If the signifier 'actually' refers to other signifiers and not a signified, then the dyadic sign is not so dyadic after all. One has instead a system of traces, neither mental not physical, but that which makes distinction possible in the first place. — jas0n

Oh, I was thinking of that as the feature and not the bug. :gasp:

A monkey randomly bashing a keyboard will in infinite time surely produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Along with the Tractatus and 50 Shades of Grey in even shorter order.

Or like DNA coding for proteins, any kind of nonsense polypeptide chain could be produced. Finite means can produce infinite variety. And it is the judgement being exercised in what exact proteins get made that then adds all the meaning.

So the greater the scope for an endless recursion of sign, the more meaningful it is when we can say almost everything in a remarkably few words.

At the wedding ceremony: "I will".

Chaitin's algorithmic complexity and semantic content as data compression.

Maybe this is because the dyadic switching is understood by me not as a linear chain but hierarchical recursion? That is a further assumption built into my Peircean semiotics that is worth making explicit.

Again, it is the 20 questions thing, so is also in fact built into Shannon information.

A taxonomy is a hierarchy of switches. Ideally, the throwing of a switch at each level bisects the space of probability with 50/50 Bayesian exactness.

So I have in my box here a ....? Well, you already know its got to be that small. So its it animal or mineral? Is it rocky or metallic? Is it shiny or dull? Is it more gold or silver? Is it globular or toroid? Aha, I can guess it is the wedding ring. "I will".

A linear chain of distinctions is how you have to encode messages. You have to break the holism of a thought, a protein, a percept, a mathematical object, into a string of digits. Only a chain of switches can reduce its material cross section to the point where it "escapes" the 4D constraints of the real material world.

But then the trick is the switches can encode the holism of a hierarchical order. Each switch can either expand or contract the space of possibility in logarithmic steps while keep the cost of any step strictly linear.

So a linear code gives you hierarchical holism for next to no computational cost. I can't talk as gaily about the Big Bang as the fleck of dust I've just noted on my screen. In 20 questions I can cover almost any space of semantic possibilities that I might practically have an interest in.

It is a first principle of clear writing that global or abstract statements are then always anchored/evidenced in the conviction of supporting particulars. You give the general principle and offer the specific examples that support it. — apokrisis

I agree! That's an ideal way to go. Examples, examples, examples. But apparently some subcultures consider that a buzzkill.

Again I wonder what sociological advantage that gives PoMo texts - except to play the poseur too clever to be understood by the likes of me and you, — apokrisis

The super-clever mystification game is definitely out there, IMO. It happens on the religious side (which denigrates the limitation of concept) and on the PoMo side (which denigrates the pursuit of objectivity as passé ).

But hey, you clearly value it. Which makes me curious as to how you don't appear to have had your thoughts scrambled by it. — apokrisis

Probably helps that I studied math formally: graduate real analysis, Galois theory, some crypto, as much computability theory as the school offered. Also learned lots of stats, and I got to (and had to) teach, which forces one to clarify.

Oh, I was thinking of that as the feature and not the bug. :gasp: — apokrisis

Not clear on this. Derrida transforms Saussure's signs into traces. You like signs or traces more?

And it is the judgement being exercised in what exact proteins get made that then adds all the meaning. — apokrisis

Yes. And 'the world' (an otherwise vague continuum) constrains our use of signs, I'd think. So frequently used signs will be short/cheap, etc.

So the greater the scope for an endless recursion of sign, the more meaningful it is when we can say almost everything in a remarkably few words.

At the wedding ceremony: "I will". — apokrisis

This also emphasizes the importance of context. The meaning of the sign is in its position relative to other signs (the minister, the bride, ...)

A taxonomy is a hierarchy of switches. Ideally, the throwing of a switch at each level bisects the space of probability with 50/50 Bayesian exactness.

So I have in my box here a ....? Well, you already know its got to be that small. So its it animal or mineral? Is it rocky or metallic? Is it shiny or dull? Is it more gold or silver? Is it globular or toroid? Aha, I can guess it is the wedding ring. "I will". — apokrisis

Yes, this makes sense to me. I studied a little of Shannon's work.

Only a chain of switches can reduce its material cross section to the point where it "escapes" the 4D constraints of the real material world. — apokrisis

Over my head at the moment.

Each switch can either expand or contract the space of possibility in logarithmic steps while keep the cost of any step strictly linear.

