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being heard |
experience and perception
Survival and meaning-making — life and BIOSEMIOSIS — are co-extensive. Every being is an element in an environment, recognizing and understanding others by their signs. Unavoidably, in whatever form, conversations then follow, gathering together communities of mutual interest and dependency. Billions of years ago a conversation between different beings fused them together, and from the cells that resulted our species evolved. conversation made our primate tribes the world for us; and still orchestrates our rise and fall today.
Societies are fundamental. Constructed by both allies and predators, they are the builder of complex organisms and their means of survival. For those in our kingdom, they are the focus of our environments, providing the frame of meaning through which our ontogenies develop. Our bodies themselves are societies; we evolved as co-operatives of cells rather than dictatorships of brains. Only half the cells in my body have my DNA — the other half are bacteria, without which I would struggle to survive. I is a unique alliance of animal and bacterial cells, my identity an illusion, a necessary emergent quality that every BEING must have.
Life intrinsically is not about codes but about connecting with an environment that is social as much as material. communicating is not merely an aspect of our genes it is their function. Despite our awareness and its self-interest in survival, from our very first moment, like the birds in the trees we call out. Although being heard as often calls diners as dinner, calling-out reveals what is good for us as well as 'who' is not. communication not only drives our development psychologically and culturally but also our evolution biologically.
4.1. In their ontogeny children learn to communicate with their environment. Their experiences aggregate and form a cultural framework that then supports, and also constrains, their development. 4.2. Like those of other animals, our young are driven to seize the powers adults have, co-operating and competing with them as they do with each other. Whatever they may be taught, they build on what they experience; mimicking it, and trying it on for size. 4.3. Through the cultural frame of their ontogeny, children learn to recognize and distinguish between relations — those with whom it is easy to empathize, and others, individuals of species and groups with whom that feels impossible.
5.1. The course of evolution has proved society to be life's best defence. 5.2. Driven by the comfort of inclusion and fear of exclusion, beings engage with others and accommodate their differences. 5.3. To find our place in a society, and to be accepted, our perceptions of touch, taste, sound, and sight, of emotion and thought, are constructed by adapting to the environment in which we are conceived. 5.4. The value of a being and the meaning it has to a society are determined not by its intentions but by its expressions..
6.1. Conceived in a being's intentions, meaning only lives in its perception. It is not intrinsic to words. Words are just midwives for it. 6.2. beings uniquely perceive and express meaning in every kind of sign, from light to sound, through forms and shapes. 6.3. Ambiguity is intrinsic to natural languages — it only kills machine codes. If it had been otherwise, over the millions of years it would have simply vanished. Although ambiguity hides deceit, the examination fostered by extended conversation is the only defence against that; and so it serves to shepherd beings closer together. 6.4. Text is a technological representation of natural language, a simulacrum and reduction of it. The apparent clarity of it, and of rhetoric, its verbal form, disguises ambiguity, and removes the defence of extended, synchronous conversation.
7.1. As our species focused on signs and symbols, new media developed. From handprints on cave walls to theatre, text, and photography, an industry of broadcasting evolved. 7.2. By filtering information and mediating individual choice, broadcasting, by increasingly orchestrating conversation, has transformed social intercourse. 7.3. Individuals now, adapting to interactively broadcasted social-media (IBSM), are gathered together behind screens as nodes in a multi-dimensional web of virtual societies. 7.4. The neural networks of IBSM function as ecosystems, infospheres constructed through a propaganda of the everyday; the cognition and behaviours of their individuals adapting as they develop within their new environments.
BEINGS reflexively PERCEIVE patterns and signs. As a consequence, societies and languages emerge. Life coextends with MEANING; on being heard the environment gave birth. In the beginning was the word, just not one we would recognize.
8.1. conversations construct not only virtual environments but also those that provide for our physical needs. 8.2. By building that common sense in which we feel safe and at home, conversations assemble us into societies and cultures. 8.3. Through adapting to the social frames our conversations construct our minds develop, our psychological needs met in proportion to the success of this.
Δ making sense λ literal error
I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move.
