
α2 | unfolding expression |
contexts
I emigrated long after the WATERSHED began. Like a child, not realizing I was lost I wandered further and further, looking for the common ground I had assumed lay behind words and smiles.
Moments of insight brought some success and seemed worth recording but required deeper examination, and instead led to the simple paradigm of learning and development published here now.
Most of the paradigm is commonplace. Many key words in it then assume their definitions from habit. The definitions of others are disputed. To avoid reflexive explanations and unnecessary confusion, these words have been EMPHASIZED.
inside out, outside in
The outline of the paradigm published here is less a story than a diagram of frames and perspectives.
Frame Θ. Internal documents and external resources underpinning the site.
Frame A. Meta-documents e.g the preamble (A1) and this introduction (A2).
Frame B. Literal and metaphorical. Language registers contextualize frame C.
Frame C. Recognizing patterns. Biosemiosis predicates perspectives D and E.
Perspective D. Individual learning and development. The integration of experience and expression in ontogeny.
Perspective E. Societal learning and development. Identity, experience and expression in societal ontogeny.
From the poem The Stare's Nest by My Window by William Butler Yeats, from: Meditations In Time Of Civil War (1922-23).
The WATERSHED refers here to the transitional period between the Powell Memorandum of 1971, and the full commercialization of the internet in 1995. In the middle of this, the IBM-Microsoft contract of 1980 brought together the politics of neo-corporatism together with the means to drive a semio-societal revolution — one that is now transforming human relations, experience, perception, and cognition.neo-corporatism
The Powell Memorandum of 1971 ...
The IBM-Microsoft contract of 1980 ...
The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought, the practices that we accept rest on.
Linked to from: A2-Content.php; n_A2_outro.php.
.. words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, egotize, narcotize, and paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain.
Words and language are 'tools' of expression; semiotic adjuncts. biosemiosis is fundamental and coextensive with life. We, and all other beings, depend upon it, exploit it, and are colonized by it. Communication technology then is effectively 'addictive', changing our perception, our lives, societies and selves, as these grow, develop, and adapt to it.
What is it that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language.
The term being, is used here for all forms of life, whether multicellular (e.g. humans, ants, plants, etc); unicellular (e.g. bacteria, archaea, and some algae), or both (e.g. slime molds), and to other metasystems (e.g. jellyfish, and societies, of ants, humans, deer etc.
Bioemiosis proceeds through recognition — through current sense-data that a being perceives then being recognized by it; as being the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something the being has sensed or perceived before. This then is a recursive process, its first iteration (or 'base case') generating meaning by matching current sense-data and perceptions to those that have previously been recognized, recorded, embodied, and inherited.
Here embodiment refers to the biophysical expression of semiosis and to the semiosis that biophysical expression represents; and embodied cognition is then simply a description of biosemiosis.
A metatransition is a metasystem transition to EITHER a more complex OR a simpler structure, ultimately leading to a transitory OR a permanent evolutionary transition in individuality.
Here, refers to the general, rather than a restricted, controlling or organizational system which maintains the homeostasis necessary for the functioning of a system and its subsystems.
biophysical nature
If anthropocentric and creationist teleologies are set-aside, and it is accepted as unavoidable that descriptions of the ineffable are metaphorical, then BEINGS, unencumbered by anthropocentric concepts of the soul, can be defined simply as 'vehicles' of life and life inferred recursively.
BEINGS are not only physical, they are animate and BIOPHYSICAL — the term BIOPHYSICAL then is used here to refer to their actuality as distinct to their BIOSEMIOTIC life. Their META-EXPRESSION (the prefix "meta-" used here as in metalanguage - a system of "signs and symbols", a language, used to describe a language) is BIOSEMIOSIS, the system of "signs and symbols" that articulates the internal and external EXPRESSION of BEINGS.