So a linear code gives you hierarchical holism for next to no computational cost. I can't talk as gaily about the Big Bang as the fleck of dust I've just noted on my screen. In 20 questions I can cover almost any space of semantic possibilities that I might practically have an interest in. — apokrisis

OK, I think I get that. Nice point about the linear cost. I've studied a little complexity theory, but I haven't put it in such a context before. Thanks!

You like signs or traces more? — jas0n

I’m not getting how it is a distinction that makes a difference. I am already presuming that a signs need to be understood as switches, and that switches already deal with the negative space issue - the not-A - by implementing the logic of the LEM.

Again I come back to Peirce who reduced all logic to the switch that was his amphek - the discovery of the NOR logic gate long before it got officially discovered.

I think that Kauffman paper references that. But anyway, the nature of the sign as a binary switch, and so already including the not-A as the not not-A, is already mathematically presented in Peirce’s writings.

It is another thing I just take for granted and forget to mention.

This also emphasizes the importance of context. The meaning of the sign is in its position relative to other signs (the minister, the bride, ...) — jas0n

This is enactivism or ecological perception in a nutshell. Another argument against Cartesian representationalism is that real brains leave as much information out in the world as they can get away with.

The context is always out there in brute physical fashion. So start by trying to predict and thus already ignore it. Let it then intrude on your world conception to the degree that it feels it must.

I’m not getting how it is a distinction that makes a difference. — apokrisis

It doesn't matter much. The big issue is whether one thinks the meaning of a sign is grounded in some kind of pure mental stuff or instead in the relationship this sign has with others signs and objects in the world.

The context is always out there in brute physical fashion. So start by trying to predict and thus already ignore it. Let it then intrude on your world conception to the degree that it feels it must. — apokrisis

:up:

Stan Salthe wrote the best two books on all this from the hierarchy theory point of view - Evolving Hierarchical Systems and Development and Evolution - probably the two most important books I ever read. — apokrisis

Thanks for the reference. I'll check into these.

It doesn't matter much. The big issue whether one thinks the meaning of a sign is grounded in some kind of pure mental stuff or instead the relationship this sign has with others signs. — jas0n

The way this makes most sense to me is that a network of linguistic signs is a syntactical network of semantic switches. And this is lain over the neurobiological substrate of an animal level of consciousness, so as to enforce a further sociocultural level of constraint.

Thus it is neurobiology that is indeed “the pure mental stuff” here - even if one wouldn’t want to use such a dualistic, Cartesian substance, term.

And the network of signs has a rather mechanical aspect in being a structure of syntax that only constrains the state of the brain so as to put it into some state of interpretance that it wouldn’t otherwise be able attain.

So for example, I can say to you: “The fat and hairy caterpillar with a ring it’s nose and purple shoes.”

And you can take that sentence and construct some image - a visual anticipation - of what it would be like to actually see such a thing in the real world.

Take 10 people. Everyone would imagine something both similar, yet also randomly different. One hairy caterpillar might be far more hirsute than the next, or whatever. But the point is that the words can whip up a structure which puts you in mind of a certain thing, which is also completely imaginary, utterly contingent, quite impossible in fact.

So a constraints based approach says the syntax glues together a set of semantic switches. We have to think of the hairy caterpillar, and not the bald or scaly or feathered or clothed caterpillar.

But there also has to be the neurobiological capacity to form anticipatory images just as part of normal perceptual processing. Even animals can form search images to shape their states of intentionality.

And this seems to be where the confusion in where the meaning of words lies.

It doesn’t lie in the words - and yet they form the very necessary structure of constraint. Nor does it lie in the neurobiology - even though that is the equally necessary plastic potential which can take on some constrained state of interpretance.

Clearly, the meaning lies in the way a constrained state of interpretance then has some pragmatic relevance to the job of living in a world where being able to form such states of intentionally - like being able to anticipate fat hairy caterpillars with nose rings and purple shoes - might be a meaningful thing to do.

Even if right here, it is the very nonsensicality of such a perceptual expectation that is what hopefully makes my example instructive.

That is then the Peircean view. You can chase the meaning all over the place. But it is to be found in the holism of the self-world modelling relation. Words are just another level of constraint on our existing neurobiology, which already has to be doing a pretty robust self-world modelling job.

Thus it is neurobiology that is indeed “the pure mental stuff” here - even if one wouldn’t want to use such a dualistic, Cartesian substance, term. — apokrisis

That's helpful. Curious what you'll make of my concerns.

I'm a bit of a 'consciousness denier.' I don't mean that I don't have the usual 'sensations' and 'emotions.' But I suspect that the idea of an inaccessible interior is epistemologically useless. You've probably seen this, but for convenience and whoever else is reading, I'll quote the classic analogy. I doubt the following will be new to you, so perhaps I'm measuring whether/where exactly we might differ.

