With a foreign tongue I can barely speak here, but even in silence language is inescapable. This is not madness. The brain, reflecting on the information the senses provide, asleep or awake anticipates a future space, integrating experience into an internal model, and testing this through thought and conversation.

It is not necessary to ask whether soul and body are one, just as it is not necessary to ask whether the wax and its shape are one, nor generally whether the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter are one. For even if one and being are spoken of in several ways, what is properly so spoken of is the actuality.    Aristotle, 350 BC

spirit and soul

According to Barnhart and OED (1989), the earliest use of the word [spirit] in English mainly is from passages in the Vulgate, where the Latin word [SPIRITUS] translates Greek PNEUMA and Hebrew RUAH. A distinction between soul and spirit (as "seat of emotions") became current in Christian terminology (such as Greek PSYKHE and PNEUMA, Latin ANIMA and SPIRITUS) but "is without significance for earlier periods" [Buck]. Latin SPIRITUS, usually in classical Latin "breath," replaced ANIMUS in the sense "spirit" in the imperial period and appears in Christian writings as the usual equivalent of Greek PNEUMA.    from: Etymonline, spirit - retrieved 17 June 2024.

It then seems reasonable that the pre-Christian concept of an animating force (a breath or spirit) be translated as the meta-biological construct, biosemiosis.spirit

It is as correct, as it is incorrect, to say that hormones create love, as to say that love creates hormones.

complementarity

Niels Bohr, who received the Nobel Prize for his foundational work on Quantum theory, conceived the Principle of Complementarity —that singular items could at the same time possess apparently mutually exclusive properties— after realizing that light behaved like both waves and particles. His motto became: "Contraria non contradictoria sed complementa sunt", meaning: contradictions are not contradictory but complimentary.

On words and meaning, he wrote:

 What is it that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.

Niels Bohr, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1963.

phrasal language

Languages we use to communicate with are not acquired through learning letters and grammars. Individual expression is acquired through the repeated use of increasingly lengthy and complex word-blocks —of words then phrases, sentences, and paragraphs— learning the concepts and laws of a language through real, and virtual, social interaction.

While 'primitive' peoples even today are still able to express themselves routinely and seamlessly in more than half a dozen languages, with the establishment of nation states it has become normal for the majority of a people to speak only the official language of the state that they reside in.

As the translators of the Tao Te Ching [1] explain — referring to their translation of the six, symmetric characters it opens with as "Tao called Tao is not Tao" — translations are necessarily approximations, incapable of fully reflecting each others' unique heritage and nuancing. Korzybski[2] specifies the fundamental issue — "The map is not the territory." "Words are not the things they represent." — When translations from one terrestrial language to another are unavoidably approximate, and language ambiguous, how much more so is any translation of a deity's 'language' — the utterances of infants more precisely approximate those of adults than the words of Man do the Words of God.

Fundamentalism here carries a belief-neutral definition: the rigid adherence to a point of view characterized by fundamental principles, and an aggressive intolerance of other views.

words and maps

In the paper 'A Non-Aristotlean System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics', presented to the American Mathematical Society in 1931, Alfred Korzybski made two observations: 'A map is not the territory', and 'Words are not the things they represent' (here highlighted in bold; italic emphases by the author).

... A) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory. B) Two similar structures have similar 'logical' characteristics. Thus, if in a correct map, Dresden is given as between Paris and Warsaw, a similar relationship is found in the actual territory C) A map is not the territory. D) An ideal map would contain the map of the map, the map of the map of the map., endlessly. ... We may call it self-reflexiveness. Languages share with the map the above four characteristics. A) Languages have structure, thus we may have languages of elementalist structure such as 'space' and 'time', 'observer' and 'observed', 'body' and 'soul', 'senses' and 'mind', 'intellect' and 'emotions', 'thinking' and 'feeling', 'thought' and 'intuition'., which allow verbal division or separation. Or we may have languages of a non-elementalist structure such as 'space-time', the new quantum languages, 'time binding', 'different order abstractions', 'semantic reactions'., which do not involve verbal division or separation.; also mathematical languages of 'order', 'relation', 'structure', 'function', 'variable', 'invariant', 'difference', 'addition', 'division'., which apply to 'senses' and 'mind', that is, can be 'seen' and 'thought of',. B) If we use languages of a structure non-similar to the world and our nervous system, our verbal predictions are not verified empirically, we cannot be 'rational' or adjusted,. ... ,. C) Words are not the things they represent. D) Language also has self-reflexive characteristics. We use language to speak about language, which fact introduces serious verbal and semantic difficulties solved by the theory of multiordinality. ...     Alfred Korzybski, 1931.

inclosure

During the Middle Ages — the 5th to 12th centuries — and later, the Latin word feudum was used to refer to freehold property. Only in the 17th century was the term feudalism coined by historians to create an historical narrative for European nation states.

