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expression


Although expression is a characteristic of all beings, it is generally considered as referring to states that are almost exclusively human., The ubiquity and relevance of extended and embodied cognition are then overlooked, and the psychological correlate of expression in human beings considered as technique.

The term expression is used here more widely than normal to refer to semiotic communication — the making, recognizing, interpreting, using, and responding to signs; whether these are made through, for instance, auditory, visual, mophological, or behavioural media.

External or internal, conscious or not, a being's expression develops in response to the meaningful internal representations generated from the expressions of their sensory systems. expression then is recursive, predicated on elementary, inherited rules, or behavioural modules. For instance, a being's physicality and markings are perceived by others as meaningful, whether through experience or association, and choices are influenced. Selection and inheritance then follow.

awareness arises from differentiated sets of mental activity — temporary foci around which orbits, for instance, our own cognition. Conscious expression is a linear organization of the elements of these foci, and fluency the semiotic competence with which they are identified and translated into a stream of signs.

language is the recognition of a set of signs, the meaning of which has been informed by the macrocosm of metalanguage within which it has developed — cultures are metalanguages within which human languages develop these then driving the development of cultures.

The expression we develop within the cultures of our ontogeny is foundational. In later life, as we engage within other cultures, together with our other elementary, cognitive and bio-mechanical capabilities it commensurately founds our expression in these too.




expression


edit: 4 Feb 2024, written 10 Mar 2023.

expression refers here to any signal, sign or symbol, that a being generates, whether external or internal to itself, and whether or not it is consciously or deliberately generated. Its transmission may be through a biophysical channel e.g vocal, luminescence, neural, etc.; a virtual channel e.g text, artefact, smoke, etc.; or a bio-virtual channel e.g telephony, video, etc. It is the effective response of a being to its perception of an external and internal event, constructed from the meaningful internal representations it generates from the chemical, electrical, or electro-chemical expressions of its sensory mechanism.




artefact here is a back-formation (from Latin: arte "by skill" and facere/factum "make/made") to refer to creations made by any being e.g to the sculptured sand bowers of Pufferfish, or the ornately decorated play-house of the Bowerbird.



Pufferfish Bower.
A Pufferfish bower. ...more



Mind can be defined as a causally effective inner state.

quote leftThe endocrine apparatus (the hormone system) .. should not be seen as an isolated regulatory system .. but rather as an integral part of both the immune system and the nervous system. Together, .. these endosemiotic tools are collectively responsible for the interaction of the organism with its social and physical world and constitute the fundament out of which so-called psychological reality, if any, of the organism will emerge.

from "The Great Chain of Semiosis. Investigating the Steps in the Evolution of Semiotic Competence." Jesper Hoffmeyer & Frederik Stjernfelt, 2015, Biosemiotics 9(1) DOI:10.1007/s12304-015-9247-y





Language: any system of sounds, gestures, symbols, or other signs that facilitates communication.




Microcosm / macrocosm: a macrocosm is a complex structure that is considered to be a whole; a microcosm is an element with a similar structure that exists within a macrocosm.

reference example:— Collins English Dictionary.



Metalanguage: a language or set of symbols that describes or defines another language.




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.


NB. The definitions used here may vary considerably, both in degree and specificity, to those used elsewhere; nonetheless, they also overlap with them considerably.


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 measurements.



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


19 Nov. 2024, edit 7 Mar. 2025.

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.



© robin greaves, 2018-2025.
quoteleftI'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.
David Spiegel, MD, Stanford University Medical Center. Stanford research builds link between sleep, cancer progression, Stanford Medicine News Center, 2003.


© robin greaves, 2018-2025.

family inheritance


a recursive definition 10 Mat 2025.

Life is the state of being. Being is the condition of BEINGS.

A BEING is a descendant of a BEING.

I am a BEING.



© robin greaves, 2018-2025.

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.


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.



quoteleftHydrozoa 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.



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/.



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.




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.


scientism


open quotation markThe 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..




from: Physics and Reality, published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, Vol. 221, Issue 3, March 1936, pp. 349-382.


from: "The Great Chain of Semiosis, Investigating the Steps in the Evolution of Semiotic Competence." p.8, Jesper Hoffmeyer & Frederik Stjernfelt, September 2015, Biosemiotics 9(1) DOI:10.1007/s12304-015-9247-y (Emphasis added).

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