Gary F, Jim, list,
Thank you for having plowed through my posts! I'm gratified to read that they
make sense to you. I don't actually mind being tuckered out by my own posts,
but I know that people have more things to do than read my posts.
Gary wrote,
> This seems tantalizingly close to a concept that i've vaguely recognized,
> and been trying to specify with more precision, for a couple of decades now.
> I call it "meaning space" and think of it as the structure of an organism's
> Innenwelt (J. von Uexkull's term), or its model of the world -- so it's more
> of a "universe" than what you're talking about here, but structurally
> similar. I picture it as a multidimensional network of mutually defining
> nodes. One chapter of my work in progress is devoted to it, and i despair of
> explaining it more concisely than that ... but what they call the "net of
> Indra" in Hua-yen (Buddhist) philosophy seems pretty close to it, and closer
> still is the "Model Q" developed by M. Ross Quillian and described by
> Umberto Eco in _A Theory of Semiotics_ (2.12). Does this sound at all
> familiar to you, or connected with what you're saying above?
I haven't read Eco or Quillian, and what little I've been able to garner today
from the 'Net about Model Q is vague to me. I think I'm going to get the Eco
novel which makes use of it. It sounds like a heck of a good novel.
Indra's net seems a concept simple enough on the surface. External reflected in
internal, each is the other inside out. I tend to seek structures of four
elements, in which two oppositions, often two _kinds_ of "mutual inverseness,"
stand out and are interrelated. I do associate structure especially with
living intelligence.
A "meaning space" -- it depends on what one means by "meaning." Do you mean a
value, an importance, the evoking of a difference made? Or by "meaning" do you
mean a kind of evidencing, a confirming/corroborating/disconfirming, etc., as
to facts?
Best, Ben
----- Original Message -----
From: "gnusystems" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 08, 2006 11:51 AM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben, Jim, &c.,
[[ Signs are built into complex signs and it wouldn't be helpful to have a
level of internal structure where semiotics must dispense with its usual
conceptions in order to reach. ]]
Having thought it through further, i think what you say here makes more sense
than what i said earlier to Jim. Actually, just about all you've said in
yesterday's posts on this thread make a lot of sense to me. If i don't
directly acknowledge other parts of them, it's because i don't want to tucker
you out any further (or myself either)!
However i do have a question about part of your message addressed to Jim:
[[ A form is a set of locations, pointing at each other. If you consider the
inside apart from the outside, then you leave the larger concrete world out of
it, which is really to leave yourself out of it, since all locatings in the
larger world are by reference to yourself, and certainly not with regard to
any ultimate frame of reference or ultimate shape of the concrete world, which
are things that we know next to nothing about. So the mutual pointings of the
parts of the form are still there, and they compel your attention, but you've
left out their reference _to_ you in _your_ specific location in the world.
This lets you impersonalize and abstract the form. It still has its center of
focus, and the solar system has its center of gravity whether it's wheeling
around the galaxy or adrift in one of the great voids. I think that with this
discussion of centers of gravity you're really dealing with a separate issue,
that of how one speaks of the precise location of an extended object, as well
as deciding what really orbits what, which are issues exactly alike for an
extended part as located relative to its a particular whole and for a system
located in the larger concrete world. Anyway the form is still a structure of
mutually opposed "indices," forces, motions potential & actual. Form is not a
quality. A form may be abstracted for its appearance, but it may also be
abstracted for the capacity of its parts to represent one another -- denote
one another, map to one another. That's what a mathematical diagram is about.
It doesn't need even to be visual. It could consist in a formula or array of
algebraic symbols. ]]
This seems tantalizingly close to a concept that i've vaguely recognized, and
been trying to specify with more precision, for a couple of decades now. I
call it "meaning space" and think of it as the structure of an organism's
Innenwelt (J. von Uexkull's term), or its model of the world -- so it's more
of a "universe" than what you're talking about here, but structurally similar.
I picture it as a multidimensional network of mutually defining nodes. One
chapter of my work in progress is devoted to it, and i despair of explaining
it more concisely than that ... but what they call the "net of Indra" in
Hua-yen (Buddhist) philosophy seems pretty close to it, and closer still is
the "Model Q" developed by M. Ross Quillian and described by Umberto Eco in
_A Theory of Semiotics_ (2.12). Does this sound at all familiar to you, or
connected with what you're saying above?
Jim, i'm glad you like my tagline collection -- it may prove to be my main
contribution to the world! The one below is a bit of a problem: after lifting
it from a Jane Siberry CD, i came across a very similar statement made much
earlier by some famous physicist, but failed to make a note of that, so now i
don't know who it was ... can anybody here tell me the original source?
gary F.
}I was sure until they asked me ... now I don't know. [Jane Siberry]{
gnusystems }{ Pam Jackson & Gary Fuhrman }{ Manitoulin University }{
[EMAIL PROTECTED] }{ http://users.vianet.ca/gnox/ }{
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