Following this logic, does semiotics pull down the wall between the real and the…unreal? — MikeL
There is no real need to tear down the Kantian wall between mind and world — apokrisis
Rather than interpretation you have signal transduction,
— MikeL
You could say that about the brain too. — apokrisis
Or maybe a count of food fragments is a sign that points meaningfully towards a food source? — apokrisis
The reason is to get food. Are you suggesting the interpretant is a sentient entity that decided to make one, or that evolution is sentient?There is a reason for the whole chemoreceptor set-up? — apokrisis
I think what you have with Pierce is a mind model of the universe. The need for an interpretant makes its so. — MikeL
The epistemic insistence on the explanatory indispensability of representation does not necessarily entail these* nefarious ontological consequences. Since thoughts of things are not the things that are thought, it is necessary to explain how thoughts are related to things while distinguishing their causal connection from their justificatory relation. This is the Kantian problem. It cannot be dismissed by simply levelling the distinction between thoughts and things, which is what flat ontology seems to require. — Ray Brassier, Delevelling, Against Flat Ontologies
epistemic subjectivity is ineliminable, but it is neither supernatural nor
immutable. It embodies a mutable conceptual structure embedded in the natural order. Concepts change over time because the way in which we know the world is conditioned by the way in which the world changes. Time conditions knowing, even if it is possible to say true things about the way
the world is at any particular moment or slice of the cognitive process. — Ray Brassier
IE, the triadic nature of sign, interpretant and object does not necessarily occur solely between humans or in a derived virtual plane from the activity of humans — fdrake
This levelling of the playing field facilitates a flat ontology, in the sense that there are no privileged stratum of interpretant required for semiogenesis; there is no subject held monopoly on meaning; we objects can be said to play amongst ourselves. — fdrake
Since thoughts of things are not the things that are thought, it is necessary to explain how thoughts are related to things while distinguishing their causal connection from their justificatory relation. This is the Kantian problem. It cannot be dismissed by simply levelling the distinction between thoughts and things, which is what flat ontology seems to require. — Ray Brassier, Delevelling, Against Flat Ontologies
You could, but you would be then annihilating the whole premise of signalling and interpretation and replacing it with cause and effect. — MikeL
Just off the top of my head, it is more likely that an array of chemoreceptors all connected mechanically to the flagella cause an angular change in the propulsive tail relative to the greatest concentration of activation. The angular change would have to happen either way to give directionality right? — MikeL
The reason is to get food. Are you suggesting the interpretant is a sentient entity that decided to make one, or that evolution is sentient? — MikeL
However, such a levelling can be interpreted as a reification of signs as objects and relations in the world, rather than representations of object-object relations; confusing map for the territory because the concept of representation has been discarded, elided and subsumed within the concept of function. — fdrake
The Piercian model, by invoking an interpretant becomes a mind model of the universe. For it not to be this would require the definitions of object, interpretant and object signifier to specifically state such a thing. — MikeL
Semiotics it seems is becoming an explanation for the mind as well as our understanding of the world.the bare semiotic relation that is the ultimate cause of "mindfulness" of any kind. — apokrisis
Is the interpretant in your definition now describing the response of the subject to the object or signifying element?An interpretant is an established habit. — apokrisis
There is as little thought or interpretance going on as possible ... yet also the first definite evidence of thought or interpretance. — apokrisis
So is a "hardwired" evolutionary habit evidence of a choice having been made, but there then being also only the one choice? Is it an example of sentience manifest, or instead an example of the ground state in which sentience is first beginning to arise? — apokrisis
Which is then what you did in saying chemoreception is "just signal transduction".
In material terms, that might be true. In informational terms, it is missing the point. — apokrisis
While I think that it's a true statement to say that it does not necessarily occur solely with humans, it does require a sentience rather than a cause and effect mechanism. I can think of no instance where sentience would not be involved as interpretation is a cognitive process. — @MikeL
Is the assertion that the interpretant is being removed so we are left with a cause and effect relationship? Is that what you mean when you say us objects can play amongst ourselves? 'Meaning' by definition would seem to possess a subject held monopoly. It is the subject that ascribes meaning to the world through the semiotic pattern interactions they observe. Different subjects may observe different patterns or the same pattern, but the meaning is theirs alone.
That leads to a more general definition of sign (within a sign relation). I have been stressing - a point MikeL did more than just mention :) - that a sign involves a reduction of information. It is not a reification - a Saussurian signifier or representation - but an active ignoring of material facticity. A filtering out of the dynamical environment, the thing in itself, so as to respond only to some "useful aspect" of the world. Reality is the totality of all that there is. A sign is a reduction of that to some token to which we feel justifies or secures an appropriate habitual response.
Now that describes semiosis of the ordinary subject-object kind - semiosis as life and mind acting in the world. But an information theoretic physics - an object-object semiosis - sees the same information reduction principle applying in the hierarchical organisation of nature in general. Just because of event horizons, every particle or material object is responding to a reduced view of the total environment.
And that is basic to probability theory (your strong interest?) as the principle of indifference. The ability to filter out micro-causes is how macro-states come to be real. An ideal gas has an actual pressure and temperature because all the detailed kinetics of the constituent particles can be justifiably averaged over, or ignored. — Apokrisis
. Despite an enormous evolutionary selection that must exist for the property of prediction, I think that imagination has great difficulty arising through cause and effect coupling or any other mechanical definition. — MikeL
Semiotics also has the problem of resolving dual conflicts. Lets give our bacterium some more flagella. What happens when the left and right chemoreceptor light up at the same time? The only reasonable argument I can see would be the claim that there is never simultaneity in effector-response nor ever an exact equal weighting of two things, as simultaneous as they may appear. A see-saw with a 100kg weight placed on both sides at the same time will not move. — MikeL
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