If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.

Perhaps you can see that Wittgenstein is 'deconstructing' the two-sided Saussurian sign in folksier language. With Witt, I like to take the POV of a biologist watching a group of animals trade material signals to organize their behavior. Such a biologist can interpret a certain cry of a vervet monkey as a warning about a nearby eagle (because/from 'flight' that follows the cry). One can try to imagine the what-it's-like-to-be-a-vervet-in-that-situation. But this what-it's-like is vague until cashed out or operationalized. If imagined as an inaccessible interior, we're stuck. So we let the sign collapse into the trace. The cry is a 'cheap' movement of the air that flicks a switch in the group's nervous system. Now we just try to view human language this way.

So a constraints based approach says the syntax glues together a set of semantic switches. We have to think of the hairy caterpillar, and not the bald or scaly or feathered or clothed caterpillar. — apokrisis

This makes sense to me, but I'm tempted to cash out 'think of' in terms of tendencies to behave this way rather than that way, where this behavior is public (back to the Popper's fog.) I very much count speech acts as 'public,' and, along those lines, multiple choice surveys would be a cheap way to detect or articulate a postulated 'consciousness space' in which there are mental images. We could choose random variations of adjectives for this caterpillar and ask questions about it, etc.

But recall that Derrida criticized Saussure in his own terms, praised Peirce, and showed how the dyadic sign broke down, connecting Saussure's 'phonocentrism' to one of the oldest prejudices of philosophy — jas0n

I've dug out my ancient notes to refresh my mind on where I felt Derrida fits in here. I see that he was dealing with the very Peircean issue of the origin of rational structure.

Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?

So he was pointing to the question of how all things - whether we are talking of cosmic structure or human phenomenological structure - could arise from some pure and simple source when structure is already itself, something irreducibly complex. (That is, a systematic, triadic or hierarchical relation.)

Because ordinary thought can see no bridge between some raw simple ground of being and its production of the very first irreducibly complex structure, that creates a foundational issue that can only be endlessly deferred.

It is exactly the same as asking the question of what could be the first cause of the Cosmos. If existence can't just pop into being as irreducibly complex structure, then the only alternative appears to be infinite regress. It was never created and always existed.

But Peirce fixed that by adding the further metaphysical resource of Vagueness (also known as Tychism and Firstness) to his logic of structure.

The ultimate ground of simplicity could be just ... the vague. Neither a this or a that. A complete lack of dichotomy, dialectic, contrast, or relation. A "realm" as lacking in identity as it is in difference. A state that was formally "less than nothing". And a state that was already contained in the laws of thought by being defined as the nullification of the PNC (just as Peirce cleverly derived the opposite of the vague - the crisply general - from the nullification of the LEM).

So in the "beginning" was the vague. And from that most general nullity could spring its other of the dichotomy that was already well on its way to the fully expressed triadic structure that is a hierarchy.

In physics, we would call it symmetry breaking. But the symmetry breaking of vagueness itself.

Yes, there are still ontological difficulties with using a logic of vagueness to ground the irreducible complexity of first beginnings, or originary events. I've spent a lot of time on that issue.

But Peirce's trick does at least take the metaphysical debate to a whole new level, making redundant much of the everyday metaphysics that people still obsess over.

On a related note, I see that Kauffman paper only talks about the Sheffer stroke and not Peirce's amphek.

Again Peirce got there first.

Ampheck, from the Greek double-edged, is a term coined by Charles Sanders Peirce for either one of the pair of logically dual operators, variously referred to as Peirce arrows, Sheffer strokes, or logical NAND and logical NNOR.

Either of these logical operators is a sole sufficient operator for defining all of the other operators in the subject matter variously described as boolean functions, monadic predicate calculus, propositional calculus, sentential calculus, or zeroth order logic.

So what this is is the identity element for all logical structure - a self-dual relation which already packs all possible structural elaboration.

Sounding familiar yet? :grin:

If vagueness is Firstness - the most absolute form of constraint in being an Apeiron, an absolute absence of constraint - then that already is also the nullity that guarantees the existence of its "other" in the form of the first primal actualisation of a constraint, and hence the full triadic irreducibility of the secondness of dyadic relations, and thirdness of enstructured habit.

It is the symmetry breaking which reveals the symmetry by being able be the breaking. First there was less than nothing. Then there was already a complexity only needing to unpack itself.

