Monday, August 20, 2012

Musings on Section 93

Doctrine and Covenants 93:23: “And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.” This might seem to some a curious definition, since most of us, if asked to define “truth,” would probably say something like, “things as they really are, etc.” The inclusion of the word “knowledge” is key, because it signifies that truth – the “sum of existence” – is in fact not “stuff” per se, but “stuff as we know it.” “But,” says the materialist-nominalist, “'stuff' is what exists, independent of ourselves and whatever we may think about it. It is not subordinate to human knowledge or perception!” The Lord, however, knows better; the revealed Gospel teaches what Peirce, apparently alone among modern secular philosophers, was able to discern, namely, that “there can be no reality which has not the life of a symbol.”

A symbol or representamen, properly understood, is something (the symbol itself) that stands for some other thing (its object) by means of a second symbol triggered in some cognizing intelligence (the interpretant [symbol]). The process by which a symbol triggers its interpretant is the primordial form of action at a distance, that is to say, non-efficient causation. It will easily be comprehended that all action, at some ultimate level, depends on this process. Imagine, if you will, that the four fundamental forces in the physical universe are mediated – as the physicists claim – by the exchange of vector particles. But even at this fundamental level, we still must suppose a non-material medium in which these particles move, and some kind of non-material action at a distance to explain their movement. And this action at a distance is akin to that mysterious action (semiosis) that takes place with the production of symbols.

Not only that, no object can be cognized except in terms of qualities of one sort or another. But all such cognition is representation and involves the use of symbols. And symbols, as we have seen, beget more symbols, which tend always towards the realization of some new fact. For example, if I, walking down a street, hear an angry barking behind me, I will interpret those sounds and form a cognition that may lead to my turning around to see if there is a dog pursuing me, or to my simply running for it. No matter what choices I make, I cannot help the fact that the sounding of barking will trigger in me a series of cognitions (which are mental symbols) and consequent actions, even if those actions are merely thoughts. This is a pretty crude example, but it serves to illustrate why Peirce would make the following claim (ignored, alas, even by some semioticians, who fail to fully grasp the all-inclusiveness of symbols):

“That the object has at all a character can only consist in a representation that it has so, a representation having power to live down all opposition.... The very entelechy of being lies in being representable. A sign cannot even be false without being a sign and so far as it is a sign it must be true. A symbol is an embryonic reality endowed with power of growth into the very truth, the very entelechy of reality.”

Thus our scripture appears to mean something like this: truth is symbolic (which includes, but is not confined to, cognitive) representation of all things, past, present, and future. And inasmuch as all reality has life only qua symbols, we cannot cognize or represent reality except as something which is both cognizable and representable. This is why truth is knowledge.

Doctrine and Covenants 93: 29: “....Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.” Light is elsewhere (Section 88) defined as “the law by which all things are governed.” This definition has reference to the particular sort of light that “proceeds forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space.” As a general notion, we may say that light is (eternal) law. But what is law, if not a manifestation of Thirdness, the third (and most generally overlooked) of the three grand general phenomena of which all reality is constituted. In the physical universe, we see Thirdness manifest as physical laws, whereas in the mental universe (which our science of Time erroneously prescinds from the physical), it is manifest as habit, motive, and the like. In essence, Thirdness is akin to final causation. In any case, we might read our definition of intelligence as “the law/mental habit associated with truth,” or, even more precisely, per Peirce, “the Thirdness of truth.”

“Intelligence” in LDS scripture is often roughly synonymous with “consciousness,” that ultimate spark of being that permits cognition, and which is characteristic of sentient life. Abraham was shown in vision “the intelligences that were organized before the world was” (NB: not “created”!), as well as the hierarchy of understanding and enlightenment among them. But he might have referred instead to the “Thirdnesses of truth that were organized before the world was.” These, we suppose, were our primordial selves; by “organized,” perhaps Abraham has reference to the raising of them from mere primal awareness to clothe them with personalities and other individuating attributes. Regardless, it is profitable to ask what these “intelligences” were in the beginning, and by what principle they existed at all. We have already seen that they were not created or made, and that such is impossible, even for God. Every Self (and therefore every discrete intelligence) is a Symbol, and withal one with the full-fledged capability of representing itself, not merely to some external Other, but to itself as an Other. It is in this that the so-called “stream of consciousness” consists – the present Self representing itself to the past Self for the sake of the future Self.  This process, which we might style “autosemiosis,” actually confers on the Self a composite nature; it gives the so-called individual a double identity. A Self may be regarded as the most fully-reified type of Symbol, because, like all symbols (and no other category of existent thing), it possesses the power of self-replication (all symbols, recall, produce interpretant symbols, which are replicas, albeit imperfect ones). But a Self-symbol is capable of doing it purposefully. The most enlightened intelligences/Selves are capable of the most extended, refined, and complex purposeful representation/action. So it would seem that, in some mysterious way, God took certain eternal intelligences and endued them with greater capacity to act purposefully, which capacity may have been bound up with giving them finite contours in the form of spiritual bodies.

