false friends
Exact translations are generally only possible for the simplest of statements. A complex EXPRESSION of mathematical calculus, for instance, can be translated into an elementary LANGUAGE of addition and subtraction. But accuracy requires division and multiplication.
Although it may be possible in some way to say anything in any LANGUAGE, the more dissimilar the CULTURES of the LANGUAGES involved the more numerous, significant, and masked, FALSE-FRIENDS of chance and semantics will be — as meaning is first and foremost inferred through a CULTURE's assumptions and beliefs.
Accurate translation between CULTURES, of human affairs, then seems an ever receding goal. One that when engaged with openly provides opportunities for interpersonal learning and engagement, but when not provides them for deception instead.
There are already more than one hundred translations of the Tao Te Ching. ... Chinese consists of a single monosyllable for each word and often does not mark such grammatical features as tense or number.
from the Translators' Preface, of Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu. Translated by Stephen Addis and Stanley Lombardo, Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.
FALSE-FRIENDS can emerge either by chance or semantically. Chance FALSE-FRIENDS are elements of LANGUAGES that seem the same, or similar, in two or more LANGUAGES, but have different meanings, whereas the meanings of semantic FALSE-FRIENDS have diverged as, over time and distance, their CULTURES have grown apart.
Semantic FALSE-FRIENDS can either be 'full' — elements of LANGUAGES whose meanings in various LANGUAGES diverge widely — or they can be partial. Partial semantic false friends are elements of LANGUAGES that have several senses, but while some of these coincide in two or more LANGUAGES others do not.
Partial semantic FALSE-FRIENDS represent divergences between CULTURES as they have grown, divergences of customs, habits, and beliefs. The miscomprehensions arising from these then carry the greatest risk of a significant impact, and of that impact then snowballing.
With an example of an interstellar war, Douglas Adams, in the science fiction comedy novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, wrote satirically about the impacts of partial semantic FALSE-FRIENDS.
An example of the real world impacts they have when the miscomprehensions they can lead to are not addressed, was provided by the implementation of The Withdrawal Agreement, agreed by European Union Member States and the United Kingdom for the UK's withdrawal from the European Union.
reasonable words
A key provision of the The Withdrawal Agreement was the process to be followed for notifying affected residents of the Agreement's impact on them personally, and to inform them of any steps they needed to follow to confirm the rights that the Agreement had safeguarded for them in their new country of residence.
The provision required signatories to take all reasonable steps to inform affected residents both of the changes that would follow and of any country specific procedures that individual residents would then need to follow. However, in the Finnish translation the provision was understood by the Finnish government only to require announcements of those changes to be made through commonly used channels, and that the provision was then met simply by posting information on the Government's Facebook page and in Finnish newspapers. The Finnish government did not understand it to be a requirement to notify affected residents individually, for instance by post or by copying them into the information it sent to its agencies; information that while notifying those agencies did not notify those individuals of the changes it had made to their status.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the impact of the miscomprehension caused by this particular false-friend is reflected in the communication of the Vogons with the people of Earth that notified them of the planet's imminent demolition..
biophysicality
If we accept as unavoidable that descriptions of the ineffable are metaphorical, and anthropocentric concepts of the soul are set aside, BEINGS can be defined as 'vehicles' of life and LIFE inferred recursively.
BEINGS are BIOPHYSICAL EXPRESSIONS, organized and animated by the interpretations of their external and internal environments that their endo-SEMIOTIC systems generate.
In order to exist, any psychological construct requires a BIOPHYSICAL correlate; in order to survive, every BIOPHYSICAL construct requires a psychological correlate. Psychology then refers to a BEING's META-BIOLOGY, the BIOPHYSICAL expression of its ONTOLOGY.
PERCEPTION is an attribute of BIOSEMIOTIC systems. In humans it is also referred to as both awareness or consciousness, and EGO, or mind. PERCEPTIONS are generated from information that the SENSES of a BEING can recognize of NOUMENA it experiences in its internal and external environments. Awareness, consciousness, EGO, and mind are PERCEPTIONS of self, existing in the the same way that colour does.
wellness
In an individual, the development of wellness and illness is a function of the interaction between their BIOPHYSICAL actuality and their environments. This system as a whole is then impacted by any medical or psychological interventions, and the receipt or privation of the care and support of their social complex.
