Stephen J - I guess we disagree on a lot! 1) I don't see how, with regard to symbolic language, having hands has any causal role. After all, there ARE people born without hands who most certainly learn language. And I don't see how an ape hand could not, purely technically, draw a complex diagramme. It's their brain, guiding that hand, that is incapable. Therefore, I remain in the 'innate capacity to symbolic language' camp - based on the equally innate capacity for logical reasoning and hypothetical imagination...
2) What 'predispositions defined in the biosemiotic paradigm'? 3) There cannot be any valid case of a human infant raised among wild wolves; imagine a week-old baby - impossible to be raised by a wolf. Now, can there be a case of an autistic or brain-damaged child of over the age of let's say, five, abandoned in the wild by his family, living among animals - that's slightly possible but his inability to speak would more likely be the brain damage. No, to define a unique characteristic of a species is not 'anthropocentric'! After all, animals can have unique characteristics (whales, elephants, insects...)... The FACT that only the human species uses symbolic language is a unique characteristic - and is due primarily to the large brain - with its innate capacity for logic, reasoning and imagination. And I don't agree that we are different from animals only in degree; the use of symbolic language, which rests entirely on memory and imagination - as well as logic - is a HUGE difference. As for the bird - that's one bird; not the whole species. 4) You haven't defined the Peircean biosemiotic principle. Yes - we don't agree on very much! Edwina ----- Original Message ----- From: Stephen Jarosek To: 'Edwina Taborsky' ; 'Peirce-L' Sent: Friday, October 16, 2015 10:30 AM Subject: RE: Open axiomatic frameworks (was: [PEIRCE-L] A Second-Best Morality) Here it is, Edwina... here lies the crux of our differences: >"I disagree that 'human hands and vocal chords' are the important tools of our species. These technological adaptations are vital but the important tool is the human brain, with its capacity for hypothetical reasoning, imagination, logic and symbolic language." My thesis, like that of Norman Doidge, 2007, is that the neuroplastic brain wires itself in response to experience. The mind-body unity implies that the mind-body is a whole, mind is not separate to body. However... for the sake of illustration, it is via the body that the mind apprehends the experiences that wire the brain. Now it is true that apes, chimps, etc also have hands and they also use vocalisations, but their vocalisations are limited, and their hands are not predisposed to holding biros or drawing complex symbols or building complex things... they also have smaller brain-body weight ratios. And so apes will never, at their current levels of evolution, develop the sorts of complex cultures that we inhabit. You bring us back to this old tough nut to crack... innate. I insist that nothing is innate (beyond the predispositions defined in the context of the biosemiotic paradigm). You insist that "hypothetical reasoning, imagination, logic and symbolic language" are innate in humans. But a human infant raised among wild wolves will unlearn whatever innateness there is quicker than you can say "define the things that matter in a lupine den" and this is what accounts for the phenomenon of the feral child. This is consistent with the axiomatic framework that I outlined. Your insistence on innate characteristics cannot be sustained within such an axiomatic framework. It is anthropocentric because it designates something "special" about the human condition. But we are different to animals in degree, not in kind. All living things conform to the same Peircean-biosemiotic principles (this is what I meant by 'manifestations of Peircean biosemiotics'). We are not going anywhere with this, and we have to just agree to disagree. There is no crossing this Rubicon. sj PS: Koko the famous gorilla exhibits imagination and ability to work with symbols. A lot of animals do. A lot of animals use tools. Just a moment ago, I viewed a video clip of a wild bird snowboarding down a rooftop on a margarine lid, just for the fun of it. There is nothing exceptional about the human condition beyond the "tipping point" in development that has enabled us to form the largest, most complex cultures. The human exceptionalism that imbues humans with special powers is just another form of anthropocentrism. Aha, I found the clip of the snowboarding bird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB_I08ahD1c The usual narrative for this kind of thing is that the bird is acting on an adaptive instinct... this kind of typical genocentric narrative is hogwash. Maybe the bird is doing exactly what it looks like it's doing... just curious and having a bit of fun. From: Edwina Taborsky [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, 16 October 2015 2:53 PM To: Stephen Jarosek; 'Peirce-L' Subject: Re: Open axiomatic frameworks (was: [PEIRCE-L] A Second-Best Morality) Stephen, see my comments below: ----- Original Message ----- From: Stephen Jarosek To: 'Edwina Taborsky' ; 'Jerry LR Chandler' ; 'Peirce-L' Sent: Friday, October 16, 2015 5:41 AM Subject: RE: Open axiomatic frameworks (was: [PEIRCE-L] A Second-Best Morality) SJ:Edwina, recent developments suggest that many creatures have "culture" not just humans. Human cultures are as complex as they are because we have the physiological tools (mind-bodies) that make them possible. There is nothing magical about human cultures. They are simply manifestations of Peircean biosemiotics that apply universally to all living things. Human hands and vocal chords are the "tools" that are especially important in the evolution of human culture. No magic, no