Before this took place, they (we!) were primordial intelligences – symbols capable of self-representation. And they existed in the first place because truth needs both to represent and to be represented; otherwise, growth, and (as we shall see below), existence in any form is impossible.

The ancient Hebrews must have understood this principle – I mean the principle that a Self is not a static entity but a symbol constantly representing itself to itself and to some Other. This is why the Savior characterized himself, not as “the great I,” but as “the great I Am,” those two words -- "I Am" -- signifying the primordial act of self-representation.

Many years ago I passed out in a doctor’s office. It was not like falling asleep; it was like being extinguished. When the first glimmerings of consciousness returned, my initial impression was that I was an existent being, but who, what, or where I could not tell. From that followed a rapid-fire chain of inferences culminating in the memory of my name and circumstances, including, finally, the embarassing realization of lying supine on the floor of the doctor's office. We all, I suppose, had something similar happen sometime in the remote past when we became self-aware, or, in other words, when we had perceived enough about the external Other to frame a hypothesis of a Self in which those perceptions and sensations could inhere. And Christ, who was Jehovah, the Firstborn, was the first and greatest “I Am,” the Self-symbol to which all other Self-symbols must be subordinate.

All of this might smack of mystical gibberish, because so few of us learn to reason about symbols, in spite of the fact that symbols are such an essential part of who and what we are. This, thanks to the labors of Peirce building on foundations laid by Scotus, is apodictic reasoning of a different sort than has been in vogue since the age of Descartes (and, Peirce would say, of William of Occam). It cannot be apprehended all at once, this logic of signs (which Peirce called the logic of relatives), but has to grow inside. I happen to think it is worth sharing with the Saints, as inadequate as my understanding of such matters is, because I believe that it is the best way to arrive at an understanding of such doctrines as are to be found in Section 93 (which are typically glozed over in our Sunday School classes). But the Lord would not have instructed his servants to reveal such things if he did not intend for us to try to comprehend them. After all, we must come to know God, and that means, among other things, comprehending his attributes, among which light, intelligence, and truth figure very prominently.

Doctrine and Covenants 93: 30: “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.” This verse is a death knell for the dogma of determinism that has informed science since the Greeks first postulated atoms. The pre-eminence of Laplace's Demon, in its many guises, has gone essentially unchallenged among men of science until the late 20th Century (and even the philosophers, in the main, embraced the notion that matter behaves ultimately as deterministic and time-neutral cosmic machinery, the Universe-as-Automaton). Lately, however, certain enlightened souls, like the late Prigogine, have noticed that matter, in real-life, complex, far-from equilibrium contexts (so-called "dissipative structures"), behaves probabilistically, and that such behavior is irreducible, even in theory, to the crude determinism of trajectories (and, more recently, quantum waves) of classical physics. To insist upon determinism is to deny the elements their agency and, in the end, their very existence. As Vladimir Nabokov put it, "What can be controlled is never completely real; what is real can never be completely controlled."

Truth and intelligence(s) are symbols; as such they have the power of representation, which is action (Peirce’s “entelechy of being”). More than this, they MUST represent, and that eternally, inasmuch as one symbol begets another ad infinitum.

This, then, is existence: to act as a symbol, and especially, to represent oneself to some Other. And, we would venture to add, there is no other form of being than this (existence), since even pure Nothingness cannot be conceived of; Nothingness, in affording space for representation, as Peirce observed, is therefore itself a species of symbol, albeit a wholly vague one. This is perhaps why the Spirit whispered to the hymnist that “no man hath seen pure space.” Absolute, asemiotic nothingness is impossible. The existent universe is thus pervaded with light (i.e., law, or Thirdness) and populated with an infinity of intelligences, not all of which possess the same degree of sentience, but all of which are essentially semiotic progressions working out their respective lives without end.

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