And it's fascinating. It may be a little unfortunate, the par for the course for these American pragmatists, to s**t on Hegel, but there's obviously so much influence here that, you know, Hegel's appreciation and all of the idealists from Fichte through Schelling to Hegel and back to Kant. Of course, the importance of triads, even in dogmatic metaphysics. I mean, and the Holy Trinity, it's there, deeply interwoven with the whole of the dominant religious and philosophical tradition that Peirce is inheriting in some sense. But he's emphasizing it in a unique way. And yeah, I think helps us avoid becoming hung up on true but partial perspectives, which is that, you know, firstness, we all have... If we're broad in our appreciation of the evidence, let's say, we have an intuition of firstness, which is like what I think motivates people who want to defend qualia. Sometimes they're like... And then we have an intuition of secondness, which is like, "Well, no, hold on. We can take some critical distance from this and really think through what's been presented." But until you're able to acknowledge the reality of thirdness or the reality of relation as an ontological... I hesitate to say ground because it's kind of groundless also, but until you can inhabit that third space of being in between and being capable of becoming conscious of a generative learning process, ultimately, you know, where you're allowing firstness to inform secondness and secondness to inform your memory, at least, of firstness, then, you know, something emerges out of this that's generative and literally gives rise to generals, you know, and allows for evolution to unfold. And so, yeah, I don't know. I'm just... I'm kind of wonderstruck by Peirce, you know, after having spent some time with this essay. But does that distinction I was trying to make about people getting, you know, sometimes we get hung up on secondness, sometimes we hung up on firstness, but we need to include and transcend them both?

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, I think Peirce wants to eat all the cake, you know. Like, he absolutely is acknowledging the importance of each of those perspectives, but he's saying that, you know, if we have this triadic conception that we can encompass those without, you know, trying to reduce one to the other. I mean, I think, in a sense, he is a monist. In an important sense. And he's a... I mean, he describes himself as an objective idealist, in fact. You know, he says that that's the only intelligible metaphysical position, which is, again, something to get into. And we're going to find a big convergence with Whitehead, and I think the convergences are real. I mean, look, I've, you know, read both of them as well, and it's, you know, how does one know how one would read them if one hadn't? So it's very difficult to avoid reading them into one another. And of course, you know, I see them both as just great generalizers of what I think of as a fundamental evolutionary logic. So I have to read. That's just my, you know, limitation or my grounding. I have to read both of them through that lens. So we're always reading and understanding analogically, and that is sort of the point that Peirce is making as well. But I think, yeah, he is kind of a metaphysical monist, and he's a mind-first monist. But we should get into what he actually means by mind. And I mean, to cut to a certain chase, that quote that I pulled out from another essay for you, from "The Concept of God," he says, "By experience must be understood the entire mental product." Right? So when we get into what mind means, because mind, well, mind is basically the capacity to take habits. I mean, mind is the action of firstness and secondness and thirdness, sort of in toto, which is this creative evolution where, again, you've got the classic Darwinian triad, you know, as famously articulated by Lewontin, but absolutely explicitly articulated by Peirce in this article, that firstness is spontaneity, is sporting, is chance and anacasm. Secondness, sorry, because I haven't introduced that triad either, tychasm is chance, is firstness, is the principle of variation in contemporary, you know, Darwinian terms. The anancasm, secondness, is basically heritability, which is by, you know, evolution by law. But that's just repetition of what came before. That's consistency with what came before without any deviation. Right? So like the... Again, these are ideals. The firsts, seconds, and thirds are always... These are idealized operations or functions, which I think is also an important thing. And they're also stances, their perspectives, they're all of these things. But yeah, so absolute inheritance, perfect inheritance, that would be evolution by law, which is secondness. And of course, Peirce thinks of the mechanist, you know, mechanical clockwork universe of the determinists as a world of pure secondness. Right? So that's also pure, efficient cause. But that's just endless repetition. So he just very, very lucidly points out, and I mean, every evolutionary thinker should understand this, right? This is basic evolutionary theory, that in a universe of pure secondness, so in a universe governed by absolute deterministic laws, there is no novelty. There's only a repetition of the same, which is why it's ultimately a mysterian principle, which is a block in the path of inquiry, which, again, is Peirce's point about atomism and all of these things because you have to postulate absolute laws which are in themselves inexplicable in order to speak of a universe of pure secondness or pure law, basically. Either they've always been that way, so it's an eternalism of repetition of the same, or they spontaneously or instantaneously, he says, actually, because he wants to reserve spontaneity for firstness, for tychasm, they instantaneously and completely, inexplicably, by fiat, come into existence, and there, and you know, thenceforth govern everything. So again, he makes the point there, and I think this is really important for the theologians or, you know... But he makes the deterministic view of the laws coming into existence instantaneously is itself a creationist view. It's entirely theological in itself. But yeah, there's no novelty. It's like people have the question, like, "How... Why..." You know, one way of putting it is, "Why was the universe in such a low entropy state at the... At its inception?" But another way of putting that in a more vivid way of putting it is to say, "How come all the information was already there, basically?" Because there's nothing new, right? It's just a repetition of the same. So it defies any kind of notion of creativity. But that would be, yeah, that corresponds to inheritance in the classic evolutionary triad.

Matt Segall: I just love, though, that Peirce allows us to argue that anyone who affirms total determinism is a profoundly anti-evolutionary thinker, who has more in common with creationists than with contemporary biologists. How he makes that beautifully explicit.

Timothy Jackson:  It's kind of obvious if you've thought through these issues, to be frank. But, and one of the funny things about Peirce is that he seemed to genuinely believe that everything he was saying was profoundly obvious. You know, like he's one of the... He was kind of a... I don't know if you'd say he was a prodigy, but, you know, he was raised... His father, Benjamin Peirce, was himself an eminent, you know, scientist and mathematician. And so he was just raised in this intellectual milieu. And he's like obviously reading tons of science as a kid, but also, you know, reads the Critique of Pure Reason in his very early teens, and becomes obsessed with, you know, like he's... He was very an early, you know, developer in terms of having some relatively... And understanding some relative... And I mean, he's obviously completely okay with the mathematics of his time. He's one of the greatest logicians of any time. I mean, he considers himself to be... He considered what, like Aristotle, Leibniz, and Duns Scotus to be his only peers in the history of logic. So he is funny because he combines this... There's a bit of arrogance there, obviously. I think there are probably a lot of people who might agree with some sort of, you know... And he's very clear to say, "I only mean in terms of logic. I don't mean in terms of anything else. These guys are all greater than me. Aristotle is far greater than me as a systematic metaphysician, blah blah blah. But in terms of logic, I'm his equal." But so there's this hubris on the one hand, but then there's also this, you know, and this often go together, of course, you know, this is a very Jungian kind of idea that the megalomania and the deep insecurity are two sides of the same coin, and he was a...

Matt Segall: Was he an alcoholic, or there was some drug use, abuse issue, right? So maybe he had had a few drinks when he said that, or wrote that about himself, you know.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, I mean, he was a bit of a dissolute individual in a lot of ways, and you know, I don't know his biography super well, but he struggled, I think, throughout his life to feel part of any community. He felt apart, and by all accounts, that was self-inflicted, as it really often is, you know. But one of the things that he says all the time is that, you know, I'm not... He also says, despite having said what he says about being this peerless, almost peerless logician, that, you know, I'm not particularly brilliant. I'm not at all creative. I just happen to hit on a method at an early age. And everything I'm saying is abundantly obvious to anybody who thinks it through. And even like James, William James, his good friend, is kind of saying, "Well, you know, I don't know. You need to rewrite this stuff, Charles, to make it more approachable and stuff. And like, I'm getting something from what you're saying, and it's really profound, and I know, but it's beyond me. You know, it's incomprehensible." And Peirce just doesn't get it. He's like, "No, this is just obvious. Just think." But there is a certain obviousness to some of this evolutionary reasoning. It certainly feels that way to me. But again, I can't get outside my perspective. And it's dangerous to think that such things are so obvious as well, because then that means you... That is a path into certain dogmatism. But just to finish the triad, because I keep waffling... The thirdness, then, or agapism for getting into evolutionary love, that's basically selection. Because selection is what creates generals, what creates, you know, purpose and goals and all of that. And those are the things that are characteristic of thirdness. Thirdness isn't just relation in the sense that... Actually, relation was his term for secondness originally, but he changed that to reaction because it's a certain kind of... A certain kind of relation which is blind and brute.

Matt Segall: Resistant.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, yeah. It's efficient causation, basically. It's things banging into each other, you know, with no learning or no growth coming from it. Whereas thirdness he describes as mediation.

Matt Segall: Mediation would be the better term. Yeah, I mean, just on the historical point about James and Peirce and their relationship, I know James really went to great lengths to try to get Peirce a position teaching as a, you know, faculty member at Harvard. And for some reason, the president of Harvard, who had known Peirce from an earlier time, just didn't like him, and because he was a prickly, abrasive personality. And so, yeah, he just struggled working for the US... Equivalent of the Geological Survey, like...The Coast Survey, right? And just these odd jobs that he would do, which taught him a lot about, you know, the practicalities of making measurements and how to... That gap that can exist between mathematics and the perfection of geometry versus having to make the measurement and the need for approximation when you do those sorts of translation between the mathematical, rational relations of mathematics and the real relations that you can start to uncover through measurement, even if there are higher truths that are... There are real relations that we can discover through intuitive leaps that we then find later also apply to the natural world. But Whitehead actually wrote in a letter to Hartshorne about Peirce. And Hartshorne had studied Peirce's papers when Whitehead arrived at Harvard in the '20s and early '30s. And, you know, Hartshorne introduced Whitehead to Peirce's later philosophical work, even if Whitehead actually cites Peirce's mathematical papers in his Universal Algebra text. But Whitehead wasn't familiar with his philosophy until Hartshorne, and having been introduced to Peirce, Whitehead first of all told Hartshorne, like, "Please, please promise that you'll say I'm just reading this for the first time," because he was so struck by the convergence. He didn't want to be accused of plagiarizing. But also, he said that, you know, even though the time isn't quite right, the time order isn't quite right, he identified James as really like the American Plato because of how suggestive but unsystematic his thought is, whereas Peirce was more like the American Aristotle, because he really is a systematic thinker. And it could be that Peirce wasn't as clear as he could be in his presentation of his ideas, and James had a point that, you know, make this more approachable so people can see your genius. But, on the other hand, James isn't exactly a systematic, rigorous, logical, or... I mean, he's scientific in an empiricist sense, like he... He really pays attention to his sensory experience, and he's a great anatomist and physiologist, but he's not a logician either.

Timothy Jackson: Pragmatist guy in many ways, right?

Matt Segall: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Peirce has that too, but he's willing to, you know, carry it forward and formalize it. And he's a master of diagrammatic modes of reasoning, and in algebra and geometry. And Whitehead shares that with him, but I think, you know, the distillation that Peirce achieves with this triadic logic, I think, is in some ways more impressive than Whitehead's metaphysical achievement because it's just far simpler.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah.

