In 1934, T.S.Eliot wrote the pageant play, The Rock. In it he famously mourned the loss of meaning from knowledge, and information. Fifty years later, when data was added to Eliot's three categories — information, knowledge, and wisdom — the DIKW hierarchy was born. In 1979 Frank Zappa identified its topmost tier:
Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not wisdom
Wisdom is not truth
The absolute truth is REALITY; infinite and ineffable. However, a BEING can only know this through their PERCEPTION of it, and that is unavoidably informed by the unique, personal MEANING it has for them.
The common denominator of BEINGS is MEANING; that is also what sets them apart as individuals. MEANING guides their choices, determining then not only their individual futures but also, as elements of multiple systems, that of their societies, species, and environments.
Information science finds it problematic to apply the DIKW hierarchy — its focus is on coding machines to parse data and generate mechanical understanding; natural languages evolved to negotiate the conflicts that arise between different PERCEPTIONS. The hierarchy then, though simple, fitting and functional, makes no sense to a machine. Information is contextualized data; Knowledge is contextualized information; Wisdom is contextualized knowledge; and Truth is the context of wisdom.
If completeness is the goal then Eliot's original lines would need be topped and tailed. Rightly, many would object to the loss of their elegance and beauty, but the four, rhetorical questions that result seem perfectly to infer and encapsulate the derailment of cognition in the information age:
Where is the truth
we have lost in wisdom?
Where is the wisdom
we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge
we have lost in information?
Where is the information
we have lost in data?
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The DIKW hierarchy (as it came to be known) was brought to prominence by Russell Ackoff.. in 1989. But the actual first recorded instance of it was in 1934.. from the poem The Rock by T.S. Eliot. (And for now we can skip over the 1979 reference in the song "Packard Goose" by Frank Zappa.) The sequence seems to have been reinvented in the late 1980s, independent of these poetic invocations.
..in his address accepting the presidency of the International Society for General Systems Research..
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The Harvard Business Review is a general management magazine published by Harvard Business Publishing, a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University.
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Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
from the pageant play, 'The Rock', written by T.S.Eliot in collaboration with the musician Martin Shaw. The complete text, Choruses from 'The Rock', was published as part of the edition of Eliot's Collected Poems, 1909-1962.
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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.
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MEANING, is that which a BEINGPERCEIVES 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.
Whether or not
there is free-will,
we choose
whenever we can.
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.
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virtuality refers to abstractions of actuality that pre-process experience.
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We recognize what we see; this is our perception, inherited and learnt from experience.
Seeing what we expect to see we then construct and integrate accordingly the data that our eyes and other senses are capable of registering.
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The term BEINGS, applies here to all forms of LIFE, whether multicellular (humans, ants, plants, etc.); unicellular (bacteria, archaea,algae, etc.); or the MODULAR societies of slime molds,jellyfish, ants, humans, deer, etc.
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Bioemiosis proceeds through recognition — through current sense-data that a beingperceives 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.
NB. The definitions used here may vary considerably, both in degree and specificity, to those used elsewhere; nonetheless, they also overlap with them considerably.
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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.
NB. The labels, 'more complex', 'simpler', 'transitory' and 'permanent', here refer to relative positions on subjectively defined axis, not to any objective measure.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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footnotes of n_Einstein_Translation.php included in entryNote.php, e_Einstein_HumanDelusion.php, and e_personalMeta.php.
my translation
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 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:—
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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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.
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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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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
The definitions above, apart from those for meaning and recognize which are after those in the Collins English Dictionary, are after those in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.
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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 narcissistic belief that the human species is the central fact and final aim of a universe that must therefore be understood in terms of human experience, needs, and values.
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Ribeiroia in herons,
fungi on beetles,
or the staph in our guts,
win minds and hearts over
to serve other gods.
Shut outside our doors of reason,
flocking crows and horses,
otters, gorillas, chimps and geese,
play follow the leader.
What makes us special.
Or more so than dogs.
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science
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 it drove 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.
The DIKW hierarchy (as it came to be known) was brought to prominence by Russell Ackoff.. in 1989. But the actual first recorded instance of it was in 1934.. from the poem The Rock by T.S. Eliot. (And for now we can skip over the 1979 reference in the song "Packard Goose" by Frank Zappa.) The sequence seems to have been reinvented in the late 1980s, independent of these poetic invocations.