Research into cancer and other diseases long since identified the existence and primacy of METABIOPHYSICAL systems and the need to address these as a whole; however, despite the work of the WHO, the BROADCASTING of modern societies and systems increasingly discounts these 'holistic' systems, instead promoting reductionist mechanical models of wellness.
MEANING, refers here to that which a BEING PERCEIVES from the EXPRESSION of a NOUMENON. Developed and encoded through the FRAME of an individual's ONTOGENY it is then inheritable, and different FRAMES then inevitably arise. BEINGS in social groups less able to recognize and reconcile these FRAMES are at greater risk of being misinformed or deceived.
The short term success of an individual can be seen as insufficient to guide their future actions. Locusts, for instance, are successful as individuals, but find themselves unable to escape developing from this peaceful co-existence into the cannibalistic war of a swarm.
The entire sequence of events involved in the development of an individual BEING over its lifespan.
BIOSEMIOSIS is recursive, enabling BEINGS to generate MEANING by aligning their PERCEPTION of current SENSATION with what they can RECOGNIZE from MEANING previously EMBODIED in themselves, by themselves or through inheritance. ENDOSEMIOSIS and EXOSEMIOSIS then refer respectively to the processes involved in the RECOGNITION of EMBODIED and external NOUMENA.
BIOSEMIOSIS is recursive, enabling BEINGS to generate MEANING by aligning their PERCEPTION of current SENSATION with what they can RECOGNIZE from MEANING previously EMBODIED in themselves, by themselves or through inheritance. ENDOSEMIOSIS and EXOSEMIOSIS then refer respectively to the processes involved in the RECOGNITION of EMBODIED and external NOUMENA.
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 to a 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.
The article, from which the quote was taken, although apparently accessible in 2024, has now been taken down by Stanford Medicine. The new article (at Stanford research builds link between sleep, cancer progression) still refers to Spiegal's work, but the expurgated quote there now, intentionally or otherwise, seems to downplay the research and to distance Stanford from Spiegal and the view he expressed.
life — a recursive definition.
Life is the condition of BEINGS.
A BEING is descended from 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.
Both Aristotle and Plato wrote about signs and symbols; signs in the world of nature, and symbols in human culture. Today, symbols, such as numbers, letters, words etc., are considered as a special type of sign, one that carries meaning through arbitrary conventions rather than by having any direct relation with what is signified.
BIOSEMIOSIS is the process by which a sign is recognized as such; and anything, when recognized, is then a sign.NOUMENA
The term semiosis, and then biosemiosis, as well as semiotics and semiology, are derived from the greek word, semio-, meaning sign. The ending -sis, for instance, the equivalent in English of -ing, then translating literally as sign-ing, sign-action, or signification.
Semiosis is therefore elementary; and semiotics incapable of providing a scientific foundation for an ideology despite the claims of nazi eugenicists.
In order to exist, any psychological construct requires a BIOPHYSICAL correlate; in order to survive, every BIOPHYSICAL construct requires a psychological correlate. Psychology then refers to a BEING's META-BIOLOGY, the BIOPHYSICAL expression of its ONTOLOGY.
A BEING's development is both ontogenic and ontologic; its ONTOGENY developing its biophysical form, and ONTOLOGY developing its awareness of self (ONTOLOGENY). As instinct, although a major component of inheritance, does not contain the complexity of behaviour and habit which humans develop, from diet to sociality, sex to proprioception. For us then, ONTOLOGICAL development is key.
Nazi scientists believed that a fixed, one-to-one relationship exists between the biological and emergent characteristics of individuals; however, emergent characteristics develop during ONTOLOGENY as a consequence of interactions with the environment. Even biophysical elements only give a probabilistic approximation of racial origin. Race, therefore, is not an absolute class of discrete individuals, but simply a category of convenience — as most, if not all, categories are.
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 that are 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 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.
Noumenon, is a Greek word meaning "that which is perceived". It is 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 recognition of the thing-in-itself as perception. Here however, PERCEPTION is used to label one of the four stages in the process of BIOSEMIOSIS that is bootstrapped by RECOGNITION.
NOUMENA may function as SIGNS of themselves — as rocks, or holes, or hands, etc.; as qualities these are associated with — food, green, danger, etc., or as things distinct from themselves — a woman, a mother; a sound, a river, a phoneme or "Mum!"; a mark, a word, or a symbol, like pi, or a photograph or a drawing of a pie or a pipe.
