On 5/4/2011 3:56 AM, Rafael Capurro wrote:
Dear Pedroyou write: "There is a large risk of becoming subjective, therefore unitelligible, if one leaves the foreground-background convention of the unified, standard, invariable against chaotic, unpredictable, varied."Is it really like this? or is it like this as seen from the perspective you give a priority by qualifying the other perspective as "subjective"? Is not not muchmore the case that what seems "subjective" is the primarily experience ofthe singularity of being in the world, this eery experience? The predominanceof the common experience as described by you is what metaphysics (and later on science!) has been saying for centuries.Some days ago I sent this text to Joe that I forward it to the other FIS membersLet me quote Octavio Paz "El mono gramático" (The grammatical monkey) (Mexico 1974, pp. 97-98; 100) first in Spanish then in a free (with a lot of mistakes!) English translation"Por la escritura abolimos las cosas, las convertimos en sentido; por la lectura, abolimos los signos, apuramos el sentido y, casi inmediatamente, lo disipamos: el sentido vuelve al amasijo primordial. La arboleda no tiene nombre y estos árboles no son signos: son árboles. Son reales y son ilegibles. Aunque aludo a ellos cuando digo: /estos árboles son ilegibles/, ellos no se dan por aludidos. No dicen, no significan: están allí, nada más están. Yo lo puedo derribar, quemar, cortar, convertir en mástiles, sillas, barcos, casas, ceniza; puedo pintarlos, esculpirlos, describirlos, convertirlos en símbolos de esto o de aquellos (inclusive de ellos mismos) y hacer otra arboleda, real o imaginaria, con ellos; puedo clasificarlos, analizarlos, reducirlos a una formula química o a una proporción matemática y así traducirlos, convertirlos en lenguaje - pero /estos/ árboles, estos que senalo y que están más allá, siempre más allá, de mis signos y de mis palabras, intocables, inalcanzables, impenetrables, son lo que son y ningún nombre, ninguna combinación de signos los dice. Y son irrepetibles: nunca volverán a ser lo que ahora mismo son. [...] La noche me salva No podemos ver sin peligro de eloquecer: las cosas nos revelan, sin revelar nada y por su simple estar ahí frente a nosotros, el vacío de los nombres, la falta de mesura del mundo, su mudez esencial. Y a medida que la noche se acumula en mi ventana, yo siento que no soy de a quí, sino de allá, de ese mundo que acaba de borrarse y aguarda la resurrección del alba. De allá vengo, de allá venimos todos y allá hemos de volver. Fascinacion por el otro lado, seducción por la vertiente no humana del universo: perder el nombre, perder la medida. Cada individuo, cada cosa, cada instante: una realidad única, incomparable, inconmesurable. Volver al mundo de los nombres propios.""With writing we abolish things, we transform them into meaning; through reading we abolish signs, we accelerate meaning and delete it almost immediately: meaning goes back to the primordial chaos. The small forest has no name, these trees are not signs, they are trees. They are real and one cannot read them. Even when I refer to them and say: 'these trees are not readable' they do not care about what I am saying. They say nothing, they do not mean anything: they are there, just there, nothing more. I can throw them down, burn them, cut them, turn them into masts, chairs, ships, houses, ash; I can paint them, carve them, describe them, turn them into symbols of this or that (including of themselves) and I can make another small forest, a real or an imaginary one. I can classify and analyze them, reduce them to a chemical formula or to a mathematical proportion and in this way translate them into lenguage - but /these /trees, that I now mean and that are beyond, always beyond my signs and words, untouchable, unreachable, impenetrable, are what they are and there is no name, no combination of signs that can say what they are. They are unrepeatable: they will never be again what they are right now. [...]Night brings deliverance to me. We cannot /see /without the danger of getting mad: things reveal themselves to us without revealing anything, just with their pure being there in front of us, the void of names, the lack of measure of the world, its essential dumbness. And as night comes closer and closer to my window I feel that I do not belong to here but to there, to that world that just disappeared and waits for the resurrection of the morning. I come from there, all of us come from there and must go back there. Fascination on the one hand, being seduced by the non-human slop of the universe: loosing name, loosing measure. Every individual, every thing, every moment: a unique reality, uncomparable, unmeasurable. Go back to the world of the proper names."The world of the proper names is the paradise in which there is a name for each thing. The "small forest" is not such a proper name, then there can be a lot of small forests that are incomparable in their singunalirty. There is no possibility of getting this singularity into a dialectics of the general and the particular (which is not the same as the singular). Octavio Paz writes that the critique of the paradise is called