Matt Segall: And for that reason, more applicable.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, and the whole idea here, which again, Peirce is very explicit about, is what I've taken to somewhat facetiously calling min-maxing as an approach to metaphysics. But it's what is the absolutely minimal postulate that you can make from which you can essentially derive the maximum variety? So one way of thinking about it, we've talked about Simondon and alligmatics in the past, and that's one of the reasons also to have recommended... We start our, you know, collaborative engagement with Peirce with this essay because what he's doing is he's defining the triad, and then he's mapping it onto all these distinct disciplines in sort of special sciences, you know, at various levels of detail and whatever, and with maybe dubious levels of success at some points. But what he's engaging in is this analogical reasoning, which essentially is what... Well, again, maybe we get to that... It's what mathematics is, it's what, you know, computation is really, but he's doing it in this extremely fundamental way where he's starting with this very, very basic, yes, triad, and basically trying to see if you can map every observable onto this scheme. And I'm like a leanness freak when it comes to metaphysics, as you know. You know, I don't want cause, you know, I find a lot in common with Peirce here. I think there are ways that he violates his own strictures here, and, you know, if we get into the theology, maybe we'll talk about that, but... Interperson's more explicit theology. But I really think that as a fundamental posit, like, if we're gonna say that we need something that's kind of basically inexplicable, you know, and Whitehead has this too, obviously, with his just creativity and the primordial nature of God and stuff, right? This is absolutely, you know, inexplicable. But if we're going to start with that, we want to make that as like denuded, as impoverished, as bland and colorless as we possibly can. And that's why I have, like, my own personal rules against using certain words which to me are just way too colorful for a primary... I just like the, you know, firstness, secondness, thirdness, and then you can... You can map whatever at some higher level and some more colorful... You know, I don't want to drain the color from reality at all. That's part of having the three universes that Peirce has. Again, Peirce kind of has these three universes, which are stances, really, three perspectives that you can take on any observable, like from the perspective of firstness, which then would be, you know, his phaneroscopy, phaneroscopy, whatever, phenomenology. The universe of inquiry, which is basically the science, and that's corresponding to secondness in the sense that science is, you know, efficient cause dominated. And then, you know, thirdness is a kind of the speculative, and what grounds the speculative is this minimal posit because the speculative is where you try to get the explanation from in some sense. You know, like, that's the fundamental explanatory stance that you take, whereas the other two are much more descriptive in a sense, right? And of course, again, these are idealizations. Each of them feeds back onto each other, and I'm certainly never going to say that there's no explanation in science, you know. I think ultimately, science is all about our desire for explanation, but what the methods of science are particularly good at is extremely rigorous and as precise as possible descriptions. And then we bring in speculative hypotheses that are, again, in a very much a dialectical relationship with those very precise descriptions, of course. And Peirce is very, very clear on that as well. You know, you have to be in correspondence with the... I mean, he is a scientist, you know. And again, that's what makes Peirce such an attractive figure. And I think Whitehead is very similar, you know, and I really enjoy James, and I enjoy tons of different philosophers, and they often are very much specialists in kind of one of these universes, so to speak. Right? You know, they take a... You know, Peirce, White... James, I get it right the third time, everything comes in threes... James, you know, he's this radical empiricist, right? So he's this thing, incredibly good at, you know, phenomenology or phaneroscopy or whatever, and that's his emphasis. Peirce is a much more balanced thinker. He's a much more complete thinker in that sense. And I think that's the case with Whitehead as well, because these guys are hardcore empiricists, but they also have the deep familiarity with the science and the methods of science. Of course, all of the methods of formal modeling. They're both heavy-hitting, you know, mathematicians and logicians, but then they're also willing to do the speculative metaphysics thing. And so, you know, most people we find who are, you know, really like highly developed on the formal side of things, don't really... are often quite dismissive of speculative metaphysics, right? Or they might be dismissive of firstness, of the phaneroscopic approach as too subject to delusion, and whatever. All that's all illusion, and they thereby, you know, they become specialists, right? And there's a great virtue to that as well, but there's a virtue to these generalists who have the capacity to vie with the specialists in any of those given domains. And that's pretty rare, obviously.

Matt Segall: Yeah, I mean, it's a shame that Peirce, while he may have been a more well-rounded thinker, he didn't seem, at least from what I've read, to be a more well-rounded personality, whereas James... William James was such a gregarious, sociable person. Whitehead never met him but referred to him as an adorable genius. And so, such a much better communicator and, you know, able to move through social reality in quite a fluid way, whereas Peirce just was unable to do so. And so there's... I don't know. There's just a paradox there, and, you know, Whitehead was maybe not as charismatic as James, but was still well-loved by his students, and...

Timothy Jackson: Maybe this fits in the sense... Sorry to interrupt, but maybe this fits in the sense that, you know, social reality is... and being present with your interlocutors... that's kind of an orientation towards firstness, you know? It's... and that's what people really enjoy in an interlocutor, right, is feeling seen, you know, feeling like this person's really listening, really paying attention and really responsive. And, you know, Peirce is too much in the world of secondness and thirdness, in some sense, to be present. And as that kind of synthetic, systematic thinker, I think he just feels kind of alienated from everyone who's not really doing that to the same extent as he is.

Matt Segall: Yeah, I know. I mean, it can't be easy to be at that level where these really deep truths are obvious to you, and nobody else seems to be able to notice.

Matt Segall: So I don't wanna just abruptly transition straight into the theology, but maybe arrive there by way of a question for you, which is like... I know you like the minimalism of Peirce, like, say, in contrast to Whitehead's more elaborate approach with just, you know, 27 categories of existence and 27 categories of explanation, and on and on. Peirce has a leaner set of metaphysical equipment that does a lot of the work. His categories are evident in Whitehead's scheme. There's no easy one-to-one translation, I don't think that's even the right approach to try to take, you know, to say like, map a firstness to one of Whitehead's concepts, etc. But I wonder for you, it sounds like so far you're more comfortable with the Peirce approach here. It doesn't... I mean, there's the theological side of it, and we'll get there. But... Because... You know, Peirce lays out these different options, right? These different views that he associates when he develops this analogy about measuring an infinite line. And, you know, the way we think about the beginning and ending points of that line sort of reveals our underlying metaphysical position. So he lays out the Epicurean view, the pessimist view, and the evolutionist view, and he has a rather interesting view of the evolutionist which may be carrying some theological baggage that you might want to leave behind. But, you know, just to lay that a little bit more... When he develops this analogy, which was one of my favorite parts of this essay, right? About this infinite iron bar that, you know, we're trying to measure with the yardstick. And if we think that, you know, we can say that the absolute first is the beginning of this line. He calls it God the Creator. It's the origin. It's the pure potentiality from which everything springs. And then the opposite line is the absolute second, right? It's the absolute... It's the ultimate terminus, and he calls it God completely revealed. It's the fully actualized state of the universe. And then thirdness becomes anywhere we measure along this line. It's inherently relative in that sense. It's history between the Alpha and the Omega. Because then, you know, he goes on, then, to offer these three different interpretations of the nature of these points. And he says the Epicurean view would be the one that says that only thirdness is real. Those two points are imaginary. The second would be the pessimist view, where you say it's cyclical. Those two lines, those two points are coincident. They actually end up being the same line. And this is where you think... As he puts it, there's no real progress to be made in reality. There's just a sort of dissolution into Nirvana. It's a cynical view of reality. And then his view is this evolutionist view where he thinks there's some kind of absolute distinction between the origin, firstness, and the terminus, secondness, that something real is accomplished, something... something is achieved, something dis... something different is achieved in the distant future than from where the universe began. And for him, he says that this evolutionary view is essentially the same as that of Christian theology, which is quite interesting. Now, one doesn't need to make that move, but for Peirce, it's not just, you know, many people in his time thought, "Oh, wow! Evolution and Christianity are totally incompatible," and he's like, "No, actually, there's a deep symmetry here. If you're going to be a Christian, you might actually want to look again at this evolutionist view because it aligns quite strikingly with your sense that there's a historical process unfolding here, and that real novelty is being introduced, such that, you know, a whole new understanding of miracles can spring from this idea of a habit-taking process where laws of nature are not fixed and deterministic, but that chance and repetition and selection can give rise to some very unexpected capacities, right? And so the universe has this... this arc to it, this telos to it." So yeah, I just wonder, given his full theological interpretation of his stripped-down metaphysics, like, where are you on the train, and where do you get off the train?

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, I mean, there's so much... This is... This is a very big question, you know. And I have... I mean, I have a lot to say on the subject, but I try to respond to what you've said specifically in a few ways. So I think one thing, there's... There are places where Peirce is making analogies. So he's... And he's speaking poetically as well. And he does tell us that, you know, our image of the Infinite... You know, the time in the infinite past, which is the absolute... well, the absolute origin, if you want. But there's a reason not to say it that way as well, because it's real but inexistent. It doesn't exist, right? That's not an actual state of affairs. It's not an actual... yeah. And similarly, the time in the absolute, you know, infinite future... So there's this idealized continuum, which is the passage from basically absolute indetermination, absolute indeterminacy, to absolute determination, which is a universe of pure inertia. So he thinks that, like, his endpoint, his idealized endpoint is the world, in fact, of pure secondness. It's the world of, you know, mechanical determinism. It's a universe of pure inertia. It's dead. He's very clear. This is the death.

And I like to think of it as a fossilized universe in a way, right? Because what's there... The structure that is there is the fossilized remnants of this process of active formation, which is what's going on in the actual history of the universe, and that is... Peirce is a vitalist, let's be clear. So that is living as the... When the universe is alive, it's creative. It's doing this active formation thing. That's Ruyer’s term, right? Raymond Ruyer’s term. And also that is the operation of mind. You know, that's what Peirce means by mind with a capital M, is really this creative evolution, this capacity to learn, this capacity to generate novelty. So he's got this image. And sometimes he... Yes, he analogizes, and he speaks poetically, and he says that the absolute firstness... We can't speak about that, like... It's very appropriate to speak about that in the terms that are in the Book of Genesis, for example, and we shouldn't try to speak any more precisely about it than that, because it can't be spoken about precisely. And this is a general principle about firstness as well, right? That when you... When you're speaking about firstness or you're in thirdness, basically, you can't actually speak of thirdness. You know, you can't even think articulately of it. When you think articulately of it, it's gone. You know, remember that anything... He says something like, "Remember that anything you say of it will never be faithful to it," or whatever. There's a... Although, you know, I have this ongoing debate with a Persian friend about whether or not this is a kind of principle of ineffability or unsayability, and whether it maps onto something like Alfred Korzybski saying, you know, "Whatever I say a thing is, it is not." I think it does map onto that. I think this is... There is a trace of a kind of negative theology in Peirce, but there are those who would deny that, and they know more about Peirce than I do. But I will maintain my point of view regardless, stubbornly, until I, you know, proven otherwise. And I find Peirce to be in conflict with himself at certain points as well, like any expansive thinker is going to be.

I'm trying to get to the point. I'm trying to get to the theology. So there are times at which he is... He's making analogies. And I think that in the passage that you've read, you know, that is God the Creator, and that is God, the fully revealed. In a sense, he's giving us a poetic description of these idealized, you know, first... Pure firstness and pure secondness. And then, yeah, he totally says that this evolutionist view is essentially the Christian view, and he goes harder and harder on this later in life, basically. And as he develops his evolutionary cosmology, which is what he's, you know, he's a big part of what he's doing in the last sort of, I don't know, 10 years of his life. He's also actually finding God in his personal life, and he's finding solace... You know, we discussed him being this irascible individual who found it very difficult to fit into any community, and basically had a very difficult life, and... You know, was unable to fund his projects often, you know, was quite poor, was unwell, had issues with alcohol and other drug abuse, etc. And he does find solace in Christianity later in life, like in the notion of a personal God. But, you know, when we see him analogizing this evolutionary picture to Christianity, we should also remember, that is it in Evolutionary Love or maybe it's in Synechism, Fallibilism, and Evolution, but in another essay, he says that Aristotle is just evolutionary, you know, metaphysics as well, right? So he doesn't... He doesn't say that this is... You know, originates with Christianity. Of course, Aristotle has his God too, right? But the metaphysician's God, which Whitehead will make a lot of... But he is... He is saying this is a general form, a general way, and this is his whole shtick basically, like this is the most general way to think. And Peirce isn't, so far as I know, particularly good on, like, comparative mythology or whatever. But, you know, I would say, find me a creation myth that isn't evolutionary, you know. Find me a... You know, like this is a generic way to think about the world. And we do go through these weird periods. And maybe, you know, I said recently on Twitter that they kind of reached their apotheosis in a certain sense, in the 19th century, ironically given the rise of contemporary evolutionary biology. But where we get this really mechanical clockwork, anti-evolutionary picture. But the... At least implicitly, the evolutionary picture is the standard view. So yeah, Christianity is an example of that. And Peirce, of course, makes a lot of that example because of the culture that he grows up in. And also because of what he finds personally in that later in life. So there's... There's all that to say. And I've said a lot. There's a lot to say, much, much more to say about things where he... Like, what is... What... Okay? What's the concept of God to Peirce?