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/.
footnotes of n_Einstein_Translation.php included in entryNote.php, e_Einstein_HumanDelusion.php, and e_personalMeta.php.
Einstein wrote the above (bold emphasis added), in ink, in a note now held in the Albert Einstein Archives, Jerusalem. The edit I have made is of the translation, written in another hand, that appears underneath them.
There were several reasons for editing that translation — to reflect the gender neutrality of the German more consistently; to echo Einstein's use of the words, delusion, and, illusion; and to better reflect the certitude of the note's opening argument, carried in the brevity of the German yet somehow absent in the translation on the note itself. In the end, the edit below, supported by translations by Google on 6 March 2024, is only a minor edit of it:
The 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 that translations I have found are faithful to the originals, stripped of their context, quotations 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 in an original.
Where I have edited translations it has been only in order to address issues of punctuation, prosody, and inference, that I found 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 faithful, and required to make the fluency, erudition, and sensibility of the originals explicit — original texts are provided so readers may draw their own conclusions.
Footnote {delusion01a} of n_Einstein_Translation.php.
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.
Hormone, from the Greek, hormon, meaning 'that which sets in motion'.
from the Greek, akrasia, meaning 'loss of free will'; acrasins are signalling molecules, providing the function that hormones have, for instance, in humans.
context is king
A FRAME refers here to a frame of reference, a reference frame, or category; the meta-LANGUAGE, contextualizing, or describing, the data it contains, and by doing so giving it meaning.
Any form of LANGUAGE is a FRAME and every FRAME is a LANGUAGE. CULTURES are meta-LANGUAGES, environmental FRAMES that aggregate the EXPRESSIONS of a community's EXPERIENCE and PERCEPTION. Their histories of families, communities, and peoples, are histories of privilege and trauma that reflect and convey the fears, wisdom, and strategies they have learned, and passed on. CULTURES are as varied as any individual and as intransigent and challenging to unravel.
Contextualizing and defining the LANGUAGES that evolve with them, and informing the interpretation of those which have not, CULTURES provide opportunities for FALSE-FRIENDS to develop.
This definition of the term, frames of reference, taken from the Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, aligns with the broader application of it here for FRAMES.
category mistakes
In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes referred to the category errors that philosophers make. Three hundred years later, Gilbert Ryle coined the term category mistake, in The Concept Of Mind, illustrating it with several examples, one concerning a misunderstanding about universities.
The philosophical error had also been identified, by professor Heinrich Hertz, in respect of physics.
The prefix "meta-" is used here as it is used in the term meta-language — a language used to describe or contextualize another language.
Language: a system of arbitrary signals, symbols or signs, used to communicate information.
Meaning: the sense or reference of an expression.
Semantic: of or relating to meaning.
to communicate: to convey information through a system of arbitrary signals.
to recognize: to know something as the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something known before.
from the poem The Stare's Nest by My Window, published in Meditations In Time Of Civil War (1922-23), by William Butler Yeats — on the Irish Civil War.
corporatism
the organization of a state on a corporative basis. — Collins English Dictionary.
the principles, doctrine, or system of corporative organization of a political unit, as a city or state. [1885-90] corporatist. — Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary.
the control of a state or organization by large interest groups; "individualism is in danger of being swamped by a kind of corporatism" — TFD Thesaurus, Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection.
corporative
of a state organized into and governed by corporations of individuals involved in any given profession, industry, etc. — Collins English Dictionary.
of or relating to a government or political system in which the principal economic functions, such as banking, industry, labor, and government, are organized as corporate entities. — American Heritage Dictionary.
of or pertaining to a political system under which the principal economic functions, as banking, industry, and labor, are organized as corporate entities. — Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary.
The first Gilded Age, from the 1870s to 1890s, was named after Mark Twain's novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which satirized the excesses and societal problems which had arisen from the laissez-faire capitalism, political corruption, and wealth inequality of the times. A second Gilded Age, named then for its resemblance to the first, is considered to have begun between the 1980s and 2010s and to have continued to the present day.
The nature of the differences between the first and second Gilded Ages, was also examined in 2015 by historian Steve Fraser.