Archives for May 2007

JG: Half-jokingly, you were going to subtitle Lost in the Cosmos: Why Carl Sagan Is So Lonely . .. . a statement obviously directed at scientists in general who try to “dissolve the uniqueness of man” and make him like all other species. This brings up the problem again and again of the doctrines of evolution and creationism. While the evolutionists don’t pretend to see their view as the “eternal truth,” scientists, like Carl Sagan and others, see the status of evolution as a logical theory — even though it is not provable in a traditional scientific method. While he can’t be proved wrong, your book points to some of the holes in his theory which caused Sagan to write and ask about Lost in the Cosmos.

WP: Yes, he wrote me he’d read somewhere that I’d written a book in rebuttal to his writings and questioning the fact that he’s left God out of the Cosmos. He said if I could show him any cited evidence that God was ever there or ever in a being, he would have to consider it. He just said he’d like to read the book. He reminds me of a pathologist who finished an autopsy and said to his students: “Where is the soul?”

JG: So he hadn’t read the book yet?

WP: No, he hadn’t, so I sent him a copy.

JG: Most reviewers come up with the idea that it is a rebuttal of Sagan, but it isn’t against him personally. It only mentions Sagan one time.

WP: I only mention him in one question and one footnote. People like to latch onto something, and the two most obvious names are Donahue and Sagan. They’re featured in different parts of the book. But you know where the loneliness comes from? It comes from a triadic creature, scientist, whether it be Einstein or Darwin or Sagan, who tries to explain the whole world by dyadic theory and mostly succeeds. Darwin was trying to do it — thought he’d succeeded. Darwin’s theory of evolution is purely dyadic. Organisms compete, then small, accidental changes occur, which survive through adaptation and survival of the fittest. But notice that there is a curious moment taking place while you’re explaining the whole world by dyadic theory: you yourself are getting more and more removed from it. There you are sitting making up these theories, but how do you fit in? So you feel a little isolated and so end up with these fanciful notions of ETIs and talking chimps. Sagan wrote books which appear to explain not only the whole Cosmos but the human condition, how humans got to where they are, through his theories about the reptilian brain and cortex brain as computer and so forth. But why is Carl Sagan so anxious to find an ETI (extra-terrestrial intelligence)? Because the triadic scientist gets lonely. If everything gets put in the sphere of immanence, the sphere of dyadic interaction, one gets more and more isolated. Where does one fit in? Then he has a problem of reentry. How does one lead his life? Well, one way to it is to communicate with extraterrestrials. If one is a great scientist like Einstein, one simply does science. If not, then one starts longing for encounters with extraterrestrials. What people like Sagan don’t realize is that humans are far more mysterious than any extraterrestrial they’ve yet imagined. It’s a fanciful idea of Sagan having explained the whole Cosmos and the human position, then trying to find an ETI to tell it to, to communicate with.

Conversations With Walker Percy, p. 296-8 (reprinted from The Southern Review, 20, Winter 1984).

To descend to more particular similarities, we might first notice that when we initially come to realize our personhood, we find that we are in a world, as Percy in Lost in the Cosmos (p. 96) phrases it, as opposed to just an environment. An environment, in his sense, is a setting in which only efficient causal relations are to be found. A world, on the other hand, along with environmental factors, also includes significance, meaning, interpretation, understanding, and selves. These additional factors Percy places under the heading of triadic behavior, or sign-use. Percy’s discovery was that such triadic relations cannot be reduced to conglomerates of dyadic relations. Or, worlds are not reducible to environments. In this point Percy is actually an independent rediscoverer (see Percy’s “The Delta Factor”) of the almost identical principle noticed by Peirce about 1866. I have traced aspects of these two parallel discoveries elsewhere (“Peirce’s ‘Most Lucid and Interesting Paper’: An Introduction to Cenopythagoreanism”) in considerable detail.

It is a major confirmation of my thesis that Percy, after a period of intense immersion in the literature of existentialism, rediscovered this point independently. Only later did he come to realize that Peirce had worked it out almost a century earlier. That the two thinkers are so close on this fundamental point is a major confirmation, and hence perhaps the principal point of comparison that tends to support pragmaticism really being an existentialism.

— Kenneth Ketner, in A Thief of Peirce, Appendix II: “Pragmaticism an Existentialism?” p. 291-2.

From Lost in the Cosmos, “A Semiotic Primer of the Self,” Section XI:

If the sign-user first enters into an Edenic state by virtue of his discovery and constitution of the world by signs, like Helen Keller or any normal two-year-old, and if aboriginal sign-use is a joyful concelebration of the world through an utterance in which the ancient environment of the Cosmos is transformed and beheld in common through the magic prism of the sign, it is also, semiotically speaking, an Eden which harbors its own semiotic snake in the grass.

The fateful flaw of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension–and that is the sign-user himself.

Semiotically, the self is literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g., apple, Canada, 7-Up.

The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally.

You are Ralph to me and I am Walker to you, but you are not Ralph to you and I am not Walker to me. (Have you ever wondered why the Ralphs you know look as if they ought to be called Ralph and not Robert?)

For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

You are not a sign in your world. Unlike the other signifiers in your world which form more or less stable units with the perceived world-things they signify, the signifier of yourself is mobile, freed up, and operating on a sliding semiotic scale from — ∞ to ∞.

The signified of the self is semiotically loose and caroms around the Cosmos like an unguided missile.

From the moment the signifying self turned inward and became conscious of itself, trouble began as the sparks flew up.

No one knows how such a state of affairs came to pass, except through the wisdom (or folly) of religion and myth. But, semiotically speaking, it is possible to describe the consequences.

As a consequence of the unprecedented appearance of the triad in the Cosmos, there appeared for the first time in fifteen billion years (as far as we know) a creature which is ashamed of itself and which seeks cover in myriad disguises.

One semioticist defined the subject of his study as the only organism which tells lies.

The exile from Eden is, semiotically, the banishment of the self-conscious self from its own world of signs.

The banquet is still there, but it is Banquo in attendance.

The self perceives itself as naked. Every self is ashamed of itself.

The semiotic history of this creature thereafter could be written in terms of the successive attempts, both heroic and absurd, of the signifying creature to escape its nakedness and to find a permanent semiotic habiliment for itself–often by identifying itself with other creatures in its world.

Among Alaskan Indians, this practice is called totemism. In the Western world, it is called role-modeling.

The question must arise: What is the nature of the catastrophe of the self? Is the catastrophe nothing more or less than the breakthrough itself, the sudden emergence of the triadic organism into a dyadic world? And is the predicament of the self the price of naming and knowing? Or is the catastrophe a subsequent event, a bad move in the exercise of its freedom by the sign-user? Is it a turning from the concelebration of the world to a solitary absorption with self?

It is fruitful to speculate on the possible nature of other intelligences (ETIs) in the Cosmos, if they exist.

Presumably, they too have achieved the triadic breakthrough. Might they not have achieved the world of signs without succumbing to the terrible penalty? Might there not exist preternatural intelligences who do not necessarily share the shadow-life of the earth-self?

Much of current speculation about the nature of ETIs–what level of technology have you achieved?, etc.–is misguided. The first question an earthling should ask of an ETI is not: What is the level of your science? but rather: Did it also happen to you? Do you have a self? If so, how do you handle it? Did you suffer a catastrophe?