You know, Peirce will say that if you spend time with a great thinker, if you spend time reading the works of Aristotle or just in the company of some great person, then something of their behavior, something of their character, something of their mind rubs off on you in a way that then goes on to inform your conduct and behavior. So you develop a deep kind of resonance with these great minds. When you contemplate physical reality, when you contemplate the actual cosmos, it has a similar effect on you. And that is you rubbing up against the mind of God, basically, right? So in the same way that, you know... Yeah, this is the analogy that he makes. He's also quick to say that saying that God has a mind is a kind of, he says, ludicrously figurative at one point, way of putting it. It's like some artist drawing God up in the clouds and, you know, blah blah blah. And that would be... And I'll stop talking now, but we can continue to develop this if you want, but that's where I start with my critique of his later arguments about the reality of God. But God is a very... Again, it's kind of like Whitehead in the sense that it is this minimal metaphysician's God, it's a kind of Spinozistic God. Maybe we could say to some degree, it's basically God as we view the order of nature. That there is an order to nature, that's God, you know, to Peirce. But he does kind of get into a personalistic God to some degree. And this is what I think of as... The last thing I'll say, this is a teaser, again, we don't need to go there... To me, that's the God of prosaic reality. And for me, God is banished in my scheme, my Persian scheme, which is just one of my schemes. God is only allowed to exist kind of in firstness. So I have these strictures, for, like, speculative hypotheses, you can't have God because God is just too inexplicable there. And it's too colorful as well. You know, it's not an impoverished enough concept. We've talked about this before, but I do... I, of course, wouldn't want to deny the experience of God, but I would also remind, you know, Peirce and others, that if this is a God that inhabits firstness, that is a God of direct experience, even the word God strictly does not refer, right? Because nothing strictly refers to, you know, direct experience. So that would be part of the way that I wriggle through this terrain and have my own strictures where I don't want to be... Again, I don't want to be denying that this sense that people have, that we might have, that comes through a kind of contemplation of the mind of God or the works of God, you know, the order of... But it's strictly a kind of firstness to me, you know, like it can't be erected as an explanatory principle. And I love what you said in one of our exchanges on this, you said, "I don't believe in a Creator God. I believe in a related God," and I think that that's quite consistent with what I'm saying. I just kind of go further down to the Negativa. And I'm basically like, yeah, but the term God, especially with a capital G, and all that, strictly does not refer to that related God because that's just an experience, and as soon as you... As soon as you dress it up... So I'm going on and on, sorry. But I bring Peirce's principle of diagrammatization and the idea of stripping ideas of their garb... And these are just sort of direct allusions to the things that Peirce says in order to reveal the... To make the relationships themselves more definite, which is basically what Poincaré says is mathematics. It's basically what Whitehead says is mathematics in his Introduction to Mathematics as well. That's diagrammatization. And so I say, yeah, you know, you apply that... Like, God is a function in a certain... In these explanatory schemes, and God is a function or an operation that you can have a kind of direct contact with by contemplating, you know, again, the order of nature and all of that. But when you're in the diagrammatic mode, so when you're in the speculative, analogical, alligmatic, etc. mode, you want to strip... I think, I want to strip that garb down to those relations and not give them colorful names, basically, because that obscures the relations in a certain sense, right?

Matt Segall: Goodness. I mean, it's certainly a contested term that has a history of use that might, in different cultural contexts, suggest exactly the wrong idea. And that Creator-relator distinction is important. But, you know, I think I'm not ready to cede the territory. I mean, usually, the word God is defined as the highest idea we could have. But maybe what Peirce is getting at when he says, "Look, I'm just saying everything that's obvious," and when Whitehead defines metaphysics as an analysis of the obvious, I mean, maybe when they use God, they're trying to make it so common. And literally, God as what is common, what is most common. So instead of being the highest, most difficult thing to reach or whatever, it's actually what we all always already share and presuppose. And so, whether we render that in terms of evolutionary love as the kind of the agapic tendency of the whole evolutionary process, or we think of this in terms of what mediates between possibility and actuality, and I think Peirce and Whitehead both have a sense of God as a mediator of possibilities. And then there's this idea of, you know, when Peirce talks about truth, it's like the ideal of truth is that some community of inquirers in the distant future might converge upon this vision. That's another way of thinking about the divine, you know. But it's a very relational way of thinking about it, and it's elaborated in a beautiful way by another friend of James's. And I don't know, I guess he must have met Peirce as well. He certainly was influenced by him. Josiah Royce, who develops this whole logic of community.

Timothy Jackson: I mean, just Josiah Royce, Peirce describes him as... well, maybe he doesn't quite get there. He kind of says that I have no students, but Josiah Royce is generally considered like the one guy who really got it. Yeah, so he was definitely very influenced by him. Yeah. Sorry, go on.

Matt Segall: And just in the context of a community striving to realize truth, the concept of God, the word God even, I think serves a function that's potentially... I mean, it might be irreplaceable. I mean, we could come up with some other...

Timothy Jackson: Yeah.

Matt Segall: Numinously charged word if we don't like the old one, but...

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, look, I'm not really in disagreement with any of that, you know. In fact, I mean, I'm in pretty profound agreement, I think, with a lot of it. And it's certainly not any objection. I mean, obviously, I have objection to some of the functions and operations that some notions of God are, you know, allegedly fulfilling, but there...

Matt Segall: Creator God, yeah.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, but there are these classical, probably with a big "C," traditional with a big "T" functions that God fulfills. And there are a whole bunch of them that I recognize and kind of endorse. I'm just... I am just leery of the name. And I... at least I've come up with which I haven't fully articulated now, and we don't need to. Maybe if we were really, if we read something like "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," you know, another Peirce essay, and his concept of God, for that matter, we could go more into my kind of quasi-Peircian mosaic and how I try to restrict the kind of spreading of the God function out of the prosaic across the whole mosaic. And you know what my reasons are for doing that. And that's just an exercise. That's just something that I'm, you know... that's just a way that I'm differentiating my own thought by constructing systems. It's not like, "This is my system," or something, you know, and I'm certainly not... I can see a lot of reasons to preserve the term God for some of the functions or ideals that you are mentioning. So I'm not sort of deaf to those. And it may be that I'll come around to that in a certain sense. And I mean, part of it is like, who do you want to talk to? You know? Who are you trying to bring into the fold to some degree, you know? But you know, God is this very polarizing term. So you are, by using it, bringing some people into the fold and, you know, probably pushing others out. And that's part of why I'm handling it with kid gloves, and I'm seeing how I might restrict it kind of systematically, almost formally, to certain regions of reality. But I like what you said about... this is not exactly what you said, but trivializing God, making God a triviality. That's exactly...

Matt Segall: Commonality. Yeah, yeah.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, but I like to say it this way because it's more provocative. That was exactly my approach some years ago to evolution was, and I mean, in a sense, it's still my approach, but it's just to trivialize it in the...

Matt Segall: One could say secularize it, too. I mean, I think it's another way of getting at the same...

Timothy Jackson: But I like to say trivialize. Like, I even wanted to base my favorite ideas in some sense, you know, it's like... Evolution shouldn't be at all threatening. It's completely trivial, trivial, and just observable in like all... you know, it's just a straightforward thing. What we do with that idea is different, but it has a kind of... another version of it. And I mean, it's the same as Peirce's 1, 2, 3 is just a logicization of evolution. Exactly. Again, we see in Lewontin's diagramming of Darwinian evolution the exact same triad, right? I'm not sure to what degree Lewontin was actually directly influenced by Peirce, but... you know, yeah, evolution is just to me like a very... just a basic posit in that sense. So I try to short circuit, you know, some of the arguments against evolution. To me, that's just silly. Yes, against all sorts of theories that try to account for evolution, against, you know, emphasis on one mechanism or one form of process, you know, but evolution is just process. It's just constrained change, you know, like... it's like nobody can... I mean, yeah, there are ways of denying it, like, I guess, a universe of pure secondness, or...

Matt Segall: So here's another question for you. Peirce's sense of firstness as involving immediate feeling... For him, the evolutionary process presupposes feeling. Feeling is not a trait that emerges later on through some mutational selection process. No, it's built in. And what allows evolution, what allows habits to occur, is only that there is a kind of primordial sensitivity. There's a... there's a... yeah, a feeling of pan-feelingism, of pan-sensualism, whatever. So it's... I don't know if we want to call it panpsychism. We probably don't. I don't want to upset you, but there's clearly... I mean, you said mind first earlier, that for Peirce, he's an objective idealist. What do you make of this aspect of his ontology, that if this triad goes all the way down, that means on some level there is... there is experience, there is a habit-taking tendency already with molecules, already with atoms, you know, etc., etc.?

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, I mean, I'm like, fully on board with that. It's, you know, it's like, I don't have these objections to Whitehead either in terms of the... again, the diagram, the structure, the operations in the thought. I'm really very comfortable with those. And, you know, I don't see, like you, I don't... I'm dissatisfied. I do think life is special in a sense, you know. I mean, there are ways you can justify that claim. But I mean, I'm basically a vitalist, you know. I'm basically a vitalist animist, which to me is just process relationism, which is just, you know, evo-eco, you know. These are just... those are generic principles to me. So yes, of course, there's a responsivity. There's a... there's a fundamental relationality in, you know, and that is required for determinate forms to evolve. So, you know, call it feeling, if you want, call it experience, you know. I mean, yeah. So Whitehead has a very beautiful definition of a generalization of the term experience. Peirce has the same. Like I read to you a second ago, you know, Peirce is a pan-experientialist in a pretty... by experience must be understood the entire mental product, you know. The cosmos is the mental product. Yeah. So because this operation, evolutionary process, that's the operation of mind to the extent... and it's life to the extent that it is in any sense generative or creative. So it's only when we reach the universe... like, and we never do because it's not an existent state, but there's an idealization, an idealized pole in the distant future, the universe of pure inertia. That's the dead universe. That is the... but that is the product of mind. It's just... there is no mind operative anymore. And I mean, you know, Peirce also, you know, one of my, you know, my issue with panpsychism as a sort of substance property version of panpsychism is really the same as yours, you know. And Peirce says... you know, exactly refutes that view. So he talks about, you know, theological... so more like creationist thinkers and their objection to atomism, right, their objection to the idea that atoms are fundamental. And he says, these, you know, creationist thinkers do not perceive that which offends them... hang on, that which offends them is not the firstness in the swerving atoms. So the idea that atoms are themselves somehow creative because they themselves are just as much advocates of firstness as the ancient atomists were. But what they cannot accept is the attribution of this firstness to things perfectly dead and material. So they don't object to atoms being creative, he's saying. They object to them being dead. And now I am quite with them there. I think too that whatever is first is ipso facto sentient. Sentient, he even says, right? I mean, sometimes people are loose with words, in my opinion, right? I wouldn't use that way, right? But okay, if I make atoms swerve as I do, I make them swerve, but very, very little because I conceive they are not absolutely dead. He's a vitalist. And by that... here we go. By that, I do not mean exactly that I hold them to be physically such as the materialists hold them to be, only with a small dose of sentiency super-added. That's process, I mean, that's a substance property panpsychism for that... for that, I grant, would be feeble enough. What I mean is that all that there is, is firstness, feelings, secondness, efforts, thirdness, habits, all of which are more familiar to us on their psychical side than on their physical side. And that dead matter would merely be the final result of the complete injuration of habit. So absolute habit, absolute inheritance, right? Absolute secondness, reducing the free play of feeling and the brute irrationality of effort to complete death. Right? So, you know...

