Dear Marcus,
When considering things in terms of "functional significance" one must confront the need to address "meaning" in terms of both the living and the physical . . . and their necessarily entangled nature. “Meaning” is first a linguistic construct; its construction requires interhuman communication. However, its use in terms of the living and/or the physical is metaphorical. Instead of a discourse, one can this consider (with Maturana) as a “second-order consensual domain” that functions AS a semantic domain without being one; Maturana (1978, p. 50): “In still other words, if an organism is observed in its operation within a second-order consensual domain, it appears to the observer as if its nervous system interacted with internal representations of the circumstances of its interactions, and as if the changes of state of the organism were determined by the semantic value of these representations. Yet all that takes place in the operation of the nervous system is the structure-determined dynamics of changing relations of relative neuronal activity proper to a closed neuronal network.” Failing to "make that connection" simply leaves one with an explanatory gap. And then, once connected, a further link to "space-time" is also easily located . . . Yes, indeed: limiting the discussion to the metaphors instead of going to the phore (that is, language and codification in language) leaves one with an explanatory gap. Quantum physics, for example, is a highly specialized language in which “mass” and “information” are provided with meanings different from classical physics. Best, Loet
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