ϴ | incorporation |
expression and meaning
As a society grows, its individuals become more dependent upon it and their roles increasingly specialize. Cohesion and growth are achieved through a shared cultural narrative, an identity that competes with others and reproduces in the perceptions and behaviours of individuals.
1.1. Environments consist of beings as well as inanimate entities. On being heard, conversations between them begin, gathering together societies of mutual interest and dependency. 1.2. In society, individuals find they obtain greater benefit from their actions than they do alone. 1.3. Soon after life on Earth began, three or four billion years ago surplus social capital gave birth to the biosphere of social beings, of which we evolved as a part.
2.1. Only about half our cells are human, the rest are bacteria. Without these we struggle to survive. 2.2. Inside and around us, the sociality of virus, microbe, and animal, blended together and evolving, gives rise to what we come to know of as 'us'. 2.3. Our body is the environment for microscopic beings. And they live in it dismissive of its needs —as we appear to be of the needs of ours.
3.1. Every being exists as an element of a social environment. From this elemental sociality, individual, multi-cellular life-forms evolved. 3.2. Before we developed as groups of individuals, from extended families into tribes, nations, and empires, our own life-form evolved colonially. 3.3. Although our technology sets us apart we are not essentially so different to other species. 3.4. Hunting, warring, reproducing and protecting young, are fundamentally social acts. Sport, music, and art, express and develop social cohesion. All are resourced from social capital and variously serve to produce it.
4.1. Born expecting to be understood, we have learned to see, to hear, and to feel, within the cultural environment that has surrounded us; consciously and unconsciously developing our behaviours to be interpreted by those around us. 4.2. Before we could stand we fought to be free —now something we line up and die for— yet deprived of connection we soon become frustrated, anxious or bored. 4.3. our culture nurtures us as we grow, finding our sense of security and home inside the groups that it defines. Enfolding us in its constructions, customs, and stories, it manifests who we are, both to others and to ourselves. 4.4. So as our society and species can evolve and survive, as individuals we have evolved to die.
5.1. The environment of a being is the series of spaces it knows through experience; constructed by perception as much as by physics and biology. 5.2. Individual perception develops through adaptation to the culture surrounding us during ontogeny. This frames our experience and informs the perception we have of others and ourselves. 5.3. Darwin noticed that finches have adapted to their environments. And yet it is the environments, of inanimate and animate things, that 'select' those beings that survive. 5.4. We shape our environment but we survive, and are shaped, as an integral element of it.
6.1. As we develop, the cultures of our family, tribe, and community grow nested within us like Russian dolls, informing our feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. 6.2. Adapting as we grow we absorb the narratives of our familial cultures, integrating them even when they contradict one another. 6.3. The differences between our singular personal cultures individuate us; while the commonalities between them facilitate communication, aggregating us into ever larger groups. 6.4. Reproduction involves the transmission of biological codes, but also of cultural codes that reproduce on being believed. These grow and evolve, whether within their native societies or alien ones, engaging and competing with others as individuals do.
7.1. Individuals depend upon society. In a social crowd their boundaries soften and they merge, as differences between them are unconsciously reconciled. 7.2. In a shared virtuality of symbols and signs, cultures hold societies together. 7.3. Shepherding societies to wage war, or revolt, or labour and repress, a culture's narratives of belief and justice comfort, excite, and terrify. 7.4. Responding to threats and opportunities they perceive, cultures develop and grow. With lifespans of hundreds or thousands of years they behave as individuals, changing their 'minds' and replacing their leaders.
8.1. As cultures evolve and develop increasingly complex strategies to exploit social capital, individuals take on increasingly specialized roles. 8.2. limited companies evolved in our cultures to release social capital from the risks and responsibilities that constrain individuals. 8.3. limited companies have rights as individuals do, to own property, enter into contracts, employ others, and sue for damages, but only limited responsibility. 8.4. Conceived to drive our industry, limited companies were the first virtual beings, their artificial intelligence a simple algorithm of cupidity. Serviced by people they have grown; now they direct economies and nations. 8.5. From handprints on cave walls to printing presses and HTML, for over 65,000 years virtuality has grown, while human brains have shrunk.
9.1. cultures secure their future by means of their historical narratives. Their unity, and their practices of justice, freedom, and charity, are founded upon an acceptance of the context of meaning this provides. 9.2. Many narratives hold that recent human migrations were 'natural', but peoples were and continue to be dispossessed of their common land, variously evicted from their homes and stripped of their livelihoods, through ordered Acts of inclosure. 9.3. Peoples have been forced to migrate to towns. There, religious charities, industrialists, and a new breed of landlord, rehoused extended families of the old world in ideal, nuclear-family homes. 9.4. Societies infantilized after industrialization when families were rendered down further by the extermination of a generation of males in two world wars. 9.5. scientism has replaced old religions; education now trains citizens for industry, and knowledge is translated into procedures. Social capital has been digitized and, in ever more finely segregated demographics, virtuality has bloomed.
Δ making sense ψ on being heard
All we have in common is the illusion of being together. And beyond the illusion of permitted anodyne there is only the collective desire to destroy isolation. — Impersonal relationships are the no-man's land of isolation. By producing isolation, contemporary social organization signs its own death sentence.
As a society develops and grows, its individuals become more dependent upon it and their roles increasingly specialize. Cohesion and growth are achieved through a shared cultural narrative of thought and behaviour; this competes with others and replicates on being believed.
anodyne. anything that alleviates mental distress and pain.
.. another voice.
Progressing through cultural as well as physical adaptation, evolution is driven by what the next generation is learning. The framework of knowledge that nurtures this understanding is the culture of its society, and is more powerful, and of greater and more fundamental, long-term value than that which comes from direct application of the knowledge itself
The stanza is taken from the poem: 'Little Gidding', written by T.S Eliot during the air-raids on Great Britain in World War II.
Dissatisfied with each draft, and believing the problem was not with the poem but with himself, Eliot abandoned it, returning to finish it the following year. The concluding poem in a volume of four, it was published in 1943 as: 'Four Quartets'.
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..