Peirce, Spinozism, Cosmic evolution, and a Universal Turing Machine
After yesterday’s post on Huxley’s account of cosmic evolution, Trevor Pearce (whose book, Pragmatism’s Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy I warmly recommend), called my attention to Charles S. Peirce’s (1891) essay, "The architecture of theories." The Monist. This is apt because in it Peirce defends what he calls a “Cosmogonic philosophy.” (pp. 175-6) Before I enter into it, I should note that throughout it Peirce’s brilliance and technical creativity is on display, but that it is also a bit of a trip to read. In a short amount of space, Peirce jumps from topic to topic. The piece is full of arguments in the sense of considerations in favor of a view, but it does not develop any arguments in our modern sense at any length.
When it comes to cosmogony, there were traditionally three mutually conflicting options: the epicurean (the system of chance), the Spinozist (the system of necessity), and the system of divine order. However, when Peirce confronts the three options in his characteristically distinct fashion, we encounter a twist:
One of the questions philosophy has to consider is whether the development of the universe is like the increase of an angle, so that it proceeds forever without tending toward anything unattained, which I take to be the Epicurean view, or whether the universe sprang from a chaos in the infinitely distant past to tend toward something different in the infinitely distant future, or whether the universe sprang from nothing in the past to go on indefinitely toward a point in the in finitely distant future, which, were it attained, would be the mere nothing from which it set out. (172-173)
The first two options are fairly clearly the system of chance and necessity. However, the third option is while allowing for creation out of nothing and teleological in character (“toward a point in the…future”), different from the standard deist or theist account; it looks as if it is also cyclical (from nothing to nothing). The details are worth figuring out, but need not concern us here because Peirce’s own view will turn out to be a novel variant on the system of necessity.
Not unlike Huxley, Peirce is undaunted by the division of cognitive labor. Here’s what he suggests to a system-builder in philosophy:
Peirce then launches into offering a “hint” at the results of his “long studies.” (p. 163) He starts his narrative with Galileo and the origin of dynamics and rapidly moves through the centuries to focus on the role of laws in scientific research. The first stunner occurs at the atomic level:
When we come to atoms, the presumption in favor of a simple law seems very slender. There is room for serious doubt whether the fundamental laws of mechanics hold good for single atoms, and it seems quite likely that they are capable of motion in more than three dimensions. (p. 164)
Unfortunately, Peirce does not explain his grounds for this piece of speculation. This is especially odd because we quickly learn that Peirce himself is committed to a kind of principle of sufficient reason for events, facts, or phenomena that exhibit orderliness to minds:
To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for. That a pitched coin should sometimes turn up heads and sometimes tails calls for no particular explanation; but if it shows heads every time, we wish to know how this result has been brought about. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason.—p. 165
That is to say, Peirce denies that universal laws of nature can be taken as primitive (as, say, Tim Maudlin would suggest in our time). Now, unlike rationalists like Descartes, Clarke, or Leibniz, Peirce does not pursue the grounds of laws of nature in some metaphysical principle. Rather, not unlike Huxley, he proposes that the laws of nature are themselves the effects of evolution, and, in fact, could only be the effects of such a process. (I am unsure whether he has read Huxley’s, The Progress of Science: 1837-1887, but there may be a common source because he is also explicitly responding to Spencer’s synthetic philosophy.) This turns out to have far-reaching consequences:
Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature and for uniformity in general is to suppose them results of evolution. This supposes them not to be absolute, not to be obeyed precisely. It makes an element of indeterminacy, spontaneity, or absolute chance in nature. Just as, when we attempt to verify any physical law, we find our observations cannot be precisely satisfied by it, and rightly attribute the discrepancy to errors of observation, so we must suppose far more minute discrepancies to exist owing to the imperfect cogency of the law itself, to a certain swerving of the facts from any definite formula.—p. 165
Not to put too fine point on Peirce’s position: if laws of nature are the effects of an evolutionary process then the laws of nature cannot be exception-less; they will have to be granular in character. Lurking here is a further regress: the rules or laws of nature that guide this evolutionary process are, if they are produced by evolution, as they must be, themselves granular, etc. Peirce seems to bite this bullet because it looks like he thinks nature must have “more minute discrepancies” all the way down. And that’s because like Huxley and (later) Dennett, he treats evolution as a kind of universal acid: “Wherever there are large numbers of objects, having a tendency to retain certain characters unaltered, this tendency, however, not being absolute but giving room for chance variations, then, if the amount of variation is absolutely limited in certain directions by the destruction of everything which reaches those limits, there will be a gradual tendency to change in directions of departure from them.” (p. 167)*
In fact, for Peirce this is no bullet to bite for two reasons: first, because he thinks that there is always a discrepancy between observation and laws. This echoes Descartes’ position in his Principles. I mention this because while Peirce’s argument is an impeccable instance of evolutionary reasoning, it is still somewhat surprising to see this argument so late in the nineteenth century after a couple of centuries of non-trivial pay-off from Newton’s dictum that in enquiry, laws must be taken to hold “either exactly or very nearly true not withstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exception.”
Second, Peirce explicitly rejects the idea — variants of which can be found in Descartes, Kant, and (as we saw yesterday) Huxley — that a homogeneous original matter can give rise to the observed variety in the universe. As he puts it, “exact law obviously never can produce heterogeneity out of homogeneity.” (p. 165) This echoes Newton’s argument against Spinozism in the General Scholium, although Peirce takes it in a different direction than Newton would.
For, it turns out that while Peirce certainly thinks reality is in a certain sense granular and (with a nod to ancient Epicureans) swerve-y in character, Peirce rejects the further regress (in the context of disagreeing with Spencer). For, while the granular laws of visible nature are the effect of an evolutionary process, he does not think we need to explain (as Herbert Spencer suggests we must) this process in terms of further laws. For, “the principle of evolution requires no extraneous cause.” (p. 165) Evolution is, as it were, inherent in reality itself “since the tendency to growth can be supposed itself to have grown from an infinitesimal germ accidentally started.” (p. 165)
The previous paragraph seems rather ad hoc or question-begging. But Peirce has a further consideration up his sleeve: “because the law of the conservation of energy is equivalent to the proposition that all operations governed by mechanical laws are reversible; so that an immediate corollary from it is that growth is not explicable by those laws, even if they be not violated in the process of growth.” (p. 165)
With that in place, Peirce’s own Darwinian cosmogony goes like this:
It would suppose that in the beginning—infinitely remote—there was a chaos of unpersonalised feeling, which being without connection or regularity would properly be without existence. This feeling, sporting here and there in pure arbitrariness, would have started the germ of a generalising tendency. Its other sportings would be evanescent, but this would have a growing virtue. Thus, the tendency to habit would be started; and from this with the other principles of evolution all the regularities of the universe would be evolved. At any time, however, an element of pure chance survives and will remain until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system, in which mind is at last crystallised in the infinitely distant future.—176.
Above I called a position like this ‘Spinozist.’ But unlike Spinoza, for whom an infinite mind is always co-extensive with the universe, for Peirce such a mind is the emergent, evolutionary effect of the universe. That is, evolution is understood as an ordering principle that, while relying on chance, also, by first making the universe more law-like, eventually eliminates chance over infinite time from the universe. Somewhat surprisingly, then, the pure infinite mind that is the outcome of this cosmic evolution will be a system of strict universal laws.
*Peirce himself also thinks that much evolution is driven by changes in the environment or due to sudden “novel circumstances.” (p167)