woo, no anthropocentric man made in god's image, none of that nonsense. It's just natural law doing what it does. The late Thomas Sebeok understood precisely this very point: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/02/us/thomas-sebeok-81-debunker-of-ape-human-speech-theory.html EDWINA: I'm not arguing for a magical nature of human culture! Nor am I talking about some anthropocentric man in god's image!! And what do you mean by defining them as 'manifestations of Peircean biosemiotics'? I disagree that 'human hands and vocal chords' are the important tools of our species. These technological adaptations are vital but the important tool is the human brain, with its capacity for hypothetical reasoning, imagination, logic and symbolic language. This enables a species that can only live as a community, for its knowledge base is learned rather than innate, and is expressed and communicated via language. The actual format of the human culture is, in my view, developed as a logical adaptation to a particular biomic ecology; that is, as I've said before, you can't grow wheat in the Arctic and therefore, develop a hunting economy which is organized (family mode, economy, political etc)..very, very differently from an agricultural mode. SJ: And in other conversations on this list, I compared dynamic cities that restructure themselves with historical experience, to brains as colonies of neurons, to suggest the dynamic way that functional specialisations in brains emerge. I have never suggested that there is anything about culture that is carved in stone. But I think I see where your objection emerges. Cultures are resistant to change for the very same reason that personality and the brain's functional specialisations are resistant to change... habit. In a very real sense, a culture is like a thought, with its own habits, associations and motivations that we identify in what the culture stands for. EDWINA: I'd agree - societies are like giant organisms, and indeed, behaviour and beliefs are very resistant to change, for such would destabilize the community. All organisms require stability of processes - and in those that can adapt, change begins and develops in the periphery - and can be slow, or in other cases, can...when the system as a whole requires change...be apocalpytic and sudden. sj From: Edwina Taborsky [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, 16 October 2015 2:04 AM To: Stephen Jarosek; 'Jerry LR Chandler'; 'Peirce-L' Subject: Re: Open axiomatic frameworks (was: [PEIRCE-L] A Second-Best Morality) One further comment, Stephen - with regard to your point 10, where you write that 'for humans that ecosystem is Culture'. I disagree, for you do not examine where and how and why cultural behaviour and beliefs develop. And, you seem to view culture as 'carved in stone'. My view is that cultural behaviour and beliefs develop as logical adaptations to the real ecological realities - i.e., you can't have an agricultural economy in the Arctic and so, you develop a hunting economy- and it has a very different socioeconomic mode of organization than an agricultural economy- and also, enables/limits a different size population. And - cultural behaviour and beliefs will change, as the technology enables more food production and the population increases. [And I'm against historicism] Edwina ----- Original Message ----- From: Stephen Jarosek To: 'Edwina Taborsky' ; 'Jerry LR Chandler' ; 'Peirce-L' Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2015 1:06 PM Subject: RE: Open axiomatic frameworks (was: [PEIRCE-L] A Second-Best Morality) Edwina, I formulated my "law of association of habits" in conjunction with "the desire to be," before I heard of Peirce. It was in the interests of publishing my thoughts that I researched and stumbled upon Peirce (hence my paper published in Semiotica 2001), to discover considerable alignment between his three categories and my habits, association and "desire to be" (the "desire to be" relates to the constellation of motivations, desires, fears, thrills, etc that relate to the things that matter). An axiomatic framework can only ever be a best guess... even Isaac Newton's framework is a best guess that thus far, beyond the controversies of SGR, has been shown to work very well. The list of assumptions that I relied on to guide my thinking, taken from a somewhat waffly list that I put together a couple of years ago, was along the following lines (updated since then, for a more informed readership): 1) The law of association of habits [title of my article that I got published in Semiotica in 2001] provides the same sort of generality for cognitive science that Isaac Newton provided for the physical sciences in his laws of motion. Moreover, it fits in perfectly with Peirce's philosophy of Pragmatism (as in, usefulness - defining the things that matter); 2) Perhaps the law of association of habits relates also to matter, as per Peirce's famous reference to matter as "mind hidebound in habit"; 3) Our existence within cultures - and the fact that cultures can be sustained over time - can be understood from the perspective of the law of association of habits. For example - memes as habits, and imitation as a subset of associative learning. Associative learning provides the mechanism by which memes (habits) are transmitted. Imitation is one of the ways in which we choose what to associate; 4) Persistence across time is the deal-breaker. No matter what accidental complexity might manifest according to the laws of chance, the fact that life persists across time, with all the thermodynamic forces (entropy) acting against it, suggests that there is something more robust going on than the mechanics of dumb luck; 5) The law of association of habits is fully generalizable to every entity that lives. This enables