Matt Segall: This is why I'm always... it kind of sounds absurd when you first hear it, but this is why I've tried to articulate in various forms the argument that life... dead matter presupposes life. Life always comes before dead matter, right? Just as firstness comes before secondness. And I like the feebleness. So there's a feeble substance panpsychism and this more robust Peircean-Whiteheadian view where it's not just consciousness super-added to a material substance.

Timothy Jackson: I have no objection to it, you see, that I am going to choose to use words in a certain way myself. I think it's important. So, you know, this was a challenge that I had in my recent chat with, you know, Levin Fields and Friston, and it will be an ongoing challenge in my interactions with that group of thinkers who I deeply admire. That, you know, they have... well, Mike articulated, you know, such a kind of, you know, pragmatic pragmatist, but I think Peirce himself would object.

Matt Segall: Instrumentalist might be the better word for it.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, but... but view of the use of language.

Matt Segall: Was Dewey's word. Yeah, yeah.

Timothy Jackson: Right. View of the use of language like, "Oh, it's all metaphor." So it kind of... or it almost doesn't matter what metaphors I choose. It only matters if this metaphor reveals something. And I don't mind the play with language. It's a difficult one to pin down, right? But you can easily do a reductio ad absurdum. Like, if I... and I'll make it just super silly. If I said the free energy principle was a, you know, banana split sundae, you would... you would be like, "Hang on, I'm not sure that's a metaphor." You know, and maybe I could then give you an elaborate, you know, justification of the choice of that metaphor. But having presented that to you without that elaborate justification, you'd probably initially be going like, "Hang on, it isn't just confusing me. Like, what is this actually revealing to me?" And so there are always going to be limits. And this is all I was able to say in response to Mike in that conversation. We're all going to agree that there are limits. We're all going to agree that words don't have intrinsic meaning. We're not essentialists about definition. We're not doing, you know, the... we're not, you know, committing Whitehead's fallacy of the perfect dictionary here. So we're not ordinary language philosophers in the sense that that cannot be our fundamental principle of reasoning. But we're still all going to agree that it's kind of important to have a shared set of meanings which are never going to... you know, my mind doesn't map onto your mind or whatever, or Peirce's or Whitehead's precisely. But I know what they mean. And that's the important thing. And so then I'm going to choose... and I'm not settled, you know, like, I'm very unsettled about these things. But I'm going to choose in a certain context to use a word in a certain way. And probably if it's any kind of, you know, quasi-scholarly or academic or whatever context or this kind of context, you know, if I'm going to use the word as a positive term in my thinking when I'm trying to articulate it, I probably will need to provide a stipula... I'll need to stipulate a definition for that word that is appropriate to this time and place to avoid misconceptions. And so, you know, I feel like I've studied, you know, Peirce and Whitehead, but just the structure of evolutionary thought to the degree where I understand the operations. I understand the diagram of the thought pretty well. And there is a sense in which it doesn't matter all that much what terms are used to dress it up. But then it does matter when one tries to communicate that to others. So there's an interpretive... and I mean, you've obviously done a great amount of work in the interpretation of Whitehead for people who are not Whiteheadians or people who haven't studied the structure of the thought that underpins Whitehead's thought. And that's an incredibly important job. And one needs to do that with Peirce. You know, what does Peirce actually mean by mind such that he can say that, you know, something like experience is the totality of the mental product or that mind comes first, that he's an objective idealist, all of those sorts of things?

Matt Segall: I mean, we all need to struggle against becoming Whiteheadians or Peirceans or whatever, because, you know, as philosophers... and you know Wittgenstein saw this, like we can get stuck in certain language games and certain lineages of preferred discourse. And when we're dealing with symbols in Peirce's sense, there's a certain conventionality of meaning, and it is somewhat arbitrary. But what Peirce allows us to see is that meaning has this triadic structure. There's symbols, but there's also indexes and icons. And so there's... even in our alphabetic languages and, you know, the definitions of words, there's a history of use. And there's etymology, and there's a sense in which some words are onomatopoeic and do have this iconicity about them, right? And, you know, simple words are indexical. And so when we think about the conveyance of meaning, we don't want to totally just accept this, you know, Saussurean structuralist idea that it's all completely arbitrary, is it? And, you know, Saussure, of course, has this binary understanding of signs, and Peirce gives us this more triadic relationship which restores realism. We can break out of the linguistic enclosure and actually touch the world and see how language isn't just pure convention, and that we could get back in touch with reality here. And yes, we need to do this translation work. But at the end of the day, it's not about all arriving at the same agreed-upon way of speaking. That would be boring as hell and oppressive and make us all very stupid. And so we need to be, you know, constantly struggling with these mouth noises. It gets absurd when you step back because, you know, I try to listen to conversations when physicists are talking to each other about the arcana of, you know, the math of particle physics, and I'm just like, they may as well be talking nonsense as far as I'm concerned. But they clearly understand each other, and a lot... and that community of discourse understands what they're saying. And in physics, because of, I guess, the institutional structure and the weight of certain crucial experiments, there's a convergence upon a certain way of formulating a situation, and everyone agrees to speak in those terms and to use the symbols of the equations that describe that situation. Whereas in philosophy, because the questions we're dealing with are far more abstract in a sense, we have no experiments to perform at least, but...

Timothy Jackson: Embrace vagueness.

Matt Segall: And vagueness. Yeah.

Timothy Jackson: Help us embrace the vagueness of language.

Matt Segall: Exactly where I was going. Yeah. Yeah. And so the vagueness of symbolic language is both its great power and what makes it so fragile.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, because it's got that tychic, that chancy aspect that's required for generativity. For if we go Deleuzian for a second, you know, philosophy, and I'm loving what you were saying, because philosophy is a heterogenetic exercise. You know, it's not just... Deleuze would say, not just philosophy of heterogenesis, which would be like kind of evolutionary thought, although that, you know, Deleuze would take exceptions with evolutionism because he would identify it with a particular 19th-century form. But it's not just a philosophy of heterogenesis, but a heterogenesis, you know, philosophy as heterogenesis. So it's always about differentiating yourself, not becoming a Whitehead, not becoming a Peirce, always about differentiating our thought in that way. And so that's, you know, part of what I'm just doing by resisting some of these terms, to be honest, or just saying, "Okay, I'm happy to use it." And I believe I get what they mean, and I love the thing that they're articulating. But at the same time, I want to maintain a certain kind of critical distance, and I want to be at... like, these are some of the points in the thought which I would choose to poke at and perturb, not because I think I'm going to do it better. You know, that's not what it's about either. It's not about, you know, achieving some kind of ultimate final explanation. You know, Peirce will speak again fallibilistically of, you know, that there should be no particular fact which we consider ultimate and inexplicable. So we look for an explanation of any particular fact, but never an explanation of all facts, never the ultimate general, you know. Because, you know, the... even like, that might seem to be at odds with the idea of this generalizing in metaphysics. But this is a mistake to think of, you know, firstness, secondness, and thirdness as a reductive paradigm. Like, speculative metaphysics is not about reduction at all. It's the opposite. It's about, "What can you generate from this thing?" Like, firstness, secondness, and thirdness in itself cannot explain any particular... you know, so that there is all this particularity in the world. And this is also just as an aside, and I think we could get into some... yeah, analogies with things like the free energy principle. This is a way to misunderstand that kind of research program as well. And I don't say that perhaps members of that research program or whatever haven't misunderstood it in this way at times, or whatever. Like, whatever. To me, it's not reductionist in the slightest. It's alligmatic, you know. It's analogical. It's like when, in this essay, Peirce jumps from psychology to physiology. This is not a reductive move. This is not a move to reduce psychology to physiology in any sense whatsoever. Peirce is not a reductionist of any kind, like in any sense. It's an alligmatic... it's an analogical move. It's a, "Okay, so I've shown that these structures exist... this or this," you know, "these operations... in fact, the firstness, secondness, and thirdness exist in psychology. And now I will show that these same patterns are manifest in physiology." Not that I'm reducing again. No, I'm mapping across. And something like the free energy principle as a kind of fundamental set of physical constraints that anything must be, you know, coherent with in order to persist over time, which is this completely tautological thing that Peirce has, by the way, an exact articulation of this in here, which I will find. We'll get to that. But yeah, it's... can we then look at all of these different... if we're thinking of it as a scale-free or scale-invariant principle, can we then look at all these different levels of description or all these different scales, different temporal scales, different spatial scales, etc., and can we then find the manifestation of this structuring set of constraints within that? It's not, "Can we reduce it and just say this is nothing but that?" Not at all. It's got all this particularity. It's irreducible because it's got firstness, and firstness is irreducible for... like, you know, again, Peirce will say, "A feeling that it cannot resemble anything else."

Matt Segall: So this is helping me understand my somewhat fraught relationship with FEP. So if the free energy principle or the Bayesian brain or active inference is put forward as an explanation for why there is consciousness or what consciousness is, I don't buy it at all. But if it presupposes firstness, then it is a wonderful way of describing what a thing needs to do to remain the thing that it is at whatever scale or complexity, whether we're talking about a rock or a cell or a human being. But part of, you know, the input-output, you know, the sensory and the active aspects of the model, that's when Peirce talks about firstness and secondness, like, the feeling of the immediate moment is not explained by that model; it's presupposed by it.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah.

Matt Segall: Right? And...

Timothy Jackson: And it is not a representation, and it cannot be represented. It doesn't partake of resemblance in any sense. It just is. You know, that's what firstness is. It's the thing that is itself in virtue of itself and nothing else, basically. And again, it's an operation, an operational definition in the sense that that doesn't mean that we couldn't attempt to describe, you know, processes leading to, like, you know, processes in the nervous system or whatever that have as their correlate, you know, some perception or other. But it's not about reducing them to that because they have this irreducible quality of firstness to them. So even though we can... and again, whenever we think about, whenever we describe or attempt to explain a firstness, we're already in the domain of thirdness. You know, we're not... firstness just is in this sense. But you can look at any bare particular and treat it as a firstness. That's a stance that you can take towards any bare particular. You could also treat it as something else. You know, you could enter into a, you know, secondness. You could think about the efficient causes that led to its, you know, particular appearance, and that it might itself act as an efficient cause, you know, all of... and then you can think about it in evolutionary terms, historical terms, in terms of thirdness. What's its purpose? Does it have a function? All of that. And we get worried, like, functionalism is some arch-reductionism or something like that. No, that's just a way of looking at... that's a way of framing a thing which can teach us something about it. That treating it as a bare particular will never teach us about it. But it doesn't reduce or obviate or eliminate... it's not eliminative in any sense. It doesn't eliminate the fact that it is a firstness. It's just different... this is aspectualism, right? This is all perspectivalism. But I'd say aspectualism describes like, you know, the three logical universes and perspectives are more fine-grained perspectives within those. So, like, your perspective on a... when you take the stance of thirdness towards something, it's not going to be the same as the stance of thirdness that I'm going to take towards something, you know, or that a snail, or whatever. So, you know, we all have different perspectives. But again, there's a realism here. There's an actual thing that we're taking a perspective on. We can take different kinds of perspectives logically. Peirce says there are three logical aspects of the thing. But perspectives themselves ultimately as a principle of firstness exist as bare particulars. So everyone has a particular perspective, and my perspective is also changing all the time, you know. And it resembles nothing. It's not a representation, all of that. All those principles apply.

