[I present below, the "meaning" of a few terms as I am using them. I hope this will facilitate the transduction of what I compress in writing, into what you expand in the reading.]
Analog: This term is roughly what James means by precepts. In an analog representation, some energy in the environment is transduced or converted from one form to another. In the conversion process aspects of the first form are mirrored in the second. For example, in semiotics an icon is one form of the sign relationship, where the visual aspects of a thing are mimicked in an image. Such as, that the picture on the cave wall encodes lines, textures and shapes such that "looks like" a bison. Or in the case of Edison's talking machines where the squiggles in a groove mimic vibrations in the air. Analog processes are continuous, dynamic, affective and irrational. It is the mode of estimation and relation. We are analog beings engaged in the continuous flow of time and being. Digital: This term means roughly what James describes as conceptual. It mean to break something apart to isolate it from the continuous analog flow. It is setting a part of one thing from another. It demands attention to difference. It is intimately connected to definition. This is the fundamental mode of technique. It allows us to break things apart and put them back together again. It is the mode of measurement and construction. Digital process are discrete, static, linguistic and rational Rational: This term was invented by the Greeks to support their believe that any number can be expressed as a ratio for one number to some other number. It became applied to process of reason itself. The rational employs digital modalities. It attempts to isolate static concepts and reconfigure them into more static concepts. It strives for precision, for the absolute, for infinitesimal approximations of perfection. It is the primary mode of the classic, the scientific, of modernity, of language and philosophy. Irrational: This mean not rational. It comes to mean a process for arriving at answers that does not employ reason. The irrational is the continuous flux of sense, emotion, memory, and habit. It is expressed in our habits, biases our default expectations. It is in the judgments we act on driven by dim apprehensions of we know not what. It is manifest in what we feel and what we do. It is the primary mode of the romantic, the artist, the poet, the mystic and the madman. Algorithm: An algorithm is a fundamentally digital procedure that involves breaking things apart and putting them back together. It is a set of steps that yield a consistent result; like a recipe, a set of instructions, a mathematical equation, the syllogism. It is the mode of the logic, mathematic, and the age of mechanical reproduction. Heuristic: Rules of thumb, habits of thought that produce relatively consistent results. It is the mode of trial and error, of approximation of the good enough. Heuristics direct us forward based on past success or failure. It is the mode of Dasein, of being-in-world, of caring and coping and feeling our way around. Chaos: I have tried a zillion time to explain this here and seem to have failed. Let's try this one from Nietzsche, "The overall character of the world is, for all eternity, chaos; not in the sense that it lacks necessity, but rather in the sense that it lacks order, articulation , form , beauty , wisdom , and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms might say." All of those things: lacks order, articulation, form , beauty , wisdom and not discovered in the world around us. They are invented by us in our ceaseless "aesthetic anthropomorphism."" Order can emerge from the irrational processes of autopoiesis or we can hammer it out, construct it, invent it through the processes of reason. Order is a subset of the chaotic. But both order and disorder are perceptual processes that we synthesize through rational and irrational evaluations of our experience. For those who still don't know what I mean by chaos, listen to this or just be quiet: http://www.radiolab.org/2009/jun/15/ All of human existence, is an effort to establish a harmonious aesthetic accommodation to chaos. Meaning: In information theory meaning is reduction in uncertainty. It is antientropic. Not a very satisfying definition to be sure. We know what "meaning" means but it is hard to pin down. I would say that meaning is the synthesis of harmony between recollection and projection in the present moment. It arises at the intersection of what Sartre calls facticity and transcendence. Pierce says we produce meaning from the process of abduction or intuition. These are our primary ,fundamental modes of knowing. We get a feeling of rightness. These intuited irrational certainties are verified by the rational process of induction and deduction, which are the workings back and forth between the sense data and our habits of thought (schema). Meaning is not completely rational or irrational. It emerges from their combination. For a percept to become a concept, which is to say for the irrational to become rational, a transduction must occur. The one must be transformed into another. For Sartre and Husserl consciousness is this process of meaning-giving activities. This process of interaction between the rational and the irrational, this meaning giving, evolves into the technique we call language and the technology we call writing. From the standpoint of information theory this is just the process of encoding and decoding messages. But as Pirsig shows these process of transduction do not contain or enfold meaning. They are techniques for pointing or for indication. A text is a set of signs; a pattern of indication. It does not contain meaning. it must be filled with meaning. In its indication, a text assists its readers in creating meaning. The creation of meaning is the function of man. To reproduce a snatch of text is to reproduce a pattern of signs. Where does the meaning lie? Meaning lies where Pirsig says the novel lies. The novel is not inside the pages in a book neither is it burned into circuits or programed in flip flops. I think Pirsig doesn't take this far enough. Meaning and novels are not in the patterns at all. Meaning is not in the transduction or the coding and decoding. Meaning is the assessment of experience that allows rational concepts to become irrational percepts and irrational percepts to become rational concepts. Meaning is compressed in the writing and expanded in the reading. Meaning flows in the diastole and systole of the heart; in waves of neural polarization; in ink flowing to the page, photons flowing through threads of glass. Meaning results from patterns of ratio returning to the irrational and back again. Meaning is compressed as symbolic patterns, then expand back into fully blown embodied experience. That is what symbols do. They help us create and exchange meanings, the transduction of the irrational into the rational and back in the hermeneutic circle. Language or any system of discrete symbols serves as a mnemonic device to facilitate this process. Language is a technique for the reciprocal transduction of the analog and the digital. But meaning is always idiosyncratic. Every one of us makes meaning. We synthesis it from experience and as a result each of us reads a different novel from the same set of symbols. Everyone here either knows or can easily look up everything Pirsig says. But each of us synthesizes their own meaning from the a static pattern of signs. Those patterns do not contain any particular meaning. They open a pathway for the synthesis of meaning. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
