expansions
misc.
γ |
being heard |
perception and expression
1.1. Survival and meaning-making — life and semiosis — are co-extensive. 1.2. Every being is an element in an environment, recognizing and understanding others by their signs. Unavoidably then conversations follow, in whatever form, gathering together communities of mutual interest and dependency. 1.3. Billions of years ago a conversation between different beings fused them together, and from the cells that resulted our species evolved. 1.4. For us, our conversation made our primate tribes the world; and still today it orchestrates our rise and fall.
2.1. For those in our kingdom, society is the focus of our environment; providing the frame of meaningthrough which our ontogenies develop. 2.2. We have evolved as co-operative of cells rather than as the dictatorship of brains. Our bodies are societies. Only half of the cells in my body have my DNA — the other half are bacteria without which I would struggle to survive. 2.3. The identity: I is in effect an illusion, the necessary emergent quality of a unique alliance of animal and bacterial cells. 2.4. Societies are are fundamental. Constructed by both allies and predators, they are the builder of complex organisms and provide their means of survival.
3.1. From our very first moment we call out, like the birds in the trees, despite our awareness and its self-interest in survival. 3.2. Although being heard as often calls diners as dinner, calling-out reveals what is good for us as well as 'who' is not. 3.3. Life is intrinsically about connecting not codes. communicating is not merely an aspect of our genes it is their function. communication not only drives our development, psychologically and culturally, but 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.
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.
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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.
While viruses and bacteria have no use for words, nonetheless, they perceive their environment, and those within it, and reply accordingly —physically; chemically and otherwise— their conversations generating relationships that are much more substantial than those of ours.