And Peirce found that story in a way that grounded logic - the amphek as the identity element - along with everything else.

I'm a bit of a 'consciousness denier.' I don't mean that I don't have the usual 'sensations' and 'emotions.' But I suspect that the idea of an inaccessible interior is epistemologically useless. — jas0n

Of course I would agree. But also, I would add that this view of consciousness - a little soul inside the physical body that has freewill and is responsible for everything the body chooses to get up to - is socially constructed and has great pragmatic value for the social level of the human organism.

Why was the Catholic Church so historically powerful? Because is fostered precisely this image of the human condition.

If you make everyone self-conscious of their need to constantly watch over their every impulse and weigh it against a culturally-defined norm, then you indeed own their "souls".

Modern neo-liberalism just continues this epistemological tradition. If you can make every citizen guilty for their failures to be self-actualising entrepreneurs, then again you own their "souls" and they become the building blocks that creatively strive to make the social hierarchy that your "consciousness model" embodies.

This is the problem with phenomenology. It is already culturally weaponised. Whether you are a PoMo socialist or right wing think tanker, you want to take advantage of the possibilities that exist in owning the discourse that frames our Cartesian notions of selfhood.

Who needs to enslave the masses when the masses can be trained up to enslave themselves?

Perhaps you can see that Wittgenstein is 'deconstructing' the two-sided Saussurian sign in plainer language. — jas0n

Yeah sure. But this is the Kantian throat-clearing level of the discussion. It should be the bleeding obvious. How many times can one kill the corpse of Cartesian representationalism?

But yes, I realise that is a rhetorical question. Every second post on this forum demonstrates that the grip of this zombie metaphysics is as strong as ever. And I've just said why. Humanity - as a social organism - depends on Cartesian representationalism as its standard operating system.

The cry is a 'cheap' movement of the air that flicks a switch in group's nervous system. Then the trick is viewing human language this way. — jas0n

Yep. That is a nice way of putting it.

This makes sense to me, but I'm tempted to cash out 'think of' in terms of tendencies to behave this way rather than that way, where this behavior is public (back to the Popper's fog.) I very much count speech acts as 'public, — jas0n

Again, precisely my view. Evolution of language and human cognition was where my researches started. Language starts first out in the tribal space to co-ordinate tribal action. Then it became internalised as inner self-regulatory speech once the value of that trick became culturally apparent.

It's Vygotskian psychology 101. But Vygotsky is another Peirce. Someone totally brilliant, yet caught out by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They both wrote down all the answers, but their manuscripts remained lost to the world until little groups began to rediscover their existence in the 1980s and 1990s.

I would add that this view of consciousness - a little soul inside the physical body that has freewill and is responsible for everything the body chooses to get up to - is socially constructed and has great pragmatic value for the social level of the human organism. — apokrisis

:up:

I totally agree. So it's only about 'seeing around' this invention when appropriate, recognizing that it's not some absolute starting point for inquiry.

So in the "beginning" was the vague. — apokrisis

I think 'the vague' is excellent as the undifferentiated continuum. A first distinction would perhaps install/create/be the self-world dichotomy. This 'self' might be the individual organism opposed to non-body stuff. It might be the thought-stuff opposed to the 'material' or to 'sensation.' And so on. The idea is that the vague is the continuum on which or from which a discrete structure is imposed/composed.

I don't know much about the physics of the beginning of the universe. I'm interested in thermodynamics and information. I did learn Newtonian physics pretty well once.

If vagueness is Firstness - the most absolute form of constraint in being an Apeiron, an absolute absence of constraint - then that already is also the nullity that guarantees the existence of its "other" in the form of the first primal actualisation of a constraint, and hence the full triadic irreducibility of the secondness of dyadic relations, and thirdness of enstructured habit. — apokrisis

Funny point, but this is as dense and elusive as anything Derrida wrote. I think you know what you are talking about, but I confess that I can't parse it...yet. Probably because I don't know Peirce's terminology more than anything.

Why was the Catholic Church so historically powerful? Because is fostered precisely this image of the human condition.

If you make everyone self-conscious of their need to constantly watch over their every impulse and weigh it against a culturally-defined norm, then you indeed own their "souls".

Modern neo-liberalism just continues this epistemological tradition. If you can make every citizen guilty for their failures to be self-actualising entrepreneurs, then again you own their "souls" and they become the building blocks that creatively strive to make the social hierarchy that your "consciousness model" embodies. — apokrisis

I think this is what Foucault was getting at.

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

Another similar idea is that the subject is an effect of language, a kind of ghost created by/as patterns in our sign-trading.

