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words
Through their use, languages evolve organically and pragmatically. To set out and discuss elementary things then, as in a scientific inquiry, some clarification of their words is necessary. Those here refined from their general use are then emphasized.
Although words naturally refer to our experience and understanding, defining those such as 'intelligence', 'language', 'feeling', and 'perception' exclusively in this way, hobbles their use, and embeds anthropocentrism in our thoughts and conversations.
semiosis
Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them.
John Locke, 1689.
Any semantic system that is used for communication is a language; Any aspect of a noumenon that in some manner transmits or is perceived as transmitting information is an expression. Both refer to signs, and to semiosis, to sign-action, and therefore to biosemiosis, the recognition, by beings, of noumena, that renders them as signs.
noumena may function as signs of themselves — as being rocks, or holes, or hands, etc., or as exemplars of qualities they are associated with — green, danger, food, etc. They may also signify things distinct from themselves — a sound may be of a river or of a phoneme; marks may signify words, or symbols, like pi; a drawing or photograph may be of a pie, or a pipe.
Clouds may frown, girls might tease,
red skies at night might delight,
and a swallow may mean love.
expression is both an individual and a universal quality; it may be any dynamic or static aspect of a noumenon, of a being or of an inanimate or non-figurative entity; whereas a language is social and specific; a mutually recognized system of expression employed to convey information. beings develop their fluency in both during their ontogeny; from their individuation at 'conception' to their maturation; and then to their eventual death.
biosemiosis
A metalanguage is a language that defines or contextualizes another. meta-expression then is the metalanguage of expression, and defines the process of biosemiosis.
biosemiosis — the recursive process of embodied meaning.
A — Exosemiotic recognition. Reaction to the quality and insistency of the spacio-temporal presence of external phenomena.
B, C, D & I — Endosemiotic reactions; taking place 'internally', for instance, through endocrine, immune, and nervous systems.
E — Exosemiotic expression; a being's embodied reaction to its internal, and external environments.
note: — meta-expression need not have a fixed, one-to-one correlation with its underlying biological constructs.
Biosemiosis is recognition: something present, perceived as the same or similar to something perceived before. endosemiosis is then recognition of self, and exosemiosis recognition of other.
Each being, parallel processing multiple threads of endosemiotic and exosemiotic information, reflects both its inheritance and its experience.
The endocrine apparatus (the hormone system) .. should not be seen as an isolated regulatory system .. but rather as an integral part of both the immune system and the nervous system. Together, .. these endosemiotic tools are collectively responsible for the interaction of the organism with its social and physical world and constitute the fundament out of which so-called psychological reality, if any, of the organism will emerge.
Multicellular beings — all animals and land plants, most fungi, and many algae — have endocrine systems to regulate their physiologies and behaviors. By secreting signaling molecules, called hormones, these systems enable them to 'message' and co-ordinate the various parts of their anatomy.
The signaling molecules of beings that live in both multicellular and unicellular forms — such as social amoebae or slime molds — are called acrasins. These support exosemiotic communication between individuals living as unicellular beings, enabling them to cooperatively respond to environmental change and combine into a single, large cell. They then support the endosemiotic interactions of the 'new' individual being that they form; coordinating its development and enabling it to hunt for food and to reproduce.
In addition to their endocrine systems, multicellular and unicellular beings have either nervous systems, nerve nets, or proto-neuronal systems, that can detect external and internal environmental change.
From bacteria to fish, from slime molds to primates, all cellular beings also possess immune systems. Modern research has shown these systems to be complex, and integrated with other endosemiotic systems in a manner fundamentally similar to our own.
.. contrary to traditional views, jawless vertebrates, protochordates and invertebrates have also evolved sophisticated RAG-independent strategies to effect recognition and facilitate elimination of pathogens, to respond to stress, and to distinguish self from non-self.
It is becoming ever more clear that the co-ordinating, and protective endosemiotic and exosemiotic systems of beings, have evolved together, to form the fundamentally integrated semiotic structures that are found now in virtually all extant cellular phyla.