One thing you said that I wanted to just quickly loop back to, and this is, again, taking the perspective of thirdness, I think. So the evolutionary explanatory, purposive, etc., kind of perspective on things, you said, "Words are not just conventions," which is right. But I think a key here, and Peirce would not use this language, but is that Peirce and these kinds of thoroughgoing evolutionary metaphysicians, so Whitehead for sure, but also someone like Popper, and whatever, they give us a deep account of convention. Because in a very important sense, the laws of physics are conventions of the cosmos, right? So, you know, there's a term that I would... you know, one of the things about...

Matt Segall: So conventions are not just arbitrary, in other words, because these are habits.

Timothy Jackson: Exactly. So, yeah, it's... the problem is not, again, to think of meaning as conventional. It's conventional as f**k. But that doesn't mean that it's totally arbitrary, you know. It's very constrained by context. And that context has both a... just like all context in biology, which is like all context in evolutionary ecological thinking, it has a synchronic ecological aspect to it. Who am I talking to? What's the community of inquiry? What's the discourse that I'm involved in at this particular moment? And then it has this deep diachronic aspect to it. What is the historical grounding of that context? So, you know, yeah, what's a conventional... but so is everything else.

Matt Segall: I want to go back to the question of feeling and to what extent Peirce is a... you know, he calls himself an objective idealist, but there's some sense in which, you know, by making firstness primal, feeling is rooted at the very origin of anything. And this is related to his doctrine of synechism as well, and continuity. And there's a little section of William James's Principles of Psychology, which comes out a few years after this essay. And no doubt, you know, he had been reading Peirce on continuity before this, but he's specifically thinking about this principle of continuity in his account of evolution. And he, you know, he talks about how he finds it incredible that the brain ever could have evolved unless there was already some minimal consciousness embedded in the process of evolution from the beginning. And so he ends up saying, you know, he's wanting to avoid discontinuity in the evolutionary process, right, where consciousness would just appear at some point when the brain got complex enough or something. He says, "The quantity of mind or consciousness”—or feeling, in Peirce's sense, consciousness isn't wrong word, but that's the word James is choosing to use here—“The quantity of consciousness is quite immaterial." This is a funny line. "The girl in Midshipman Easy,” which was a popular play at the time, “could not excuse the illegitimacy of her child by saying ‘it was a very small one.’ Consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all the facts by continuous evolution. If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things." And, you know, here he's exploring what he calls in this context the mind-dust theory. He's not himself affirming this position. He's taking it seriously. He ends up discovering a so-called combination problem here, where how do these little atoms of consciousness form a larger consciousness? But he actually proposes a solution to that problem that I think Whitehead elaborates on. And so, you know, here, I think he's making the argument that, following Peirce's synechism, what... my version of panpsychism, the process version of panpsychism, follows, you know. And so is this just a wording problem or...

Timothy Jackson: There's definitely a big wording problem there, which you...

Matt Segall: Choice of consciousness is... yeah, it's problematic, but...

Timothy Jackson: A couple of things to say. I mean, I think, and I never would want you to think otherwise, that you've done very important rhetorical work by inserting the Whiteheadian panpsychism into the discourse, right? But I think we should recognize, I think you do recognize that calling it panpsychism is a rhetorical move, you know, in an important way.

Matt Segall: So would calling it idealism. I mean, any... whatever choice we make.

Timothy Jackson: Exactly. So on the one hand, Peirce does say... I just really... I'm very pleased I was quickly able to find this in Some Fallibilism and Evolution. So he says, "The synechist will not believe that some things are conscious and some unconscious, unless by consciousness be meant a certain grade of feeling." So, yeah, he gives us immediately there the possibility, in fact, that some things are conscious and some things are unconscious, if it's a grade of feeling, which is very consistent with the way Whitehead treats consciousness, right, as a word, in the sense that Whitehead doesn't think consciousness is ubiquitous.

Matt Segall: And James... I mean, the section a few pages away from what I just read in James's Principles of Psychology is called "Can States of Mind Be Unconscious?"

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, so all of these guys... and this, I think, is a really interesting historical point that I would love to delve into more. But none of them were unaware... obviously, James wasn't unaware. Whitehead couldn't have failed to have been aware, especially given his, you know, slightly later period of work, of the discovery of the unconscious in psychology, basically. And I don't necessarily mean Freud, but, you know, Freud is a big figure there. But Peirce specifically refers to having read Eduard von Hartmann and his Philosophy of the Unconscious, right? And this was like the 1860s or something. Incredibly widely read by all, you know...

Matt Segall: Right-minded people.

Timothy Jackson: Right-minded people. No, but like, you know, intellectuals or whatever, you know. Obviously, it's like... but popular, you know, it's kind of like popular science, popular philosophy books. It's quite... it's a number of volumes, like big of its day. And Peirce specifically refers to this, specifically refers to the fact that much of mind... so when Peirce is saying mind first, cosmologically speaking, that this process of active formation, of learning, of creative evolution, etc., is mind... I was going to say it's a manifestation of mind. Yeah, I mean, I guess you can put it that way, but it is mind. He's explicitly not talking about consciousness. And he says that much of the mental, as, you know, Eduard von Hartmann has proven, I think he even says, is not conscious. And in fact, consciousness would be a positive hindrance to a lot of the actions of mind, basically. So, you know, mind and consciousness are very much not coextensive. And so one of the issues with... that I think exists, and again, I'm not like, you know, defining a perfect dictionary here, but one of the issues, I think, with terms like even feeling and experience... and again, these guys define them fairly rigorously. So as just like when you're listening to, you know, physicists and their domain-specific jargon, you know, the Whiteheadian domain-specific jargon is fine within that domain, right? But those words to human readers who are not... humans as versus the inhuman Whiteheadians, you know, like the general populace, they do have a strong implication of subjectivity to them, of... and again, we could define subjectivity in different ways too, but, you know, of what it's likeness. And, you know, I have like a big bee in my bonnet about that whole lineage of recent philosophy from what it's like, from Nagel to Chalmers, and thence to contemporary panpsychism. That's the lineage I think that, you know, the dominant form of panpsychism is in. And I think there are all sorts of reasons, and I think our favorite guys and girls, you know, would reject that line of that.

Matt Segall: My lineage, my panpsychist lineage is Leibniz, Schelling, Bruno, Leibniz, Schelling, Peirce, you know, Teilhard, Bergson, Whitehead.

Timothy Jackson: These guys, I mean, they're all different things, right? But you might... you can call them vitalists. You can call them animists. You can... you can... I... I'm... again, what's the function of, like, inserting oneself into the discourse? Whether there's a rhetorical function of choosing certain labels for...

Matt Segall: My lineage is older, mine's more...

Timothy Jackson: I agree. I'm... you know, I'm on your side. But, you know, my own intervention, if I were so inclined as to make strong interventions into that discourse, and maybe... I don't know, I kind of got bored of the whole consciousness thing a while ago, but I mean, it's still a fascinating issue, but I mean, I got bored of that discourse, having never been... let's be clear, you know, I'm a bloody evolutionary biologist. I'm not... you know, it's not been my area of specialization to be publishing in that domain, obviously.

Matt Segall: Right, right. It's been my primary concern for, you know, 10 years, and I'm kind of bored with it too, so I understand.

Timothy Jackson: But I would recommend, and, you know, I've been recommending this for a while, that as a heterogenetic intervention, so again, philosophy as heterogenesis, to be like, "Hey, let's resurrect vitalism or vital animism or something like that. Let's go with this idea that vital equals, you know, generative process, animism is relational philosophy, so process relationism, or, you know, evo-process, evolutionary process, eco-ecology, relationism, you know, these are all synonyms, vitalist animism." And then, you know, one of the places that one can really insert oneself with that rhetorical move is into the debate surrounding the new biology, right? Because everyone in that debate is saying, "Hey, there's all this new stuff going on, and there's a recentering of the organism and all these processes, but we don't want to affirm vitalism, and we don't, you know..." And it's like, why not? You know, like, what are you so afraid of? And they're only afraid, I would suggest, of a certain rhetorical discourse of a certain period in the development of ideas, which were associated with the dominance of a mechanicist way of thinking in biology in the early 20th century, in particular, where vitalism was tarred and feathered. And it's like, we don't want to, you know, we don't want to be, you know, identified with those people. It's like, yeah, but a lot of those guys, even though you're not going to inherit their full framework of thinking, but a lot of those vitalist embryologists and, you know, biophilosophers like Canguilhem and all these guys, you know, not to mention Bergson, have a lot to say which is of relevance. And then, again, if you... if you take a... if you move away from the words into the diagrammatic, into the structures, if you think more like a mathematician for a second, then you realize that they're all... they're talking about the same thing. They're talking about this fundamentally generative creative process that is... that is what distinguishes life. And again, you might then generalize that and become a full-on vitalist, like Peirce or Whitehead.

Matt Segall: Sure. I mean, there's real ethical urgency here to make this switch to a vitalist ontology because it's basically just acknowledging that life, the biological world, is not the sort of system that you could have complete knowledge of, which is to say the capacity to predict with certainty and control, and so come to master. It's granting agency to the nonhuman world, and that's...

Timothy Jackson: To the human world, even to the human world, because the human world has no agency in a world of pure secondness.

Matt Segall: Sure. Yeah, right, right? It's acknowledging that human beings have the capacity to act as creative agents, and also that we are immersed in a democracy of fellow creatures, as Whitehead would put it. And they... this world responds, the biological world at least, but even... I mean, it's quite obvious in quantum theory that the physical world is also to some degree responsive to our observations, much less interventions. And so, you know, there's a real sense in which the whole...

Timothy Jackson: And observations are interventions.

Matt Segall: Yeah, there is no observation that's not an intervention, for sure. But it's as much a practical as it is a theoretical shift. It's as much a shift of heart as it is of mind. Because when all of a sudden, when one accepts a vitalist ontology, you're making yourself vulnerable to the intention and the activity and the agency of a whole panoply of other beings that you didn't think existed when you were affirming a mechanistic ontology or a purely materialistic ontology.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah. And you were probably... I mean, almost certainly, I don't know, you've written about this and we've talked about it, but in affirming that mechanistic ontology, you were committing a major performative contradiction, and also committing yourself thereby to a completely inconsistent ontology. And this is... there is an urgent need for this in the discussion around, like, AI and technology and all that, because, you know, what's happening here? On the one hand, we have this narrative that this is happening to us. You know, technology is going to take our jobs, and this is all just like... we exteriorize the... and give this weird agency to technology as though it's independent from humanity. But that's wrapped up in this determinism, like technological determinism, that this is just going to happen. And at the same time, we have this other narrative about technology which goes hand in hand, like the technologists are always giving us both of these narratives, that technology is a way that we, you know, achieve dominion over nature, like that old chestnut, the old techne-culture, you know, techne-nature, whatever, and techne-culture divide, you know, culture-nature divide. And it's like, you can't have all of these things together. These are all really inconsistent ontologically.

And that's why, like, in the new biology... and I haven't read it, but I saw you were responding on Twitter to an article by Johannes Jaeger, and you were saying you've agreed up until the point when he caricatured panpsychism and conscious rocks or whatever. Again, that caricaturing... and I mean, you know, I've probably been guilty of that myself in the past, but that caricaturing is a sign of a failure to... a lack of willingness to go beneath and actually do real ontological work. And that's the same thing when someone is like, "Look, there's all this amazing stuff going on in biology, and we have to move away from a mechanistic paradigm, but we're not vitalists. We're not... just let's be clear, we're not vitalists." It's like, but if you actually reconstruct the ontology in the light of what we are becoming increasingly confident of in the domain of biology, you will be forced to become a vitalist. And that's okay, you know, it's just... it's just a word, man, like chill. It's totally fine. So I think that, you know, vitalism or this... so if we go back to the free energy principle for a second, because I just want to... there's a quote that I want to pull out from... well, somewhere in this essay. But, you know, this is the... as you and I are working on this kind of ontology, looking at Whitehead and obviously Peirce and how these things might interact with the research program like the free energy principle and the organizational account, which has lots to offer as well, even though we've been critical of that, there's lots of, you know, goodness there. And again, I'm more interested in, you know, again, mapping those things onto each other. I mean, you sort of said that it wouldn't be the right approach to map Peirce onto Whitehead. I don't know. It's not about reducing one to the other. It's about, like, when we put these things together, do we... you know, it's relationism. By putting them, you know, overlaying them in a certain way, these structures, do we find the insufficiencies in either of them, or do we just get something new?

