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
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
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
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
And it is the judgement being exercised in what exact proteins get made that then adds all the meaning. — apokrisis
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
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
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
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
You like signs or traces more? — jas0n
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
I’m not getting how it is a distinction that makes a difference. — apokrisis
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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
Perhaps you can see that Wittgenstein is 'deconstructing' the two-sided Saussurian sign in plainer language. — jas0n
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
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
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
So in the "beginning" was the vague. — apokrisis
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
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
The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
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
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
Funny point, but this is as dense and elusive as anything Derrida wrote. — jas0n
don't know much about the physics of the beginning of the universe. — jas0n
I did learn Newtonian physics pretty well once. — jas0n
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
[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/
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
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
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
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.
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
It is the principles of codes that is at stake, whether they be verbal, numerical, neural or genetic. — apokrisis
One metaphysics to rule them all. — apokrisis
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
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
My journey was (roughly) literature => philosophy => math, but I never abandoned any of stepping stones. — jas0n
There is no privileged medium — jas0n
That is the goal. Why? Is an appreciation for economy something basic? — jas0n
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
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#PosPre
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.
So maybe vocalisation is a privileging medium here after all. The paleo record seems to say so. — apokrisis
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
My trajectory would have been biology => ecology => artificial intelligence => human evolution => social pyschology => cognitive neuroscience => complexity theory => systems science => Peircean semiotics; — apokrisis
Pragmatism. What use is knowledge that ain't useful.
Even poetry is supposed to be useful according to its promoters. — apokrisis
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