Yeah sure. But this is the Kantian throat-clearing level of the discussion. It should be the bleeding obvious. How many times can one kill the corpse of Cartesian representationalism?

But yes, I realise that is a rhetorical question. Every second post on this forum demonstrates that the grip of this zombie metaphysics is as strong as ever. And I've just said why. Humanity - as a social organism - depends on Cartesian representationalism as its standard operating system. — apokrisis

Yes. The ghost has been killed or at least dethroned (for what is the hard problem of consciousness all about?) but most can't/won't follow the critical conversation far enough to grasp this. A picture tends to hold us captive (Wittgenstein), also called 'interpretedness' (Heidegger) or 'prejudice' (Gadamer.) The 'soul' is a piece of technology, something 'contingent' (which is not to say unmotivated) but mistaken for necessary (as that which is initially given, as if an 'internal monologue' in French or Latin or English could make sense without a background of others in a shared world.)

Language starts first out in the tribal space to co-ordinate tribal action. Then it became internalised as inner self-regulatory speech once the value of that trick became culturally apparent.

It's Vygotskian psychology 101. But Vygotsky is another Peirce. Someone totally brilliant, yet caught out by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They both wrote down all the answers, but their manuscripts remained lost to the world until little groups began to rediscover their existence in the 1980s and 1990s. — apokrisis

Wow. That's how I see it. Or that's how I understand things from the POV of the camera positioned above the tribe, watching them deal with their environment. A sign-system (including self-regulation) accumulates/grows/differentiates within their brains/interactions. Their environment is simultaneously differentiated with their economy and tools.

Something you've probably already touched on and seems relevant is the difficult distinction between sign and non-sign. If a sign is not grounded in a 'mental content' (a signified), then it's just 'out there' in the environment. In other words, what separates a salute from wiping the sweat off of one's forehead? The answer is probably something like the 'play' or 'ambiguity' of the sign/non-sign or trace/non-trace distinction. This is why I say the Cartesian 'ghost' is dethroned perhaps rather than annihilated. Our mentalistic language, however misleading, almost needs to remain legible. This is determinate negation, writing under erasure, etc. Less pretentiously we might talk of switching between language games or perspectives.

Funny point, but this is as dense and elusive as anything Derrida wrote. — jas0n

Yes, Peirce is jargon-ridden. The difference is that Peirce is thinking mathematically. Just check out the amphek as the epistemic cut switching device that makes possible the whole of Boolean algebra - a fact known to Peirce in 1880 and not rediscovered until Sheffer in 1913. And even Sheffer got no credit until Bertrand Russell stumbled across it in the 1920s and was compelled to incorporate it into the second edition of his Principia Mathematica.

So Peirce is mathematical rigor underneath all the neologisms. Derrida and PoMo in general are more like the blind people in a dark room giving the elephant a good touch up and feeling moved to poetic outbursts.

don't know much about the physics of the beginning of the universe. — jas0n

I meant to add, given your interest in the real numbers, a physicist would these day say that the complex numbers are more foundational than the reals.

If quantum field theory and its commutativity is basic, then nature counts in complex numbers rather than real numbers. The ground of being is where the dichotomising starts. And that dyadicity is what the complex plane encodes as the dimensionality where rotations and translations share the same unit 1 starting point.

Which leads neatly to....

I did learn Newtonian physics pretty well once. — jas0n

And what was Newtonianism founded on but the (Noether) symmetry of rotation and translation. Or angular momentum and linear momentum.

So you can spin on the spot or roll in a straight line as an inertial degree of freedom. They are the two reciprocal faces of the same unit 1 identity operator that then let you start counting accelerations and decelerations within a coordinate-stabliised inertial reference frame where even being at "rest" is made a strictly relative state of affairs.

Reality is dichotomies, or switches, or ampheks, or signs, or quantum operators acting on infinte Hilbert spaces, or symmetry breaking in general, all the way down to ground. Which is then defined by the Planck triad of constants - that stand in their own final set of reciprocal relations. That becomes the Big Bang cut-off that says you can't go any smaller or hotter as the fabric of reality now becomes just a vagueness - the dissolutoion that is Wheeler's quantum foam.

