Re: Ask Meno Questions • Discussion

JA: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/8786
VA: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/8790
JA: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/8802
JA: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/8806
VA: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/8809

JA: Peirce regarded the body as one of the first objects
     that a developing being would naturally “construct”
     from the flux of experience, that is, construe or
     conceptualize as an object from the impressions
     available in the stream of awareness.

VA: Is it possible to say that the body is an “objective”, in the sense
     that living organisms maintain homeostasis;  they construe themselves
     through their semiotic relationships with their environments?

VA: and is it possible to say that one's conceptualization of body is
     an “objective” in the sense that ideas, like living organisms, are
     mental habits that adapt and change in order to persist through time?

Tori & All,

I tend to favor that general way of speaking, having been brought up
on classical cybernetics, optimal control, and systems theory, where
we think of a system as passing through its state space, controlled
by its “objective” to optimize a given “objective function” on its
space of states.  When it comes to choosing intuition-aiding names
for the various components of systems and regions of state spaces,
those details can be fit to the particular type of system in view.

In the case of creatures like ourselves, it is possible to regard
our conscious contents as representing our body's theory of what
is likely to deserve our mind's attention.  If that theory is
a good one, then we may live to be conscious of another day.

Regards,

Jon

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