Δ | making sense |
perception and expression
From the beginning, the environments that determine which beings survive have been social as well as material. Communicative competence is fundamental, affording sustenance, protection, and the empowerment of social integration. Well-being then coextends with fluency.
1.1. A being is a noumenon of embodied cognition; it perceives the world it comes to know by recognizing those pieces of data that its senses are able to gather because they have proved to be significant. It cannot see past them. 1.2. reality is like the floor of a cave in the darkness, felt as the head of a walking stick pressing against the palm of our hand. It is real even though our experience of it can only ever be a perception. 1.3. For us, reality is simply what to us makes sense. It never is and can never be quite as we perceive.
2.1. To survive, beings must interact not just with inanimate entities but with other beings. As they then found advantage in these social connections, in the primordial environment elementary societies formed. 2.2. From elementary communication, languages developed, continuing and reflecting the preconceptions that beings inherit and framing their current perception —right or wrong, good or bad, mad or not. 2.3, Over generations simple relationships became increasingly complex. Various forms of interdependence evolved, between protists, viruses and bacteria, to become multi-cellular, modular, and symbiotic beings.
7.1. First we cry; and then we suckle. Communicating effectively is vital if we are to successfully integrate with our surrounding society and obtain its protection and support. 7.2. Infants are instinctively aware that being shunned can be a death sentence; children relentlessly demand conversation. Any fear they might have is readily overwhelmed by their drive to communicate.
1.2. Born expecting their world to make sense, children see only foundations around them. They build on these regardless, imagining viability to be that which seems to them to work. 1.3. Children learn as best they can; their understanding of the information on which they depend to do so developed as well as limited by their experience. 6.1. We learn about reality from the stream of data that it stimulates in our senses. 6.2. Inside the womb, as sensory data is filtered and translated into functional information, our unique personal culture begins to develop from that of our mother.
6.3. culture trains our development like a trellis trains a vine. Moment by moment our experience blindly meshes in layers, crystallizing around a genetic algorithm. 6.4. We incorporate understanding, privation, and error equally and impartially into ourselves, absorbing the world that we come to know. 7.3. Patterns of expression, imprinted on us during early ontogeny, frame the conversations through which we negotiate meaning and develop into who we are. Interposed between us they establish our interpersonal relationships in later life.
4.1. culture frames our experience of the world; it is a meta-language, circumscribing both our understanding of language and of culture. 4.2. As we develop, the cultures of our 'family', 'community', 'region', and 'state', which surround us in our ontogeny, nest inside us like Russian dolls, building a unique personal culture. 4.3. Each of us expresses our personal culture constantly and unavoidably, non-verbally even more than verbally; it is what gives meaning to who we are and to what we do.
5.1. Imprinting our environment with constructions and artifacts, cultures also pattern our perception. 5.2. Through the paradigm culture provides, we are able to anticipate and interpret the responses we receive from the world around us. By balancing their candor with their kindness we are able to find and maintain our place its society. 5.3. In a foreign culture, when uprooted, categories evaporate that to us seemed certain. Discovering our perception is not absolute and universal, we become dumb, 'home-sick' for the authentic connection we feel in the well-established constructs of familiar company.
8.1. Every being's survival depends upon it making sense of both its internal and external environments. 8.2. The conversation between a being's internal and external worlds determines its biological and psychological well-being. 8.3. If the soul is ineffable and the psyche is understood as a meta-biological construct, then our fluency is a reflection of the impact of our experience, and of any interventions that are made in our lives.
θ incorporation ψ on being heard
from D-MakingSense.php#D_intro.
The shouts of children racing from class to playground tumble happily into chaos like fireworks at carnival: "Crazy! Let's do it!" "Wicked!" "You're mental!" Children follow instinct to choose leaders; to them our history seems like a comic strip. And yet, while they're occupied with new experience their schooling absorbs them, their growth developing framed by the environments it represents.
from D-MakingSense.php#D5.1.
shaping cultures
On the night of 10th May, 1941, with one of the last bombs of the last serious raid, our House of Commons was destroyed by the violence of the enemy, and we have now to consider whether we should build it up again, and how, and when. We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us. Winston Churchill, UK Prime Minister.
from D-MakingSense.php#D8.3.
interventions
In whatever way health conditions are expressed, their physical consequences and need for empathy intrinsically impact on the wellbeing of everyone associated with them. All healthcare interventions, whether made actively, through surgery, chemical or physical therapies, psychotherapy, or social support; by simply engaging with a healthcare provider; or when interventions are made by one party and the discussions regarding these are had with another, necessarily engage all involved in profound cognitive interaction and communication.
a complete aetiology
sorry! This note is being edited. Please use the contact form (accessible via the link at the bottom of main pages) if you would like to be notified when it is re-published.
called from D-MakingSense.php#D8.3
Hippocratic Oath
Written between the fifth and third centuries BC, the Hippocratic Oath is an expression of medical ethics, attributed to the Greek doctor Hippocrates. Its third undertaking, quoted here, is from a version of it by Louis Lasagna written in 1964. His version of it is that which is most common today.
The Hippocratic oath is the earliest expression of medical ethics in the Western world, establishing several principles which remain of paramount significance today. These include the principles of medical confidentiality and of doing no harm. As the seminal articulation of certain principles that continue to guide and inform medical practice, the ancient text is of more than historic and symbolic value. It is enshrined in the legal statutes of various jurisdictions, such that violations of the oath may carry criminal or other liability beyond the oath's symbolic nature.
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.
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.
scientism
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..