Something you've probably already touched on and seems relevant is the difficult distinction between sign and non-sign. If a sign is not grounded in a 'mental content' (a signified), then it's just 'out there' in the environment. In other words, what separates a salute from wiping the sweat off of one's forehead? The answer is probably something like the 'play' or 'ambiguity' of the sign/non-sign or trace/non-trace distinction. This is why I say the Cartesian 'ghost' is dethroned perhaps rather than annihilated. Our mentalistic language, however misleading, almost needs to remain legible. This is determinate negation, writing under erasure, etc. Less pretentiously we might talk of switching between language games or perspectives. — jas0n

Well Peirce addressed this for language by making a triad out of the steps towards full-blown semiosis. The most hesitant sign is iconic (a relation of Firstness), the more definite sign is indexical (a relation of Secondness), and the fully realised sign is symbolic (the fixity of a habit, or Thirdness).

For example....

[Peirce] identifies three types of signs as a function of their representative condition: icons, or signs that resemble their object (an image of fire), indices, or signs that are contiguous with, are caused by, or somehow point to their objects (smoke coming from a fire), and symbols, or signs whose meanings are a function of convention, habit, or law (fire as knowledge in the story of Prometheus). Here again, icons are firsts, indices are seconds, and symbols are thirds.

https://undcomm504.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/firstness-secondness-and-thirdness-in-peirce/

And I also addressed this in a more general way by echoing the usual observation that a mark can be granted extrinsic meaning precisely because it lacks intrinsic meaning.

I press my stylus into the wax. It makes a dent. It certainly draws attention to itself as a distinctive physical fact - a small and yet curiously precise effort someone has just made in a world where marks are distributed across the landscape with the maximally generic unconcern of a fractal or scalefree probability distribution.

And then you learn that the mark is in fact part of some larger mental structure - some community-level habit of interpretation. As more marks get made, you might start to think you could crack this cuneiform code.

So at the level of some single mark, it could be "just physics" - a complete material accident in a world composed of material accidents over all possible spatiotemporal scales. Or it could be "all mind" in being a purposeful act of encoding information.

A mark could be a switch. Or not a switch. And so it sits there right at the epistemic cut as an information bit that might also be understood as an entropic microstate.

Shannon and Gibbs formalised the probabilistic maths that made the two kinds of things equivalent - once you strip reality down to its own natural Planck scale cut-off to discover the Boltzmann constant, k.

Again this is why I would sound impatient with Wittgenstein or anyone who wants to just deal with language alone as the metaphysical issue. It is the principles of codes that is at stake, whether they be verbal, numerical, neural or genetic.

And computer science, quantum holography, thermodynamics, and all the other new information theoretic approaches to foundational physics now show that semiosis is not just about the actual codes employed to fashion organisms with life and mind, it also can be given the pansemiotic twist where it becomes a physicalist description of nature in its own right.

Nature is switches or signs all the way down to the ultimate primal dichotomy that is encoded by the intrinsic reciprocality of the Planck constants.

One metaphysics to rule them all. :smile:

So Peirce is mathematical rigor underneath all the neologisms. Derrida and PoMo in general are more like the blind people in a dark room giving the elephant a good touch up and feeling moved to poetic outbursts. — apokrisis

Ha. Well you know I think you are oversimplifying, but I recognize that you don't seem to need them. It's like starting from either the inside or the outside and ending up pretty much in the same place.
If meaning evolves dialectically/historically, then obscurity is often just a function of how embedded or not one is within a subculture. According to Braver, one famous continental philosopher found a famous anglo philosopher incomprehensible (can't remember the details.)

I've dug out my ancient notes to refresh my mind on where I felt Derrida fits in here. I see that he was dealing with the very Peircean issue of the origin of rational structure.

Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?

So he was pointing to the question of how all things - whether we are talking of cosmic structure or human phenomenological structure - could arise from some pure and simple source when structure is already itself, something irreducibly complex. (That is, a systematic, triadic or hierarchical relation.) — apokrisis

Derrida and Peirce on genesis and structure make an interesting comparison. To throw my two cents in, not to state a preference for one over the other , but just to delineate Derrida’s position on origins, his is binary hinge rather than a triadic dynamic.

For him , in the beginning there was the mark , trace , gramme, differance ( these terms are interchangeable).
They refer to an identity , subject or ipseity divided within itself in the very act of returning back to itself to repeat itself. Put differently, in order to constitute itself , the ‘I’ must borrow from what is other than itself. In this way there is at once a formal, transcendental , structural aspect to the mark ( that a meaning is being carried forward by being repeated or reflected back to itself) and an empirical, genetic aspect( in the very act of repeating itself or turning back around to glimpse itself it is exposed to alterity). This origin is not a vagueness or an indeterminacy but an undecidability . The mark is undecidable because there is no question of choosing between presence and absence, genesis and structure, form and content , the ideal and the empirical. Both are indissociable in a single mark. This is the complexity of the origin, its hinged articulation.