And that's why, to me, like, having been... we were a bit critical of the organizational account and autopoiesis and all of that when we were responding to a couple of papers, but, you know, the relevance realization paper that we talked about a while ago, what I'm actually critical there is of this pitting against of these different research programs in a kind of superficial way. I'm like... should I say superficial? But, you know, that's the issue. It's again, it's not the critical thing. That's not an issue at all. I criticize away, but also do the constructive thing. Also... and that will involve dipping down into the ontology, and it involves this broader philosophical exercise, I think. And then seeing how these diagrammings, whether they're using, you know, stochastic differential equations as their foundational set of formalisms or category theory or whatever, how do these different diagrammings reveal different aspects? And then, you know, looking back at the ontology provided by the likes of Peirce and Whitehead and others, and how do these things all, you know, either... can we bring them into some kind of consonance by creating a new thing? Not attributing... not saying these have been saying the same thing all along. That's a boring thing to say. Say, "No, we can get a new thing by both pitting them against each other." Oh, there's something from evolutionary love that I really want to mention. But by both pitting them against each other and... but also using them to reconstruct each other, like allowing them to fight, but in a loving way, you know?

The thing I wanted to say about the free energy principle, though, is Peirce says, "The existence of things consists in their regular behavior." Period. "The existence of things in their regular behavior." That's the free energy principle. That's what it's saying, right? There is an attractive set which characterizes this thing as the thing that it is, and to the extent that it keeps returning to that set of habits, it will be that thing. To the extent that it doesn't do that anymore, it either dissipates and becomes no thing, or if that sufficiently changes, it's a new thing. You know, that's... that's what it's saying. One sentence. And that, of course, is also a description of evolution, of path dependency, etc. That's why the free energy principle is isomorphic with natural selection or the Feynman path integral or, you know, all of these different, you know, juicy analogies. That's what's exciting about something like the FEP, is that it's already a bunch of analogies in the physical formalisms, like all these different things from different domains of physics mapped onto each other. That's super useful. Why would we want to discard that? We might...

Matt Segall: Yeah. I mean, as a physical description of, in Whitehead's terms, how a society of actual occasions maintains the dominant characteristic that defines it as a society, FEP is brilliant. But it's not itself providing the metaphysics, you know, of where experience comes from. And so sometimes the advocates of FEP will, I think, covertly hypostatize the model, even though they're perfectly aware, in other instances, of the model-territory distinction. And what the enactivists are really on about, I think, is the phenomenological... the phenomenological issue of firstness, right, in Peirce's terms, which is that, you know, you're never going to get outside of experience so as to explain it from the outside. And I think there's a fundamental compatibility between enactivism and FEP if FEP doesn't hypostatize itself or think of itself as a metaphysical postulate, but as a properly physical description. And enactivism, I think, is important because it's insisting on this phenomenological condition of science, but it leaves us also without a proper ontology that both Peirce and Whitehead do a better job of providing. And so, you know... but when you're mentioning mapping Peirce onto Whitehead, who I think they're so convergent in so many ways, and it's not that I would want to avoid that. I mean, in some sense, what I wrote up the other day is an attempt to do that. But what I mean is there's no simple one-to-one correspondence between, like, firstness and... I mean, the closest we might try to put it would be firstness is like eternal objects or the primordial nature of God contemplating eternal objects or envisaging eternal objects. Secondness is prehension, maybe.

Timothy Jackson: That's a thirdness, you know. So that's a really interesting thing that has come up in my mind a couple of times. There's a paper that I'll send you, which I... you know, you'll know why I have issues with some of his conclusions, but it's a really good paper, "An Elucidation of the Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" or whatever. It's a cool little paper, but talking about whether, you know, firstness, in a sense, can't be absolutely first. Well, in the theological context, the envisagement of God, which, you know, is another thing that absolutely aligns between Peirce and Whitehead, that's a primordial thirdness, in fact. So that thirdness comes first if you look at it that way. Peirce also has the most beautiful and evocative descriptions of habit-taking, you know, happening as a result of this, you know, action of pure, indeterminate motion and relationality, right? And so, in that sense, you don't... that would be a model of genesis from a pure firstness. But elsewhere, he talks about the role of God in that, and that ends up being more Whiteheadian, but it means you have a primordial thirdness. But the thing is, it's not an existent thirdness, because that's another point, right? No existent thing is really firstness, secondness, or thirdness. It partakes of all three. You can only have them distinct as idealizations. And so the God of the primordial thirdness is... and all these things that you did highlight in your article as well... is not in time, is not in space, and all of that is, in fact, not an existent thing, is not actual, is real though, because, you know, Peirce has this strong sense of the reality of the virtual in different terms or the reality of potential or whatever. But yeah, it's not existent or actual, because all things partake of all three principles, right?

Matt Segall: Right, absolutely.

Timothy Jackson: Which is what it is to become actual.

Matt Segall: Right.

Matt Segall: No, I was trying different permutations of this mapping between the triad and Whitehead's different categories and concepts, and none of them worked, really. There are lots of interesting parallels, but then it doesn't quite fit. And, you know, Whitehead makes this point at the beginning of Process and Reality when he says, you know, it's not a fair criticism of one metaphysical scheme that it chooses to use different terms than another scheme. You know, the ultimate arbiter should be experience, and how we decide among metaphysical schemes is a pragmatic issue for Whitehead as it is for Peirce. And it could be that while they're both monists of a sort, there's also a... as a matter of practicality, a sense in which we're pluralists too, because there are various perspectives, like big, large-scale, theoretical perspectives that one could take on the nature of the universe that do justice to a lot of the available evidence, and no abstract system is ever going to accommodate all of the evidence. And so, because...

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, go on.

Matt Segall: We always need to be... so that's, you know, that's why it's... I think the best place for a metaphysician to be is sort of between these great, elaborate systematizers, right? Because then you don't get captured by one way of thinking, even though you're aware of how far each of these modes of thought can take you. And being stretched between them, you're able to, you know, generalize from the areas where there are contradictions. You can generalize beyond that and hopefully arrive at some synthesis that would be different from all of them in some sense.

Timothy Jackson: Exactly, and in that sense, one would have justified one's own existence or work. If you're just repeating what others have to say, then what's the point? We've discussed this privately, but that’s one reason why some people overemphasize their originality—perhaps as a way of ensuring they aren’t just repeating what’s already been said.

Matt Segall: Shall not be named.

Timothy Jackson: They shall not be named. Maybe they will be in a future talk.

Matt Segall: That's the evolution of science, of knowing, of how each of us contributes. I love what he says about the nervous system producing consciousness as the public spirit of this network of nerve cells. On some level, that analogy can hold for our collective endeavor as a community of inquiry. We try to move the ball forward in whatever ways we can, each of us making our contributions. There’s a sense in which this triad is active everywhere, but in the case of conscious human beings, we've become metaconscious, as it were, of this habit-taking tendency. We're conscious of evolution, and that, I think, is where this can become theological or spiritual. We now become the stewards of a process of creation.

Timothy Jackson: Turning evolution into intelligent design.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, which is basically what we do as pharmacologists. When we find a molecule in nature that has potential use, we bring it into the lab and try to make it less toxic or more specific in its targeting by engineering its evolution. That’s turning evolution into intelligent design, with the obvious proviso that it’s grounded on such a massive history of evolution. We're only the little cherry on top. Intelligent design is not the grounding; evolution is the grounding, and then we can do a little bit of intelligent design on top of that. Although, again, we talk about mind and all these different things, and we can talk about a fundamental intelligence of a certain kind. It’s just not a personal intelligence for some of the reasons that we've already discussed. But yeah, what you're saying about not becoming a person or a Whiteheadian, deriving one's own way of thinking from engaging with lots of different thinkers and the world in particular—one's own firstness—is a very important way of embracing the diversification of one's thought. All of our firstnesses are different by definition; we’re all having different experiences. We are highly plastic, experience-dependent plasticity. Our developmental trajectories, not to mention our genetics, are all different. But our development is all different. I think these guys are encouraging that, some more explicitly than others. We’ve talked about Jung. Jung said, "I had to systematize a little bit to do my work, but I'm kind of against systems." I don't think you need your own system—don't become a Jungian essentially. That's very Nietzschean and probably a direct influence there. The best way you can follow me is to be against me, or whatever. That's Buddhist—you know, "If you see the Buddha in the road, kill him." It’s an extreme way of putting it, but also that's the fallibilistic principle that is affirmed by both Whitehead and Peirce. No system of thought is ever complete, so why would you adopt it as if it could be?

Timothy Jackson: There are a couple of things I want to touch on relatively quickly before we stop.

Matt Segall: History.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah. So I wanted to go back to the way Peirce maps his triad onto biological development. He’s talking about Darwinism. He says Darwinism represents a true cause, which in the Aristotelian sense means an answer to a "why" question. You can use that kind of reasoning to ask why a particular phenomenon is the way it is. When he maps the fact—like we talked about before—sporting as indeterminacy, Tychism, chance, variation, and secondness as heritability or anancasm (law), then he talks about thirdness. He’s trying to be very strictly Darwinian here because he's mapping onto his understanding of Darwinian thought. He says elimination of unfavorable characters is generalization by casting out sporadic cases, and generalization is thirdness. So selection is thirdness. Then he later says we get a kind of imperfect correspondence here, and the imperfectness of the correspondence may be due to the theory of development itself. He doesn't say it's because his triad might not be great; he suggests it might be due to the theory itself. But absolutely, selection is not simply the casting out of the unfavorable. By casting out the unfavorable, you're actually making space and resources for the favorable. Natural selection is fundamentally an economic theory predicated on scarcity. By casting out the unfavorable, you favor the favorable. So it's got a nourishing and nurturing aspect to it. Of course, we can go into debates about the relative roles of competition and collaboration, but bracketing that, in "Evolutionary Love," Peirce totally gets this right. He just doesn't develop this line of argument in that part of the essay. In "Evolutionary Love," when he talks about agapism, the evolution towards a goal, which is thirdness, generalization, and purposive evolution, as opposed to chance and law, he says—this is really beautiful—"It’s not by dealing out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing them and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden. The philosophy we draw from John's Gospel is that this is the way mind develops, and for the cosmos only so far as it is yet mind, and so has life. Is it capable of further evolution?" So I just wanted to point out that when Peirce talks about Darwinian evolution and tries to be strictly Darwinian, focusing on the elimination of unfavorable characters, we should never forget that the corollary is the nurturing of the favorable characters. It’s tautological, but that corresponds nicely with what he says in "Evolutionary Love," I think.

Matt Segall: Yeah, that's beautiful. I’m tempted to continue on the theological track with the mention of John's Gospel, but I think my mind is too tired for that right now.