Numerous studies .. have begun to uncover profound interrelationships .. (that) blur traditional distinctions between adaptive and innate immunity, and emphasize that, throughout evolution, the immune system has used a remarkably extensive variety of solutions to meet fundamentally similar requirements for host protection.
..relentless pressure from genetic variation in pathogens probably drove the evolution of .. innate immune protective molecules towards diversification and, in parallel, towards integration of signalling pathways to regulate cellular responses to external stimulation.
Evolutive science as a whole continues to reveal the holistic nature of life, and to confirm the place of our species in it as a microcosm.
Content of n_Einstein_HumanDelusion.php included in e_Einstein_HumanDelusion.php. NB: Must be used with 'footnotes file' n_Einstein_Translation.php
Human beings are spatially and temporally limited parts of the whole that we call "universe"; yet we experience ourselves and our feelings as separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness.
Albert Einstein, 1950.
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pragmatic — advocating behaviour that is dictated more by practical consequences than by theory or dogma — Collins English Dictionary.
semantic - of or relating to meaning
communicate - to convey information through a system of arbitrary signals
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from the greek, semio, meaning sign, plus suffix -sis, equivalent to -ing).
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noumenon, is Greek; it means "that which is perceived", and it is used here in that sense. Though the word was introduced by Kant, here it is not used to refer to his philosophy — although naturally it will to some extent have points of contact with that.
While it is self-evident that the initiating individuation of a being, of any eukaryotic species, is its conception in the fusing of the gametes that form the zygote, this is the psycho-biological reality. It does not dictate any socio-legal choice to accord rights to an embryonic individual that supersede those of an adult.
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As a placeholder for this diagram, I posted a photograph of an initial hand-drawn sketch and noticed the Post-It note in it. Although referring to another task, it seemed to say that my diagram being an echo of a schema of biosemiosis published over one hundred years ago by Jakob von Uexkull, and that I should acknowledge that — particularly as his work was subsequently so passionately embraced by the Nazis and their 'scientists'.
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Semiosis is the essential and fundamental process of life; it is recognition. endosemiosis is a being's recognition of self, and exosemiosis is its recognition of other.
Every being, parallel processing multiple threads of endosemiotic and exosemiotic information, reflects both its inheritance and its experience.
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Hormone, from the Greek, hormon, meaning 'that which sets in motion'.
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from the Greek, akrasia, meaning 'loss of free will'.
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See for example, A Slimy Start for Immunity?, Science, 2007, Vol 317, Issue 5838, p. 584, DOI: 10.1126/science.317.5838.584
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from: Reconstructing Immune Phylogeny: New Perspectives, (authors' manuscript), Gary W. Litman, John P. Cannon, and Larry J. Dishaw, in Nat Rev Immunol., available 17 Jun 2013 in PubMed Central at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine.
footnotes of n_Einstein_Translation.php included in entryNote.php, e_Einstein_HumanDelusion.php, and e_personalMeta.php.
translations
Ein Mensch ist ein räumlich und zeitlich beschränktes Stück des Ganzen, was wir „Universum“ nennen. Er erlebt sich und sein Fühlen als abgetrennt gegenüber dem Rest, eine optische Täuschung seines Bewusstseins. Das Streben nach Befreiung von dieser Täuschung ist der einzige Gegenstand wirklicher Religion. Nicht das Nähren der Illusion sondern nur ihre Überwindung gibt uns das erreichbare Maß inneren Friedens.
Albert Einstein, 1950.
Einstein wrote the above words in ink (bold emphasis added) in a note now held in the Albert Einstein Archives, Jerusalem. The translation I have made of them, and quoted from, is made in light of the translation that appears underneath them on the note and written in another hand.
There seemed to me several reasons to make another translation; to reflect the gender neutrality of the German more consistently, to echo Einstein's use of both the words delusion, and illusion, and to better reflect the certitude of the note's opening argument — carried in the brevity of the original German yet somehow stunted in the translation on the note itself in English.