Derrida writes:

"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."

“Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)... It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”

The difference is that Peirce is thinking mathematically. Just check out the amphek as the epistemic cut switching device that makes possible the whole of Boolean algebra - a fact known to Peirce in 1880 and not rediscovered until Sheffer in 1913. And even Sheffer got no credit until Bertrand Russell stumbled across it in the 1920s and was compelled to incorporate it into the second edition of his Principia Mathematica. — apokrisis

Oh it's a nice piece of technology. I have an old switching theory textbook. It's beautiful stuff. And Peirce had the spirit of a scientist. That's clear from the subset of his stuff that's influenced me for years ( which is also there in James, however adulterated with other stuff.) For instance:

The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise. If beliefs do not differ in this respect, if they appease the same doubt by producing the same rule of action, then no mere differences in the manner of consciousness of them can make them different beliefs, any more than playing a tune in different keys is playing different tunes. Imaginary distinctions are often drawn between beliefs which differ only in their mode of expression; -- the wrangling which ensues is real enough, however.

He doesn't want to babble about something unmeasurable. He moves toward what we can be objective about.

Reality is dichotomies, or switches, or ampheks, or signs, or quantum operators acting on infinte Hilbert spaces, or symmetry breaking in general, all the way down to ground. Which is then defined by the Planck triad of constants - that stand in their own final set of reciprocal relations. That becomes the Big Bang cut-off that says you can't go any smaller or hotter as the fabric of reality now becomes just a vagueness - the dissolution that is Wheeler's quantum foam. — apokrisis

I'm not fully equipped to grasp this, but I appreciate the economy of principles involved. No small feat, grasping the life of the universe at all scales....My journey was (roughly) literature => philosophy => math, but I never abandoned any of stepping stones. My bias has been toward interpersonal sense-making (personality as a lens). I've loved programming since I was a kid, so it's natural for me to think of physical models as simulations (simplified worlds which we can watch evolve, with or without 'randomness.')

It is the principles of codes that is at stake, whether they be verbal, numerical, neural or genetic. — apokrisis

A Derridean point, by the way. Phonocentrism is 'bad' because it prioritizes speech as uniquely close to 'meaning stuff.' There is no privileged medium. The idea of a code is roughly that of the iterable token, something that can function in the absence of the 'intention' traditionally postulated to ground it.

One metaphysics to rule them all. — apokrisis

That is the goal. Why? Is an appreciation for economy something basic? Informed or determined biologically? The single self ghost that haunts the body, the god ghost that haunts the sky, the unification of a body of knowledge, the necessity that a theory be consistent and comprehensive....

I love the theme you are touching on, and Limited Inc is one of D's books I've studied and enjoyed, but...the exposition (yours and his in the post above) is indulgently gnarly.

the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) — Joshs

In other words, we don't ground/fix the 'meaning' of our sign in some private intention or unboxed beetle. It's a 'token' which is implicitly iterable. But signs have their meaning only differentially (in relation to other signs), and the entire context/system drifts, so that the 'same' salute or secret handshake is not quite the same, anymore than the 'same' knight on a chessboard maintains some constant 'meaning' as the game advances.

Derrida is a bit confusing here by suggesting a gap between what we meant to say and what we actually said. This 'what we meant to say' is a kind of fiction or concept under erasure, seems to me. It's part of the view/picture that's being challenged. But we have no choice but to work within the prejudices we are challenging, as we drift on Neurath's boat.

Or that's my improvisation, which can never say an all that's always slipping away.

Ha. Well you know I think you are oversimplifying, but I recognize that you don't seem to need them. It's like starting from either the inside or the outside and ending up pretty much in the same place. — jas0n

I think it really matters which path you take to arrive at the centre. Each path trains your brain in different sets of habits.

As I see it, both PoMo and AP are essentially reductionist and never escape that monism - whether they fetishise the monism of the one or the many.

So I say that the holism of pragmatism is the best path to approach metaphysics. Natural philosophy, systems science, etc. That gives you training in the habits of thought which are actually required to grasp the whole that is meant to be at the end of the trail.

My criticisms might sound light-hearted - as no professional philosopher is actually a dope. But also, I'm deadly serious about the systematic intellectual shortcoming of both the left and right of philosophy. They both want to start in simplicity to reach the complexity. And even PoMo's pluralism is a monistic simplicity in being merely structureless complication - unpruned variety.

