Name:
Peter James Harris
Email address:
arisbe@iconz.co.nz
URL of home page:
N/A
Postal address:
7 Shackleton Rd
Mt Eden,
Auckland
New Zealand.
Phone/fax:
(6409) 630 8939
Affiliations:
Unforunately I haven't any, except in spirit, to the world-wide "community
of inquirers" C.S.Peirce speaks of. I would very much appreciate any contact
with PCP members of that community.
How did you hear about PCP?
I heard about your project very soon after finishing my thesis in
philosophy, from the person who runs the web site of the School of
Architecture here and had come across PCP on the Web.
Please take at least one page to describe your work and how it might relate
to PCP:
Personal background:
I have been working on a very similar vision to that of PCP without knowing
of your existence. When I downloaded some of your web material, I didn't
know whether to laugh or cry- it has been very lonely & discouraging working
on systematic methodology in an "analytic" philosophy department, and my MA
thesis as it turned out was barely passed by them. I am now in the academic
"wilderness", or to put it more optimistically, I am now a free-lance
philosopher..
Content of my work so far:
I am doing theoretical investigation into the nature of process in general,
and practical experimenting in computer-based methods of representing a
particular type of process: the process of rational inquiry.
The theoretical investigation draws mostly on the systematic thought of
Charles Sanders Peirce, and develops a theory in which:
-The Actual World is an evolving pattern of patterns of process, in which
all entities are supervenient processes, describable purely in terms of
their patterns of relations and their levels of supervenience (Robert
Pirsig's Inorganic, Biological, Social, and Intellectual levels).
-There is a continuum of "true and real possibilities" (Peirce) into which
the Actual world is advancing by a logic of events which includes pure
chance novelty (which comes under the Peircean category of "firstness"),
reaction to novelty (secondness), and finally incorporation of novelty into
stable process patterns (thirdness). All actual entities are thirdnesses: we
do not need the hypothesis of substance (such as atoms -in the old literal
sense- or souls).
-The objects of knowledge must therefore always be patterns of relations
(since there is for us nothing else); these objects are what Peirce called
"signs".
-All things (i.e., processes) can be fruitfully analyzed as processes by
means of the Peircean categories, with the addition of two sub-categories:
fourthness (outputs of thirdnesses) and fifthness (their inputs).
The practical experiment is an application of process theory, Peirce's
categories, or Aspects, and his diagrammatic approach, to the challenge of
representing "live" ongoing inquiries (ideational entities) of the utmost
generality, such as philosophical inquiry itself. I am developing a "Global
Evolving Inquiry Database" or GEID, with flexible categories to order my
thoughts, and "Aspectual diagrams", in an attempt to model the aspectual
evolution of systems of ideas.
A vision of the future of Inquiry.
My vision is for a development in the intellectual level equivalent to the
leap forward that happened in the biological level when the neo-cortex
suddenly evolved, and self-representing ideational organisms appeared, able
to systematically consider their own ideas about the world, and modify them.
Now humans operating in this intellectual level are on the point of
creating, for the first time presumably ever, a new supervenient ideational
organization perhaps exactly parallel to that of their own brains. The
prototypical "nerve" network -the Internet- is already in place; the
"neurons", individual inquiring humans throughout the world, are active as
never before in the history of the human race. What is lacking (from the
point of view of inquiry) is just the organizing system for explicit,
reliable, detailed, flexible, self-evolving, real-time -i.e., intelligent-
representation of all the inputs from these "neurons". The vision of the
GEID is the vision of such an intelligence. Whether or not it would meet the
conditions for consciousness (those who hold a functionalist theory of mind,
at least, cannot rule this out), we, as cells in that great supervenient
mind, would benefit enormously, having access to all its propositional
content, organized in a way that would be totally beyond us as individuals.
The bees of the intellect would at last have a hive to which they could
bring their nectar, a hive that would not waste a single drop of it, that
would articulate and relate it to the whole of human inquiry.
Obviously, PCP, as a "computer-supported collaborative development of an
evolutionary-systemic philosophy", is remarkably like my vision of the GEID
as described above. I hope to be able to contribute to it as a philosopher.
yours faithfully,
Peter Harris.