The abstracted, inferred psychological attributes of BEINGS — in humans referred to as awareness, consciousness, EGO and mind — are METABIOPHYSICAL characteristics; the PERCEPTIONS that we generate from the information our senses provide of the NOUMENA we actually EXPERIENCE — generated in much the same way as our PERCEPTIONS of colour are. In actuality, psychology then is either BIOSEMIOSIS, or METABIOLOGY, or it is the study and classification of the METABIOPHYSICAL.
wellness and illness
In an individual, the evolution of wellness and illness is a function of the interaction of their BIOPHYSICAL and METABIOPHYSICAL actuality with their environment. The social support and care that they receive, or are privated of, and any medical or psychological intervention then impact this system as a whole. Wellness and illness are 'psychosomatic'.
Research into cancer and other diseases has identified both the existence and the primacy of these METABIOPHYSICAL systems, and for various reasons of the need to address them as wholes; however, the institutions of modern societies and their broadcasting, despite increasingly appear obdurately set on discounting it in favour of reductionist models.
another inconvenient truth
The International Classification of Functioning (International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health), an holistic overview of wellness and illness, was first drafted by WHO, an international 'political' body, a quarter of a century ago in 1980. Despite this, and the fact that "biopsychosocial" models are taught in medical schools today, their significance to social organization and its institutions appears minimal, perhaps because of the powerful lobbies that work to maintain and promote the fundamentalist belief of scientific reductionism.
After nine years of international revision efforts coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Health Assembly on May 22, 2001, approved the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health and its abbreviation of "ICF." This classification was first created in 1980 ... by WHO to provide a unifying framework for classifying the consequences of disease. ... Functioning and disability are viewed as a complex interaction between the health condition of the individual and the contextual factors of the environment as well as personal factors. The picture produced by this combination of factors and dimensions is of "the person in his or her world." The classification treats these dimensions as interactive and dynamic rather than linear or static. It allows for an assessment of the degree of disability, although it is not a measurement instrument. It is applicable to all people, whatever their health condition. The language of the ICF is neutral as to etiology, placing the emphasis on function rather than condition or disease. It also is carefully designed to be relevant across cultures as well as age groups and genders, making it highly appropriate for heterogeneous populations.
"When people originally believed that the earth was flat, if that had not been questioned, science wouldn’t have advanced this far. ..saying (the) biopsychosocial model has no value, and that it is "woo", is very similar to that." Sandyshore - university researcher and wikipedian.
I'd like people to reconceptualize cancer as a biological event that triggers stress responses affecting how the disease progresses... Managing those stress responses by adopting healthy eating and exercise habits, getting a good night's sleep, and finding good emotional and social support, should be regarded as much a part of cancer treatment as chemotherapy or radiation.
The article, from which the above quote was taken, although apparently accessible in 2024, has been taken down by Stanford Medicine. The new article (at https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2004/02/link-between-sleep-cancer-progression-explored-by-stanford-researcher.html) still refers to Spiegal's work, but the expurgated quote there now seems to downplay the research and distance Stanford from Spiegal and the view he expressed.
family inheritance
Life is the state of being. Being is the condition of BEINGS.
A BEING is a descendant of a BEING.
I am a BEING.
It is as correct or incorrect to say that hormones create love as it is to say that love creates hormones. Love is not definable in the way that hormones are; they are terms of different reference frames.
Noumenon, is a Greek word meaning "that which is perceived". It is used here in that simple sense. Although Kant was the first person to use the term as a loanword, it is not used here to refer to his philosophy generally.
Kant adopted the Greek word, noumenon, to refer to the thing-in-itself so that this underlying reality might more readily be distinguished in discussion from the recognition by an observer of it that then renders it as a sign. However, whereas Kant referred to this recognition as perception — and to the perception of the thing-in-itself as a phenomenon — here the term perception is used simply to refer to a specific step in the process of biosemiosis.
A language is a system of arbitrary signals used to communicate information. To communicate, is to convey information through a system of arbitrary signals. Semantic means of or relating to meaning. Meaning refers to the sense or reference of an expression. To recognize, is to know something as the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something known before.
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.
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..