Timothy Jackson: One more thing I’ll say, and hopefully, it’ll elicit a response from you. I’m jumping around a little bit now, just because of a couple of things I thought would be nice to highlight. Right at the end, where he's talking about the triad in physics, he says a whole bunch of amazing stuff. Things you could map onto multi-way graphs, like many-worlds computation or state machines. He kind of describes evolution in terms of state transitions and rule-based transitions from state to state, which is what computation is. Notwithstanding his fundamental principle of continuity, which is a difference between pan-computationalism and what he’s saying, he says all of that, but he also talks about habits and how the acquisition of habits—or basically, what a thing is—are its habits. He says both events and substances are bundles of habits, and he turns this into a selection principle. Anything that fails to take a habit just disappears. So things that can take habits are necessarily selected for by virtue of their capacity to take habits. But then he says that substances—because he also posits at the beginning, talking about pre-space, like quantum pre-space—at the outset, the connections of space were probably different for one substance and part of a substance from what they were for another. Different points adjacent or near one another for the motions of one body would not be so for another; space is not homogeneous. Again, his ideas... well, he says different things. He talks about the progress of evolution being from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, which he takes from Spencer. But also this state of pure indeterminacy, which is pure firstness, is full of every possibility. Again, this is what Whitehead would say—every possibility is there, but in indeterminate form. But he says space can be kind of homogenized in this early stage by substances carrying their habits with them in their motions through space, tending to render the different parts of space alike. And I really like this. This is a rich way of thinking about the spreading effect of the principle of least action, starting as a local principle but becoming more global. Also, things like replication as a method of reducing free energy by making one's neighbors similar, so one isn't constantly having to find new ways to track new principles of least action. The homogenization of the landscape makes traversing it relatively easy, though this can never be absolutized, of course, because of the work of tychasm. But it's also culture, you know. It requires less action to keep track. My notes are all mixed up. It's also kind of culture, right? We homogenize ourselves, worldviews, and expect people to conform to sets of norms to make them predictable, to make one another predictable. We were even talking about this in the psychedelic discussion last time. You said that the egoic state is a kind of ethical responsibility we have to one another to maintain ourselves as consistent personalities. Peirce is just talking about this in a very abstract, but also cosmological way—substances traveling around and spreading their habits as they do. That maps so well into how people talk about the free energy principle as a scale-free pattern. I’ve kind of settled that in a very abbreviated manner. There’s a lot to develop there. But it's very striking how in that last section on the application of the triad in physics, many different, contemporary research programs could be anticipated in Peirce's thought. Peirce's contemporaries evidently didn't understand him, and he found it difficult to get his message across. But I think with another hundred years, and more years of science, many things Peirce was saying, and many extrapolations he made of his own thought, are becoming more obvious.

Matt Segall: Yeah, no. I was floored by that section on physics as well, and the way time and space are themselves emergent regularities. That spread in this way as habits increasingly permeate the universe and smooth out space. A couple of days ago, Richard Dawkins was up late, probably had a couple of glasses of wine, and tweeted out: "The Darwinian theory of gravity: Things that go up have long since disappeared, and we are left with only the things that go down." A lot of physicists were hating on him, and I think he oversimplified it, but he’s kind of trying to think with Peirce a little bit. But I don’t know that he's ever actually read Peirce.

Timothy Jackson: Also, when it comes to the law of attraction, Peirce says things like, "things that are not attracted to other things just go off to the infinite." So in any given region of space, you're left with things that relate according to laws of attraction, just by definition, because anything that didn't fit into that is just gone. That's not entirely dissimilar to what Dawkins is saying there.

Matt Segall: Yeah, I mean, the profundity and tautology of evolutionary logic is a bit of a mind-f**k. It’s so deeply satisfying as an account, but because it’s so cheap as an explanation, you almost wish there was more. But it's also enough on some level because you can see how this deep theology can pour out of it at the same time.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, we have to be wary of it. That’s why I refer to it as trivial. You have to remember that natural selection, even with its various augmentations, cannot explain any bare particular in toto. It’s just a set of principles. Again, the free energy principle—these things shouldn't be thought of as reductive. They’re useful principles that can give you purchase, allowing you to start articulating and developing an explanation—never a complete explanation, because there’s always going to be this Tychic thing, this inexplicable firstness, this chance involved, which is what again makes it seem cheap in a way. But we won’t talk about how determinism is even cheaper because it puts everything behind the veil—everything is inexplicable. There are no explanations in a world of pure secondness. No explanation is ever complete in a world that has firstness in it. That’s just the principle. But again, Popper is good on this. Michael Ruse, a fairly famous philosopher of biology, was among those who were very angry with Popper when he said that natural selection is a tautology—it’s not a falsifiable hypothesis. It is, in fact, the kind of tautological postulate which grounds a metaphysical research program. People said, "Oh, no, he doesn’t understand evolution at all. This is completely wrong. No, it’s hard science." But Popper understood the structure of an evolutionary explanation. He wasn’t refuting it—he said, "I have always considered myself an evolutionist." But this is exactly the thing—like the Free Energy Principle, and I actually applaud Carl Friston for fully owning this: The Free Energy Principle is a tautology. Natural selection is a tautology. These are tautological postulates. They're attempts at a minimal postulate, like Peirce's triad, that can ground a system of reasoning about particulars. And you need something like that. You can’t just start from nothing.

Matt Segall: I think you can escape what might seem like a circular explanation by remembering the importance of asymmetry here, and the asymmetry of temporal process. Things that are around today are around today the way they are because things survived in the past that were like them. And the things that didn’t survive aren’t here anymore. While strictly, logically, it’s a tautology, metaphysically or ontologically, if you affirm asymmetry, you get out of what might otherwise be a closed loop. You can see how a creative advance is possible, and how what you want to get out of this tautology is evolution. You only get evolution out of it if there is this asymmetrical process, this directional evolution. I think that additional—it’s a posit on one hand, but it’s also a phenomenological basis for it. Just the way that, yes, we can distinguish immediate experience, reflection upon that experience, and the learning that occurs as we do that.

Timothy Jackson: Free. Yeah, perfect. And I think even Peirce runs afoul a little bit of what he accuses... I mean, he is pretty Hegelian, obviously. You mentioned earlier that he can’t resist shitting on Hegel. He has some interesting things to say when he’s shitting on Hegel, and he feels a need to differentiate himself from Hegel partly because of the similarities, which he also owns up to. Some say that later in his career, he becomes more sympathetic to Hegel. But "Evolutionary Love" is pretty late, and he basically says that again, he’s got these three modes of evolution: tychasm, anancasm, and agapasm. By the way, people might hear inconsistency in me saying "anancasm, tychasm, or tychism." It's a bit arcane, and I can’t always distinguish clearly, but there’s a difference between tychasm and tychism. Tychasm is the fact of chance existing, and tychism is the doctrinaire acknowledgment of it as a principle. Tychasticism would be the argument that this is the dominant principle. So he’s doing arcane things with the language here. But he basically says that Hegel is an anancastic or law-based philosophy that masquerades as an agapasm. One way you can tell this is that Hegel is a thinker of—different Hegelians have different takes on this, depending on which work of Hegel’s you’re reading, which is why there are plural readings, and also which secondary tradition you’re in—but he, like many, reads Hegel as a thinker of final synthesis, of ultimate goal. He says that because that ends up being a foreordained final state, there is a global telos, and that is in fact law-based because it’s not novel. The final state is not novel. But interestingly, elsewhere—and I actually fully agree, whether that’s a fair characterization of Hegel or not, I totally agree—I’m very resistant to the idea of a global telos. I mean, there’s global directionality in a sense, but it’s emergent in that it emerges from all these local goals and purposes and directionality. It’s not in itself purposive or heading towards some final goal. And I think that’s also how people think of Teilhard de Chardin, as heading towards the Omega Point. But Peirce partakes of that logic, as we discussed, even when he posits the idea that the final state of the universe is pure secondness. But he’s careful to distinguish that as an ideal posit to ground his sense of an evolutionary continuum, rather than an actually existing state. He’ll often say there’s this tendency towards more and more law-like behavior, but that there will never be an actual existing state in which there’s no tychism. I would probably go further and say that in a sense, and it’s impossible to quantify, but the influence of tychism is never really reduced globally—it’s always there and always necessary. Elsewhere, Peirce talks about catastrophism—the idea of a meteorite hitting the planet and wiping out a huge percentage of life, opening up novel niche space. In classic evolutionary theory, that was seen as a really tychastic model—a completely contingent event that renders the whole history of evolutionary trajectories unpredictable. Peirce, inelegantly, frames that as secondness, a pure reactivity: the thing comes in and has this brute, blind effect of wiping things out. That’s a way of thinking about it as secondness, but it’s also a profound chance event, which in microcosm is happening constantly. That’s why the landscape is always diversifying, and why you can never have a global principle of least action. It’s a fundamentally local principle, and because every persistent thing is continually deriving its own path of least action, the entire landscape is constructed of these locally defined paths of least action, constantly shifting in different ways. So there’s a constant need to heterogenize, a constant need for generative novelty. Even though I can see Peirce's function for his infinite poles—my friend and I have joked about the idea of the scatter crystal, the crystal at the end of time, the universe of pure inertia, where structure is finally fixed once and for all—I think it's fine to have that as a limit concept, but there’s no evidence, as Peirce himself would say, for taking that on board as any kind of real metaphysical or ontological existent future.

Matt Segall: Yeah, Peirce's characterization of Hegel, as you just expressed it, is quite reminiscent of Schelling, who says that Hegel—Schelling has this distinction between positive and negative philosophy. Negative philosophy would be the logical, conceptual form, the law-based form, and positive philosophy is more experiential, more rooted in the existential, rooted in the fact that existence precedes essence, as the existentialists would later say. Schelling says Hegel is a negative philosopher who masquerades as a positive philosopher—he thinks he’s giving you existence, but actually, he’s just describing essences.

Timothy Jackson: Excellent.

Matt Segall: I wonder if Peirce was giving his own rendition of what he had read in Schelling's criticism of Hegel.

Timothy Jackson: That’s really interesting to point out. It’s also the Hegel that the French thinkers are reacting against. I mean, other than those who are positively embracing it. But the French thinkers of the generation of Deleuze and others—that’s the Hegel of Kojève, who is the thinker of thesis-antithesis-synthesis and the idea of a final global goal for history. I know a lot of Hegelians would dispute that characterization of Hegel. Many would say the great thing about Hegel is that he’s not a thinker of synthesis, and there’s always a perturbation. I haven’t read all of Hegel, so I don’t have a synthetic view, but I haven’t read the Science of Logic. People say that’s where you have to go to get the full picture.

Matt Segall: The great thing about all these philosophers is they are obscure enough that multiple interpretations will be rewarding and valuable.

Timothy Jackson: Productive misreadings, right? That’s the firstness again, the firstness of my reading, your reading, the eisegesis as opposed to exegesis. The function of tychasm in evolution, which is inexhaustible, the inexhaustible excess that is always there driving the engine of creativity, the élan vital, evolutionary law from Bergson and Nietzsche, you know.

Matt Segall: Right. I love his line about intuition as a legitimate way of knowing. He doesn’t use abduction here, but I think he’s gesturing towards this. He says, "Intuition is the regarding of the abstract in a concrete form by the realistic hypothetization of relations. This is the one sole method of valuable thought. Very shallow is the prevalent notion that this is something to be avoided. You might as well say at once that reasoning is to be avoided because it has led to so much error. Quite in the same Philistine line of thought would that be, and so well in accord with the spirit of nominalism that I wonder why someone does not put it forward."

Timothy Jackson: That’s so good. And it’s like Poincaré says, "Mathematicians do not deal in objects, but in relations among objects." So that’s the realistic hypothetization of relations. Content to them is irrelevant; they're interested in form only. It’s also like Deutsch, who says, "Computation is the representation of abstract objects and their relations by real objects and their movement." Whitehead says super similar things in his introduction to mathematics as well—I mean, that’s diagramming. There’s so much in these essays on intuition and abduction, which we hit a bit in the relevance realization talk. I think there are a lot of things we need to develop there and even clarify, probably some of the stuff I was sounding off about in that talk.

Matt Segall: We should follow up with John Vervaeke about having a conversation too.