Aristotle and Plato wrote of signs and symbols, over two thousand years ago; signs in the world of nature, and symbols in human culture. The terms semiosis, and its study semiotics, come from the Ancient Greek, semeion — 'a sign, mark, or token'.
A thousand years after Aristotle, symbols were understood to be just a type of sign; and now, semiosis is understood as the process by which any word, object, symbol, or nonverbal cue is recognized as being a sign.
Semiosis, from the greek, semio-, meaning sign, plus suffix -sis, equivalent to -ing , literally meaning sign-action, is the recognition of noumena as having significance — as being, in some form or manner, signs.
For a being, anything can be a sign. All beings are signs and, in whatever manner, make signs; these are then recognized by others. Life and semiosis are co-extensive.
Despite these simple, ancient roots, Nazi eugenicists claimed semiotics as the scientific foundation for their xenophobic ideology; but semiosis is elementary and ubiquitous, whereas xenophobia is a mental illness.
Nazi scientists believed there was a one-to-one, fixed relationship between the biological characteristics of individuals and their emergent characteristics. But organisms are not simple biological machines. Their ontogeny and emergent qualities develop as a consequence of interactions with their environment, their biological components, including DNA, only statistically approximating physical traits and racial origins. Race is a category of convenience, not an absolute class of discrete individuals.
In classifying organisms, biology often identifies patterns that seem to indicate a common underlying characteristic when in fact they do not —and vice-versa. Science can only address the behaviour of reality, especially in regard to multicellular organisms, such as human beings, through probabilistic explanations - the inferences that are made from statistical relationships that are deduced from data that has been observed.
Reality is dynamic, every moment a new beginning, a new set of initial conditions. The infinitesimal differences between this one and that which preceded it, transforms its 'final' outcomes - as chaos theory demonstrates. The future evolves through probabilistic states; deterministic approaches have no ability to predict or define it. Our choices emerge from a system of inheritance but this system is made up of cultural as well as genetic components, between which information is exchanged via complex and diverse pathways. The Nazi's simplistic belief, that race could be an absolute measure of behaviour and preference, was merely incorrect.
Science is simple and absolute, neither human nor divine. It has no need or place for faith. Faith corrupts it.
contents of n_A1pre_Chaos.php inserted into footnote 'Chaos' in e_Preface_Footnotes.php via PHP-include, - called from e_Preface.php#infoHum and A1-Footnotes.php#A14..
chaos
Chaos refers to the apparently random states of disorder and irregularity exhibited by complex, nonlinear, dynamical systems actually governed by interconnectedness, underlying patterns, and self-organization. While these systems are deterministic, their predictability is limited as it is is impossible to completely know their actual state at any point in time and the smallest difference in this from what has been assessed leads to behaviours that diverge exponentially over time from that foecasted —a characteristic often referred to as the Butterfly Effect.
Viruses and bacteria have no use for words; nonetheless, they perceive their environment and those within it and respond accordingly — physically; chemically, and otherwise. The conversations they then generate, create relationships that arguably are much more substantial than those that we create are.
biophysicality
If it is accepted that descriptions of the ineffable are unavoidably metaphorical, and creationist, and anthropocentric teleologies and their concepts of the soul are set aside, then BEINGS can be defined simply as 'vehicles' of life and LIFE inferred recursively.
Rather than being merely 'wet' physical entities, BEINGS are BIOPHYSICAL, organized and animated by the interpretations that their BIOSEMIOTIC systems render of their internal and external environments.
To choose actions that ensure its survival, every BIOPHYSICAL construct requires a psychological correlate, and in order to exist every psychological construct requires a BIOPHYSICAL correlate. In actuality, psychology refers to METABIOPHYSICAL systems.
Those attributes of BIOSEMIOTIC systems, which in humans are referred to as awareness, consciousness, EGO and mind, are PERCEPTIONS, generated from the information that the SENSES of a BEING provide of NOUMENA that it encounters — in the same way as the PERCEPTION of colour is.
wellness
In an individual, the development of wellness and illness, is a function of the interaction of their BIOPHYSICAL actuality with their environment. This system then is impacted as a whole by any medical or psychological interventions and any social support and care they receive or are privated of.