language which means the abolition of the proper names to which we (or he) want to go back, the world of singularities, beyond language (and "logic") that deals with the general and the particular. But then, Paz says, there is the critique of language which is done by poetry, deluding names. In the first case the world turns into language and then into logic (the one you and Lupasco criticize!). In the second case, language turns into world, which is what you want, thus becoming near to the poets than to the (Socratic and post-Socratic) philosophers or to philosophy altogether. Thanks to poets (and poet-scientists like you) the world looses names, and then, as Paz says, "just for a moment, we can see it as it is - a beautiful blue. And this vision turns us down and makes us mad; if things are but have no name/ there is no measure on earth/."I think that the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers/thinkers/poets came near to this dramatic and contradictory experience of tertium datur, that things are there and are not there, I can point to them, turn them into formulae, concepts, definitions, metaphors... and they resist all my magic and still are there, presenting themselves in the nackedness of their there-being, and making me aware of my own singularity, of the singularity of being there in front of them, letting them present themselves to me, a kind of basic logic, if I may say, or a contradictory saying that says nothing belonging to the logic of the universal and the particular. I want to avoid this frightening experience of what appears coming not from me, my language, my logic, my rationality, my... but appears or unveils TO me, calls me without saying a word, a-logically, without logos, so that I can feel the limits of my logos and logic facing the singularity of the wholeness of what is, not just the unmeasurable quantity of what is, in case it is possible to count everything that is, but the wholeness of beings as being which means as coming into being from beyond. The pre-socratic thinkers called this process of unveiling of things into being, nature / physis, having its unmeasurable measure on what they believed to be the LOGOS (Heraclitus) as the unknown and unthinkable measure of the whole in its unfolding process that the Chinese wise (Lao Tse) called the DAO. You write: "This implies that objects and events do not existe or take place in time, but are the sources of, or 'unroll' (déroulement) their own time." Excellent! This is not the homogenous time of modern science, that is of great help as a measure for what is universal and particular but not for what is singular, such as the universe / physis / nature itself. The same with regard to space. The space-time of physics also of quantum physics, is an abstraction. We now take for granted (after Einstein) that Newtonian space-time is such an abstraction. We must go one step further! Which means also to go beyond modern mental representationalism (Descartes) that transforms trees into mental representations.So I would say that Lupasco's (and your own?) predecessors are the pre-Socratic, less Kant and Hegel (for whom all reality turns into logic) and Peirce, for whom trees are signsand.. in fact "away from language and toward what is" (p. 22) the amazing experience of reality, of what Wittgenstein said that this produces "Angst" in the Heideggerian sense: which means astonishment that things ARE, nacked, without names, before and beyond our names, logics, ethics, ontologies, religions, sciences, politics, literatures... it is hard to stay there even for a short moment, no words, facing the potentiality of being, without any effort to giving reasons for it, or finding compromises or looking for a better world or... Just a basic acceptance of this eery message... that gives as a vague feeling of WHO we are (or can be) facing beautiful blue that sometimes shines forth in painting and music as well as in the free expression of mutual appreciation - beyond words.best regards RafaelDear Joseph, On Similarity and Differences The human nervous system processes both the similarity and the diversity properties of the world (of the sensous impressions the organs transmit). We polarise in our mental concepts based on evolutionary achievements. For the animal, it brings survival and reproduction advantages, if it remembers correctly. Remembering is based on the similarity property of impressions (ex perception and ex memory are compared and matched). We have deep cultural agreements that * it is good to remember correctly, * it is good to recognise the similarity property above the diversity property, * it is good to relate one's subjective impressions to a common, objective factor, * it is good to have one common experience each one is subject to in an equal fashion, * the common experience is transcendental, invisible, eternal, ubiquitous, egalising To talk about diversity is to leave the common ground. It is unquestionably more civilised to talk about the common, the unifying, the objective. Therefore, there are huge communicational difficulties to be expected, if one talks about that what is not always there, may be very much varied, is not