Timothy Jackson: I would suggest that we also do more sessions devoted to Peirce’s essays. There’s a bunch that would be great, and some of them are very short. We could chunk them together. The neglected argument—this is going to take us further into theological territory. Oh, you’ll see me squirming, but it’s a beautiful characterization of abduction and intuition that he has in that. Again, we can... yeah, there’s a way of... you were articulating it beautifully before, what enactivism has to offer in terms of its phenomenological emphasis. Peirce gives us a way of thinking about that and how that plugs into logic—the way phenomenology... logic is dependent upon this intuitive capacity that we have as embodied, embedded, enactive beings. Did I extend? Yeah, forgot the "e" for a second.

Matt Segall: Affect, don't forget the "A," the affective as well.

Timothy Jackson: Totally. Peirce gives us that. What I was reacting against was giving short shrift to abduction in that paper, but also where they're going wrong a little bit for me is they're rightly emphasizing the need for this phenomenological grounding in firstness, but then they’re trying to pit the FEP against the organizational account at the level of formalisms. They’re saying, "Here’s this phenomenological thing, and then we have this organizational account, which, even at the level of the formal, is superior to the free energy principle." I just don’t see that. It’s not saying the organizational account doesn’t have its attractive qualities—I've been re-engaging with some of the stuff I haven't read for a while on constraint, closure, and all that, and there's a lot of great stuff there—but it's just another abstraction, another diagram we can make use of. Again, there’s a complementarity to these things, and that only gets lost when we hypostasize inelegantly. That’s when we start seeing these formalisms as being at odds with each other. No, they're both just different ways of diagramming things. If some formal language can capture a certain kind of real relation better than another, then we gain by combining their insights and mapping them against each other. We’ll learn more than by giving short shrift to one of them. By the way, it's funny, but I don't think the FEP is fundamentally computationalist. It's all about stochastic differential equations; it's not fundamentally computationalist in that sense. Stochastic differential equations, random dynamical systems—what do they all have? They have a Tychic aspect to them. There's always a Brownian term, a stochastic term, a dissipative term, etc., in any of those formalisms. Some would argue that this is what computers can't do and why they're not creative. Again, we can argue about that, but...

Matt Segall: Computers aren't buggy enough to mimic kinds of evolutionary processes.

Timothy Jackson: I’ve got a couple of books that I want to read—well, I’ve got a billion books that I want to read, and many of them are relevant to this work—but there are great philosophical arguments about how computers can't do contingency, and there are great philosophical arguments about how they can. But I think Peirce's way of going right to the core of it, saying that this fundamental discreteness—you can model stochasticity, you can model a Tychic element, but there’s fundamentally no emergent vagueness, no fundamental vagueness, let's say. And that’s, of course, how a lot of determinists try to cash out the apparent stochasticity, the apparent vagueness in the world, by saying, "Oh, well, you can always nest an indeterministic formalism within a deterministic system, and vice versa. Formally, it’s undecidable." The question is whether computation is fundamentally limited because it is irrevocably this kind of discrete state machine as its fundamental nature. Again, maybe it's not a complete ontology. I don’t think it is, but that wouldn’t make it not incredibly useful, and even much more useful than the kind of lip service the anti-computationalists give to saying, "Oh, well, these are useful models." But it’s much more profound than that—they're as useful as any models, as long as we remember that they might, like all models, have some degree of limitation.

Matt Segall: Yeah, I was reading—and we'll have to wrap it up here because I'm getting pretty hungry for my dinner—but a little bit more about quantum computing and how this proposed technology that Google, IBM, and others are making some progress on... There are certain applications for it in the domain of simulating physical processes where quantum effects are super relevant, whether it's understanding better how certain pharmaceuticals work in relation to synapses, or understanding different chemical reactions, or different astrophysical processes. When quantum effects are relevant to how things are happening in the physical world, having quantum computation to simulate that will give us a better understanding of what's going on there and how to really aim our pharmaceutical design more accurately because we can better model these things. So the extent to which the people who defend computationalism are talking about the same thing as those who are criticizing it is not always clear to me. I think the game is changing very quickly. That’s why the whole project of poly-computing and whatnot that Chris Fields and Mike Levin and others are working on—I still have an open mind about it. Even if I also understand and can often agree with a lot of the criticisms coming from Jaegwon Kim, Vervaeke, Thompson, or whoever it might be who’s more in the enactivist camp.

Timothy Jackson: Without going into it in depth, because I'm also really brain-dead now after this wonderful conversation—quantum mechanics is ontologically open in an important way. But a deflationary way of thinking about it—which just means that it doesn't come with an ontology—would be a sort of Cubist way of thinking about it. Quantum mechanics is a certain way of thinking about probabilities and the resolution of those probabilistic judgments in the act of taking a measurement, in the act of making an observation. We're resolving our doubt, and we may also be ontologically resolving something that didn't have a determinate state, but that's already going further than the theory necessarily has to go. You know, I sent you that thing, that Schrödinger quote. One thing we didn’t get into in this discussion, which is super important, are Peirce’s really strident refutations of determinism. I mean, we’ve been circumlocuting that territory, but basically, he saw the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries as a refutation of the precision of certain axioms in mathematics, and he said this has to affect all of our thinking. It has to affect metaphysics. There is absolutely no reason to believe from experience or formally anymore that there is any absolute precision in the world. Again, cynicism—that’s his principle of continuity, and that’s a refutation of determinism. But Schrödinger says to Einstein, "God knows I'm no friend of probability theory. I've hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born, he of the Born rule in quantum mechanics, gave it birth, for it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything in principle, everything ironed, and the true problems concealed." Like we've said, determinism actually conceals all the problems because everything in a world of pure secondness is pre-given, everything is preordained. So Schrödinger is being non-philosophical there, but at the same time—sorry, mate—probability theory has kind of won. In the sense that indispensably, from quantum mechanics to biology to machine learning, which is basically all probability theory on some level, we're not escaping this. One thing for this project that you and I are working on together and independently, helping each other to shape our thoughts, writing together and all that—a serious engagement with the history of probability theory is also an important part of how we’ve learned to deal with chance formally. If chance, tychism in Peirce’s sense, is fundamental to processes of creativity, of generativity in the universe, then understanding in depth how chance has been handled—and again, if you're coming out of evolutionary theory, you're always working with chance at all these different levels and material manifestations, which you and I've talked about in other discussions—obviously, mutations, stochastic gene expression, behavior itself, contingent encounters between organisms. Chance is everywhere. That’s why you'll never have a complete explanation, but really rethinking deeply about the nature of chance, and probability theory as a way of doing that, is very crucial as we move away from a deterministic conception of the universe. Sorry, Schrödinger. What do we get when we try to maintain that determinism? Well, we know we get many worlds or Bohmian mechanics, or whatever, and these things have their own aberrant consequences, not to mention the problem Schrödinger identifies about concealing the problems. I can't say it enough times—determinism is mysterianism. Nothing is explicable in a deterministic world; you only have "as if" explanations.

Matt Segall: Yeah, I think it’s wonderful that Peirce, almost sixty years before Whitehead and Russell were at the Principia, and about thirty years before Gödel—he had already sort of given up on this logicist project to formalize the axioms of mathematics. It took the others, you know, even Whitehead a little longer, but eventually, I think Peirce sort of liberated us to approach metaphysics in a new way, as itself in a more scientific and fallibilist way.

Timothy Jackson: Neither of them are giving up on logic by any means. No, they're giving up on logicism.

Matt Segall: By thematizing vagueness as not just a function of our own confusion, but as having ontological significance as well as chance, and building in error correction into our epistemology, I think that represents—people say philosophy doesn’t advance—I think this evolutionary rendering of what maybe a generation or so prior was to Peirce and the pragmatists was Kantian transcendentalism, to historicize that and to see the transcendental nature of evolutionary logic, which, as we were discussing offline, is an improvement on Kant. Let me see if I can get this right—what’s transcendental for the individual organism is empirical for, or historically emergent or contingent for, the species.

Timothy Jackson: Conventionalism. That’s the deep conventionalism that we've talked about. Our umwelt, let’s say, to go Uexküllian, is a convention of the lineage.

Matt Segall: And then you get in this evolutionary picture new generals, new universals, if you want, emerging in the course of evolutionary history. So you get to be a realist, a Platonic realist, without being an essentialist. That’s the genius of Peirce—he really allows us to salvage a lot of what the metaphysicians, going all the way back, have wanted but to do so in a way that’s open and not closed, that’s not essentialist. And it permits, for all practical purposes, infinite learning and truth. He’s not a relativist about truth, but it is forever out ahead of us, and we can only asymptotically approach it and approximate it. It’s just a beautiful vision. I would love to continue reading more of Peirce’s essays if you want to stay on him for a while. I’ve really caught the bug.

Timothy Jackson: Yeah, we should definitely. I mean, I think we should do Whitehead’s Function of Reason sometime soon as well. I mean, we also said we’re going to do some Bergson, which we should definitely do as well. But yeah, no, I’m super happy to do more Peirce as well. I mean, we mix all these things up. We could definitely do a few sessions in a row on Peirce if that’s your preference. I’m trying to find this quote—bloody hell, it’s in my notes here somewhere—but basically Peirce explicitly says, and it would be lovely to read it in his own words, that the process of evolution is a process in which the Platonic forms themselves are evolving. This rescues realism. This is also what I was trying to get at in my recent chat with, and hopefully ongoing chat with, particularly Chris Fields and Mike Levin. Yeah, we can be realists about generals. We don’t have to be completely... and we can still also maintain this observer relativity. We can be perspectivalists as well. We can maintain an observer relativity. So we’re post-Kantian, not non-Kantian or anti-Kantian. Our access is conditioned, and it’s conditioned in precisely this historical manner, which is a kind of nesting thing where, yes, the transcendental of the individual is the empirical of the lineage. But again, that is still ongoing in the differentiation of perspectives within lineages. A lineage is just a super-individual in this sense, and a diversification of perspectives, of phenotypes with their perspectival correlates in individuals, feeds back onto the diversification of the lineage. There are ways that acquire... a bit Lamarckian, and certainly Peirce saw himself as vindicating Lamarck to some significant degree, a kind of cosmological Lamarckism. Should we be afraid of that because he's been so discredited? No, we're not taking Lamarck wholesale, but we're not saying that August Weismann refuted Lamarck by cutting the tails off mice, breeding the mice, and finding that the babies didn’t have foreshortened tails. That’s not a refutation of the inheritance of acquired change. Darwin himself believed in the inheritance of acquired change, and you’ll probably find quite quickly that without the inheritance of acquired change in more than just the germline—your evolutionary theory will not work ultimately. There need to be ways, and we know of various mechanisms that include everything up to and including culture, which is how we pass on habits behaviorally, and then you know the Baldwin effect, and yadda yadda yadda. Look, it's endlessly rich, this stuff. You can juice a lot out of a basic evolutionary triad, that's for sure. So yeah, we could do "Evolutionary Love," we could do the neglected argument on the reality of God, which I think is a really interesting text for abduction. But how that can link into a spiritual perspective and theological perspective. Maybe I'll articulate in more detail my mosaic picture where I'm trying to restrict the usage of that term. I mean, I'm basically eliminating the usage of the term because I'm saying if it's only in the prosaic, so it's only in our direct experience—well, I'm very much an apophatic mystic about the prosaic, you know, and I think Peirce is, you know, like you just can't speak of it directly. To speak of it is to already be taking a perspective of thirdness on it. Anyway, yeah, let's work it out and do some more Peirce.

Matt Segall: Yeah, there's the Garden of Eden, there's the fall, and there's redemption.

Timothy Jackson: 1, 2, 3.

Matt Segall: I’d love to go there next with those essays, so to be continued.

Timothy Jackson: Ok man, this was great.

Matt Segall: Yeah, thanks, Tim. Enjoy the rest of your day. See you next week.

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