Let me tie two threads together that I've made recently regarding cognitive diversity and hypermedia.
I want to introduce an idea to you from the semiotic theory of CS Peirce: the "finious" cause.
I think the best way to introduce this is to ask you to think about convergence and divergence. The Big Bang suggests that we live in a (at least partially) astronomical reality. Natural suggestion seems to have a mix of divergent and convergent evolution (see wings for example)...
By contrast, some areas of math seem pretty darn convergent.
For Aristotelian scholastics, it used to be much easier to imagine that history was convergent because Aristotle described one of the 4 forms of causation as "final," meaning goal-oriented. To illustrate: when you solve a puzzle (correctly) you are working towards a preordained solution akin to final causation. Or in other terms, the puzzle-maker has caused YOU to make certain actions in pursuit of your goal. Convergence.
Now in the period after Descartes, we almost exclusively define causation as "efficient," meaning that the thing that physically impacts, touches, compels, etc is the cause. For example, fish bite fishhooks because bait causes appetizing sensations in fish, appetizing sensations in fish cause eating behaviors, and eating behaviors include biting. The universe of efficient causation is just a big machine of force compelling compelling matter and so on.
I also want to warn about a mis-impression, before I start to build on this concept, that contemporary intelligent-design types are also all about efficient (not final) causation.
When intelligent design people advocate for the deity having some grand plan to reach goal X, they very directly talk about how the deity put things in motion and set up a plan from the origin.
Contrast this with final causation, which proposes things like "boat races cause sailboats to be built."
At this point I want to move on but it's really difficult to choose a starting point for Peirce.
How about this? Peirce was an incredibly well-read person who was both a working scientist and deeply familiar with scholasticism. So he was on-board with evolution, modern astronomy, etc. He had no guff with the explanatory power of efficient causation in modern science. But he was also thinking about the big-picture of how something like logic interacts with the world of efficient causation.
Here's an example of the kind of problem Peirce was responding to. Let's say you want to understand a physical process, & so you make a little model of it. Then you interact with the model. Based on that model you get a prediction about physical reality, which you then test, and it turns out to be right. Now how does a world of purely efficient causation explain what just happened there?
On the one hand, you can say that the subtle workings of your model are aligned with the physical process...
And so there's something that's just internally harmonious about a physical process and a pen-and-paper model. But this kind of beggars belief, doesn't it? To say that if the workings of a water-clock can tell an astronomer something about the moons of Saturn, there must be something subtle in common between the moons of Saturn and the water-clock?
Logic, naturally, should be your real recourse. You should assert that the natural world progresses in accordance with fundamental logic.
And then you can say that humans can interact with logic in a way that lets us create models that are in some way aligned with the essential, logical character of a physical process.
But then you have this strange question about how logic can work as a go-between for both the moons of Saturn and the water-clock.
The ancient stoics identified this with the "logos spermatikos." They described each object in each instant of the universe as carried forward and mediated in its relations by logic.
I think this is a pretty good account, but it involves creating one of the strangest metaphysical objects ever conceived. For starters, if all causation is actually mediated by the logos spermatikos, then maybe nothing really ever touches anything else? Then how do you explain things like wine mixing with water? (The ancient stoics have a lot of metaphysics about wine mixing with water.)
Anywho, another solution to the problem of "how models work" is to say that logic can cause things.
This gets kind of trippy and I don't want to be even more confusing than I already am.
My understanding of Peirce is that he thinks that some things, "finious" causes (similar to final causes but not quite) have a kind of ratcheting effect on reality that brings the total cosmos closer and closer into convergence.
At the beginning of Peirce's worldview, at the base level, he thinks that the ground of being is indeterminate, an etic chaos of every sense, every force, etc.
This has a ratchet effect. More and more things randomly trip into causal interaction with finious reality, and these encounters have this ratchet-like effect that create more and more Actual entities, they create history, and so on. And furthermore, more Actual entities can be made out of existing Actual entities, and so on.
In the absolute fullness of time, Peirce imagines that these interactions with finious things are going to continue to happen, and so over time reality is get determined.
That is, in the long run, Peirce imagines that reality is going to become asymptotically convergent towards these finious things.
To make a strained metaphor, you can think of the force of necessity kind of like some infinite flypaper that turns into a black hole. At first the infinite flypaper just catches flies, and you can say, "Oh there were 3 flies in here. I didn't know how many, but now I do because they are now Actual." But eventually, the infinite flypaper catches your whole world.
But I should also make very very clear that Peirce also believes in evolution etc. He isn't ignorant of all of the divergent qualities of reality. But he thinks that the divergent base of reality is going to become more and more determined with the advance of time.
OK OK so what does this have to do with consciousness and hypermedia? Before I get onto that, I think I need to make a stop and address the stuff that Peirce is actually known for.
You may have had a college class that referenced Peirce or semiotics. Semiotics are Peirce's theory of signs. And strangely enough, it works according to the three phases that I described above.
So let me first explain sign-process as it would appear in a natural organism's behavior.
You have some default condition of some living thing. It's just vibing.
Then sometimes you have some kind of stimulus introduced to the living thing.
Then sometimes you have some kind of response by the living thing to the stimulus.
Got it?
The first part is the basic ground or reference. It is the fundamental situation of vibe-ish-ness from which everything else draws its distinctiveness.
The second part is meaningful as it presents a dyad that's apart from, but refers to, the 1st part.
The third part, the response, is informed by the ground but the ground isn't sufficient to produce the response. And the response is also informed by the stimulus but it isn't reducible to the stimulus. The response is premised on the dyadic nature of the ground and the stimulus, but can't be reduced to that.
The response reflects some kind of association that the living thing bears. The association is something that has been imprinted, such as by genetics or by grooming, onto the living thing
For Peirce, this third thing, the response, is where learning happens. If the response does not return the living thing to some state of non-responsiveness, or if the stimulus remains stridently distinctive, then the living thing will probably keep trying responses to the stimulus.
If you didn't like that, here's the man himself:
>The First is that whose being is simply in itself, not referring to anything nor lying behind anything. The Second is that which is *what* it is by force of something to which it is second. The Third is that which is what it is owing to things between which it mediates and which it brings into relation to each other.
Then, from time to time, one swirling whirlwind of indeterminacy meets another and -- POP! -- something capital-a Actual comes out of it. It has a determinate character. It is something that was made out of the shifting mass below, but this Actual thing has outlines and characteristics and stuff. Now how did that happen?
For Peirce, what has happened is that the first stuff was determined in some way by something finious. At some point, something engaged with a logical consequence.