Since the Middle Ages, local lords had expanded the territories subject to them, and intensified their control over the peoples living there. In the 17th century the Inclosure Acts began, creating property rights over land that previously had been held in common. In England and Wales, between 1604 and 1914 over 5,200 such Acts enclosed around 28,000 km² of open fields and common land. Tenants and their descendants were evicted. Displaced from the countryside they were forced to look for employment in cities and factories. The poem: The Goose and the Common, by an unknown 18th century writer, protests the injustice:

They hang the man and flog the woman Who steals the goose from off the common Yet let the greater villain loose That steals the common from the goose. The law demands that we atone When we take things we do not own But leaves the lords and ladies fine Who take things that are yours and mine. The poor and wretched don't escape If they conspire the law to break This must be so but they endure Those who conspire to make the law. The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common And geese will still a common lack Till they go and steal it back.

For the history of the Inclosure Acts in the UK see e.g: Enclosing the Land, published on the British Government website, and: Inclosure Acts, on Wikipedia.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking..    Albert Einstein.

The total land area of England and Wales is approximately 151,000 km². The Inclosed land represented nearly 20% of the total land area of the combined countries.

He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.    Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886,

Meaning is a personal perception of expression encoded by the reference-frame of ontogeny. For choice not to be misguided the different reference-frames that inevitably arise must then be recognized and reconciled. Locusts are successful, but they are unable to escape growing from peaceful co-existance as individuals to the cannibalistic war of a swarm.

reconciling difference

Societies are founded on the reconciliation of differences. Winning the peace is a contradiction in terms; war just increases social entropy, turning back the clock, extinguishing evolved social knowledge, and regressing society to a more primitive state.

Wars are colonial endeavours to replace social forms; those fought by colonialists to establish themselves in other countries, for instance, or by established interests to exploit industrialization or virtualization. Destruction is their common goal.

Leaving the majority stripped of rights, wars recycle their assets, converting them into investments for those with power. The advice, attributed to Baron Rothschild, "When there's blood on the streets, buy property", only applies to those with the power to retain their assets.

virtuality refers to abstractions of actuality that pre-process experience.

We recognize what we see, this is our perception, inherited then learnt from experience. We see what we expect to see, accordingly constructing and integrating the data that our eyes, and other senses are capable of recording.

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.

Please see: here for a summary and references.

The prefix "meta-" is used here as it is in the term "metalanguage" — a system of symbols or signs used to describe another system of symbol or signs — to refer to the metasemiotic expression of biosemiosis.

psychosomatic

If it is accepted as unavoidable that descriptions of the ineffable are metaphorical, and creationist teleologies are set-aside, unencumbered by anthropocentric concepts of the soul, BEINGS can be defined simply as 'vehicles' of life, and life inferred recursively. The term BIOPHYSICAL is then used here to refer to their actuality.

BEINGS are BIOPHYSICAL, their abstract, psychological attributes, particularly in humans, referred to as awareness, consciousness, EGO, and mind. In much the same way as attributes such as colour, they are EXPRESSIONS — colour relating to both inanimate and animate NOUMENA; and consciousness etc, only to animate NOUMENA.

Wellness and illness are then PSYCHOSOMATIC, existing in a 'space' that is both BIOPHYSICAL and PSYCHOLOGICAL. Their development therefore is a function of BIOPHYSICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, and environmental factors, that are impacted upon by social support and care, and medical and psychological interventions. However, despite the fact that, for instance, cancer research has substantiated this, modern societies and organizations still ridicule it.

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.

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 frames of reference.

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.

Anthropocentrism is the narcissistic belief that the human species is the central fact and final aim of a universe that should therefore be understood in terms of human experience, needs, and values.

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..