uniform. There is a large risk of becoming subjective, therefore unitelligible, if one leaves the foreground-background convention of the unified, standard, invariable against chaotic, unpredictable, varied. To overcome this communicational danger, the accountant has created a Table on which one can demonstrate the relation between foreground and background, that is, between similarity and diversity. Here, one can observe, what you write, namely: "Some things (the most interesting ones) are partly similar to and partly different from others at the same time, and the predominance of one can increase at the expense of the other. Further, in the system of Stephane Lupasco (Principle of Dynamic Opposition, up-dated in Logic in Reality), diversity, negativity, inexactitude, vagueness, instability, etc. are given appropriate ontological value vs. identity, stability, etc., their "positive" partners. " Maybe in Varna we can get around to find a toy-maker who will produce 136 pairs of wooden blocks and we can spend a morning or afternoon ordering (and re-ordering) these. Then, the meaning of the terms you refer to can be explicated by deictic methods. It is not the intellectual level needed that makes it complicated to use a two- or three-dimensional concept of order. It is rather the convention of not doing such because such is not done. Once one has overcome the feeling of "breaking taboos brings forth punishment" one can break the taboo of talking about what diversity is to be found in the collection {1+16, 2+15, 3+14, ..8+9} which to our conventions is all alike. After the fundamental break with cultural conventions has been achieved and fully, internally accepted (like waging the crises of adolescence and daring to talk back to Teacher /parents, authority, dear leader, brother no. 1, etc./), it will be easy to extend this experiment to the collection {1+1, ...,16+16}. Then, one can discuss, whether an order on the red building blocks is more pleasing to the eye than an order on the blue building blocks. After this, one may discover the concept of a "convoy", that is, of those pairs of buiding blocks that have to move together during a reorder. From this point on, the seduction will have worked and the participants of the workshop will order and reorder like fallen angels. There is a forbidden pleasure in paying attention to details no one should pay attention to and disregard that what everybody is told to look at. There are libraries about how not to behave like one should behave. Some, like Robin Hood, Spartacus, Stauffenberg, and some others, have a positive image. There are some others who are killed because they are not so as they should be e.g. Giordano Bruno and some others. It is not easy to leave the common understanding. We can always pretend we investigate a problem of number theory, category theory, information theory or so while we play with the building blocks, if the System Stability Agency Special Forces take us away in Varna for enhanced interrogations. In fact, we will have overthrown the predominance of the Oneness over the Differences. I do hope that these remarks will be helpful. Karl _______________________________________________ fis mailing list [email protected] https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis-- Prof.em. Dr. Rafael Capurro Hochschule der Medien (HdM), Stuttgart, Germany Capurro Fiek Foundation for Information Ethics (http://www.capurro-fiek-foundation.org) Director, Steinbeis-Transfer-Institute Information Ethics (STI-IE), Karlsruhe, Germany (http://sti-ie.de) Distinguished Researcher in Information Ethics, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA President, International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE) (http://icie.zkm.de) Editor in Chief, International Review of Information Ethics (IRIE) (http://www.i-r-i-e.net) Postal Address: Redtenbacherstr. 9, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany E-Mail:[email protected] Voice: + 49 - 721 - 98 22 9 - 22 (Fax: -21) Homepage:www.capurro.de _______________________________________________ fis mailing list [email protected] https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Dear Rafael,It is so reasonable that you attracted our attention to the importance of names. In formation can exist without conventional names but information theory cannot go without names - both proper and common. When we are discussing a definition of information, it means that we want to make a transition from the name "information" as a label that has some intuitive meaning to a scientific name that specifies this important phenomenon. It's interesting by scientific names are usually theoretical counterparts of proper names in natural languages. So, when we are discussing this problem, it is important to understand where we want to go - to a scientifically grounded exact terms full of meaning for knowledgeable scientists or to names that reveal themselves to everybody without revealing anything and creating a beautiful blue.
Sincerely, MarkP.S. The problem of names is also a tremendous scientific problem, which finds its reflection in mathematics.
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