Transliteration is the process of substituting the characters used in one language with the characters used in another e.g in order to facilitate pronunciation. Translations I have made here (of Einstein and Nietzsche) might then be called 'transverbations'; addressing issues of punctuation, prosody, and inference that in prior translations, I feel, detract from the originals.
While in a sense faithful, in those translations I found, transliteration of punctuation resulted in an English that makes their authors seem coarse and uneducated; similarly, 'grammatical transliteration' replaced gender neutrality with bias.
Quotations are necessarily stripped of their context, robbing them of much of their meaning. Although I am not a professional translator or writer, the edits I have made here have been made with due diligence, and are faithful; required here, in my opinion, so that the fluency, erudition, and sensibility in the originals is made explicit — I have provided originals so readers may draw their own conclusions.
The translation I offer here is based on the translations I retrieved from Google on 6 March 2024, as well as on the note's original translation:—
Human beings are spatially and temporally limited parts of the whole that we call "universe"; yet we experience ourselves and our feelings as separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. The striving to be free of this delusion is the only object of real religion. It is not nurturing the illusion but only overcoming it which gives that measure of inner peace which is attainable.
Albert Einstein, 1950.
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A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of pure religion, not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.
This translation, in pencil on the original note, became the text of the condolence letter sent from Einstein to Dr. Marcus on 12 February 1950. The first two sentences of it were then used to open the letter of condolence sent on the 4 March 1950 to Norman Salt.
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delusions and illusions
Einstein spoke the refined German of the Bildungsbürgertum, a language characterized by its precision. It might the be reasonable to assume, as an inspection of Einstein's note also suggests, that his use of the word Täuschung (delusion) twice and Illusion once, was considered not careless.
Etymologically the word delusion implies an action, a deceiving, referring here to that suffered by human beings through our consciousness, through which we perceive a deceptive appearance, the illusion of being "separated from the rest".
Technically, delusion is a belief that, though false, has been surrendered to and accepted by the whole mind as a truth; illusion is an impression that, though false, is entertained on the recommendation of the senses or the imagination.
Illusion (n.), developed in Church Latin from the late 14c. onwards to mean: a "deceptive appearance".
On delusion, and illusion; from the Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved: 4 October 2022.
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Footnote {delusion01a} of n_Einstein_Translation.php.
..as free-spirited and anti-bourgeois as Einstein may have appeared to be all his life, his language remained the refined German of the Bildungsbürgertum of his time, a language he mastered with virtuosity.
from a 2008 essay by Barbara Wolff, Albert Einstein Archives, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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beings, here includes those that are unicellular (e.g. bacteria, archaea, and some algae); and those that are both unicellular and multicellular (e.g. slime molds) as well as those that are multicellular and, therefore, societies —cellular metasystems (e.g. humans, ants, jellyfish).
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Hydrozoa show great diversity of lifestyle; some species maintain the polyp form for their entire life and do not form medusae at all
Polyps of some species propagate vegetatively, forming colonies.. polymorphism occurs in colonies of some species of hydrozoans and anthozoans, the polyps being specialized for functions such as feeding, defense, and sexual reproduction.
Anthropocentrism is the anthropocentric belief that the human species is the central fact and final aim of a universe that should, therefore, be understood in terms of human experience, needs, and values.
Crows and flocking horses,
otters and gorillas,
clamour at our doors of reason.
Geese and horses, chimps too
follow the leader.
Fungi on beetles,
ribeiroia on herons,
staph in our guts,
win minds and hearts
for their gods.
What makes us human,
or more so than our dogs?
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scientism
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein.
Science is an elementary practice. Scientism is a belief. Eugenics and the Holocaust are among the brutal consequences and stark reminders of not recognizing this distinction..
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from: Physics and Reality, published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, Vol. 221, Issue 3, March 1936, pp. 349-382.
Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them. John Locke, 1689.
