The structural point stands: keep the causal story of how signs and habits arise distinct from the normative story of how reasons bind, and you get continuity without reduction—and a clean place to situate LLMs as artifacts that participate in semiosis without thereby acquiring the full normative standing of persons. — GPT-5

I’m finding GPT-5 to be rather contorted in is arguments and if this were some human student knocking out a paper, I would quickly toss it. A lot of very hazy and grasping connections being made.

But the interesting thing in Peirce is his argument for cosmic existence as pansemiosis - habit-taking being the semiotic cause of reality itself. The Universe as a universalised growth of reasonableness.

So are we talking causes or norms? Well the argument is that the mind finds reason to be based on the necessity of a triadic logic. And that same triadic logic which imposes itself on our epistemology is itself simply the way any form of reality - any ontological order - would have to arise.

This is the big deal. Ontology and epistemology are reflected in each other.

Or to put it biosemiotically, the Cosmos is a dissipative structure. And so are life and mind. The only difference is that life and mind have a semiotic machinery to make their own worlds within the larger world. The Cosmos is a dissipative system, and life and mind are systems for milking the larger system.

It sometimes feels to me like Apokrisis focuses on the task of explaining "real" signification, in embodied living/physiological contexts … in a way that locates overarching telic force in dissipative structures while showing little concern for antipsychologism. He does grant downward-causal power to signs (within a triadic theory) but not in a way that makes them reasons rather than mere motivations — Pierre-Normand

Do I need to be concerned with antipsychologism? Why?

But yes. That was the specific reason I got involved with Peirce in the first place. I was working with a community who understood life and mind in dissipative structure terms. Or dissipative structure as harnessed in a modelling relation by systems that could encode information - encode nonholonomic constraints to use the physics jargon.

So Peirce crystallised things nicely at the level of a universal logic of self-organising systems. The triadic structure of his metaphysical logic could be seen to be exactly the same as the triadic structure of the hierarchy theory that the theoretical biology community had been working on.

The battle was against scientific reductionism. And a triadic logic of self-organising systems was the way to combat that with a story of irreducible causal holism.

Peirce’s logic of vagueness in particular broke an important conceptual logjam.

So there is a lot of backstory to my particular take on Peirce.

**On apokrisis’ emphasis.**
If he locates the overarching telos in “dissipative structure,” he’s giving a powerful **enabling** story. Peirce would say: good, but **don’t let it become the arbiter**. Biosemiosis without the normative sciences slides toward “motivations” only. Bring Peirce’s final causation and normative ladder back in, and you recover **reasons** as top-down constraints with real causal bite. — GPT-t

Sadly Peirce was sort of aware of the power dissipative structure and self-organising physics, but also he lapsed into the awfulness of agapism when pushed for a telos. So no way I want to follow him down that path.

I’m happy enough with the laws of thermodynamics encoding the rationality of cosmic existence. This is maybe why I can never get exercised by the is/ought dilemma. As a dichotomy, it seems pretty moot.