I say you have to get the core idea - that reality has the irreducible complexity of a holistic relation - to get to the destination that metaphysics has in mind.

My journey was (roughly) literature => philosophy => math, but I never abandoned any of stepping stones. — jas0n

My trajectory would have been biology => ecology => artificial intelligence => human evolution => social pyschology => cognitive neuroscience => complexity theory => systems science => Peircean semiotics; followed by a return run through the sciences and humanities. So picking up from a semiotic view of complexity => fundamental physics, geopolitics, and a catch-up with biology now that it has got interesting again.

There is no privileged medium — jas0n

So the medium ain't the message then? :razz:

I would say there are good arguments why vocalisation beat, say, hand gestures as why language could in fact evolve.

Signing is perfectly fine as a medium for language now that the vocal version exists. Likewise writing.

Even the same parts of the brain are pre-adapted. It is convincing to argue that the hominid brain became both lateralised and got a new "articulate" motor planning area so as to make Homo habilis the first tool user, with nimble fingers and opposable thumb. But then a million years past and no evidence of a gesture based symbolic culture.

Then along comes Homo sapiens with a sudden change to its vocal cords. The throat and mouth had changed so that it was equipped with its own new dexterity - the ability in fact to dichotomise sound into vowels and consonants, and thus chop up the flow of noise into crisply bounded syllabic units.

Couple that trick - evolved for increased emotional expressiveness - with the already existing Broca's area specialised for handling fiddly finger actions, and grammatically structured symbolic speech was all ready to take off.

So maybe vocalisation is a privileging medium here after all. The paleo record seems to say so.

But then even more privileged mediums showed up, like writing, printing, emojis, Tik-Tok?

That is the goal. Why? Is an appreciation for economy something basic? — jas0n

Pragmatism. What use is knowledge that ain't useful.

Even poetry is supposed to be useful according to its promoters.

And then you learn that the mark is in fact part of some larger mental structure - some community-level habit of interpretation. As more marks get made, you might start to think you could crack this cuneiform code.

So at the level of some single mark, it could be "just physics" - a complete material accident in a world composed of material accidents over all possible spatiotemporal scales. Or it could be "all mind" in being a purposeful act of encoding information.

A mark could be a switch. Or not a switch. And so it sits there right at the epistemic cut as an information bit that might also be understood as an entropic microstate. — apokrisis

:up:

Underlined part reminds me of Gadamer.

The fact that understanding operates by means of such anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer terms the ‘anticipation of completeness’—it always involves the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.
...
The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#PosPre

Underlined part reminds me of Gadamer. — jas0n

I remember liking Gadamer.

So maybe vocalisation is a privileging medium here after all. The paleo record seems to say so. — apokrisis

Good points, so maybe Saussure wasn't such a bastard after all. Probably the medium independence idea is aimed at possibility more than actuality, such as another lifeform with different sense organs evolved on a different planet.

So I say that the holism of pragmatism is the best path to approach metaphysics. Natural philosophy, systems science, etc. That gives you training in the habits of thought which are actually required to grasp the whole that is meant to be at the end of the trail. — apokrisis

I did start with a big dose of pragmatism, which might be why I can appreciate thinkers on both sides. I'm not sure an end of the trail is possible. At the moment, I think that most systems have some blindspot or some thread that can be tugged until half of it unravels. I'm not committed to this view. I just tend to find that the elaboration and specification of a system reveals internal tensions. I do postulate an ineradicable ambiguity in all thinking.

My trajectory would have been biology => ecology => artificial intelligence => human evolution => social pyschology => cognitive neuroscience => complexity theory => systems science => Peircean semiotics; — apokrisis

Quite a journey! For better or worse, I'm am or at least have been as much an artist/musician as a laborer in the realm of concept. I'm an ex-Romantic, you might say, so I am not put off by Nietzsche or Derrida or even DADA manifestoes. Clearly you are more the pure scientist type.

Pragmatism. What use is knowledge that ain't useful.

Even poetry is supposed to be useful according to its promoters. — apokrisis

I tend to agree, but the sign 'utility' only gets it meaning from other signs (or in the spaces between.) I read a few Dawkins books lately, so I'm tempted to read utility that way. But this points away from meaning altogether perhaps. I'm guess I'm OK with that, and with the coming heat death. Dark sense of humor, I guess.

I remember liking Gadamer. — apokrisis

I love his idea that our exploration/interpretation of the object is always also self-discovery. We 'are' our prejudices in a certain sense, and we are mostly invisible to ourselves. We are revealed in our revelation/interpretation of the other.