Research into cancer and other diseases has identified the existence and primacy of METABIOPHYSICAL systems and the need to address them as a whole; however, despite the work of the WHO, modern societies and their BROADCASTING systems appear obdurate, discounting 'holism' and increasingly promoting reductionist models.
MEANING, is that which a BEING PERCEIVES of an EXPRESSION. It is inherited, encoded and developed through the reference-frame of the individual's ONTOGENY. Different reference-frames then inevitably arise.
Those BEINGS less able to recognize and reconcile differing reference-frames are at greater risk in social groups of being misinformed and deceived.
Ultimately, short term success is an insufficient guide for future action. Locusts are successful but find themselves unable to escape developing from their peaceful co-existance as individuals into the cannibalistic wars of their swarms.
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 both to the biophysical expression of semiosis and to the semiosis that biophysical expression represents. 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, metasystem refers to a general, rather than restricted, controlling or organizational system which maintains the homeostasis necessary for the functioning of a system and its subsystems.
functioning, disability and health
First drafted by the WHO in 1980, the International Classification of Functioning (the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health), is an holistic overview of wellness and illness. Despite its publication, and the fact that today biopsychosocial models are taught in medical schools, the significance and impact on social organization and its institutions of these models might appear to citizens to have been relatively minimal — perhaps because of the powerful lobbies that work to promote a fundamentalist belief in 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.
footnotes of n_Einstein_Translation.php included in entryNote.php, e_Einstein_HumanDelusion.php, and e_personalMeta.php.
my translation
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 seem 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 word 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.
The translation I offer here then, supported by translations by Google on 6 March 2024, is based on that written in pencil on the original note:—
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.
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".
Although I believe the translations that I have found are faithful, quotations, stripped of their context can lose much of their quality. Transliteration of punctuation, for instance, can result in an English that makes their authors sound coarse or uneducated; and 'grammatical transliterations' may substitute gender bias for the gender neutrality of an original.
Where I have edited translations it has been only in order to address issues of punctuation, prosody, and inference that I felt detracted from the content of the originals. The edits have been made with due diligence and, although I am not a professional translator or writer, I believe they are both faithful, and required to make the fluency, erudition, and sensibility of the originals explicit. Original texts are provided for readers to draw their own conclusions.
Footnote {delusion01a} of n_Einstein_Translation.php.
The prefix "meta-" is used here as in the term meta-language — metalanguage: a system of symbols or signs (a language) used to describe or contextualize another language.
The article, from which the above quote was taken, although apparently accessible in 2024, has now 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, intentionally or otherwise, to downplay the research and to 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 in different reference frames.
Noumenon, is a Greek word meaning "that which is perceived". It is used the word Kant used to identify the thing-in-itself, the underlying reality that is then recognized by an observer as a SIGN.
Kant referred to the recognition of the thing-in-itself as perception, but here PERCEPTION is used to label one of four stages bootstrapped by RECOGNITION in the process of BIOSEMIOSIS.
Communicate: to convey information through a system of arbitrary signals.
Language: a system of arbitrary signals used to communicate information.
Meaning: the sense or reference of an expression.
Recognize: to know something as the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something known before.
Semantic: of or relating to meaning.
Ruppert, Edward E.; Fox, Richard, S.; Barnes, Robert D. (2004). Invertebrate Zoology, 7th edition. Cengage Learning. pp. 148-174; cited in Jellyfish, Taxonomy (list item: Staurozoa), Wikipedia..
Fautin, Daphne G. and Sandra L. Romano. 1997. Cnidaria. Sea anemones, corals, jellyfish, sea pens, hydra. Version 24 April 1997. http://tolweb.org/Cnidaria/2461/1997.04.24 in The Tree of Life Web Project, http://tolweb.org/.
science
Science is an elementary practice. Scientism is a belief. Eugenics and the Holocaust it drove are among the brutal consequences and stark reminders of not recognizing this distinction.