us to formulate a more general semiotics that brings us to biosemiotics, based in the ideas of Jakob von Uexküll; 6) Existence continues to be strange and unfathomable, no matter what your theoretical base might be. The emphasis of the law of association of habits is on that which is observed. It strives to provide as consistent, logical, rational and coherent a theory as is possible, without having to contrive thermodynamically impossible scenarios, such as computers to process genetic code. There are gaps in our knowledge that may never be resolved, because it is impossible to conduct experimental controls. For example, morphic resonance may be so fundamental and basic that there is no way of isolating a control for it, because in order to do so, we would need to go to another universe; 7) Within the context of the laws of thermodynamics (complexity, entropy), life is inevitable, not accidental; 8) The law of association of habits is entropically friendly... imitation, for example, obviates the need to process complex data from genetic blueprints. By contrast, any suggestion that "computers" can occur in nature by way of natural selection fails to recognize such complexity as, thermodynamically, extremely unlikely; 9) Things that are inexplicable to our current way of thinking must have logical, rational explanations. The law of association of habits might fit in neatly with such theoretical ideas as morphic resonance or non-locality (quantum physics); 10) The law of association of habits is about making choices from ecosystems. For humans, that ecosystem is Culture. And with Culture playing a crucial role in personal identity, it follows that it is from Culture that humans learn how to be; 11) From the law of association of habits, we infer that all living entities have to "know how to be." This includes knowing how to be, in all its forms, such as imitation and pragmatism; 12) The law of association of habits is a process view of life; 13) The law of association of habits provides a basis for interpreting "nothingness", space and "infinity". It provides a theoretical framework that accounts for subjectivity, and the idea that a living entity's definitions depend on the bodily tools that it uses in order to make choices from its ecosystem. For example, there is no way that nothingness can be defined in absolute terms. IMPORTANT NOTE: A list of axioms is not a list of truths. It is an attempt to formulate a best guess. A list of axioms is comparable to an organisation's mission statement, because it provides a vision for what we are trying to accomplish. Ultimately, these questions may never be falsifiable, because we may never establish a control universe in a laboratory setting where we can test for the inclusion or exclusion of parameters like entanglement. From: Edwina Taborsky [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, 15 October 2015 3:01 PM To: Stephen Jarosek; 'Jerry LR Chandler'; 'Peirce-L' Subject: Re: Open axiomatic frameworks (was: [PEIRCE-L] A Second-Best Morality) Stephen - the gene-centric belief is hardly the sole ownership of Richard Dawkins; it's been a basic theme of classical neoDarwinism - and is he really 'traversing the globe and preaching'? There are other scientific explorations of a less deterministic and reductionist analysis, one that involves the view that the biological process is a broad informational dynamics - and the gene is merely the 'holder' of an adaptive change. However, you have not provided us, with a clear outline of your 'axiomatic framework'. I'm not sure what you mean by an 'Occidental paradigm' nor your statement that Peirce did not consider that non-human entities had consciousness. I suggest that this is not correct - he most certainly considered that, eg, mammals had consciousness. You say that you are not a Peirce scholar and again, I'm not sure what you mean by that - have you read his work with any thoroughness? And, after all, biosemiotics is based on the Peircean analytic framework...Therefore, what is it exactly that you are rejecting within the Peircean framework? Edwina ----- Original Message ----- From: Stephen Jarosek To: 'Jerry LR Chandler' ; 'Peirce-L' Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2015 7:15 AM Subject: RE: Open axiomatic frameworks (was: [PEIRCE-L] A Second-Best Morality) Jerry, List Richard Dawkins is traversing the globe preaching his gospel. It is the "life because genes because natural selection" narrative. And he is preaching his gospel in the absence of any axiomatic framework that hangs together (natural selection is a mechanism, not an axiomatic principle). He has no axiomatic framework. We do. The possible implications of the Peirce-biosemiotics paradigm are far-reaching... from politics, to religion, to sexuality, to biology and the mind sciences and even to physics and the thermodynamics of complexity. Yet, the indications are that The Establishment's genocentrism-based narrative has not entirely released its grip in our forums. Peirce was not God. His semiotics was framed from a fairly anthropocentric perspective, given that his thinking originates from an Occidental paradigm that did not attribute consciousness to non-human entities. The introduction of biosemiotics into the Peircean narrative changes all that. So to get bogged down on the semantics of the original Peirce is not even what he himself would have wanted. I think, were he alive today, Peirce would welcome the expansion of his semiotics into a more general paradigm for the life sciences. And that means that he himself would be open to recontextualising some of his assumptions. sj From: Jerry LR Chandler [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 14 October 2015 11:10 PM To: Peirce-L Cc: Stephen Jarosek Subject: Open axiomatic frameworks (was: [PEIRCE-L] A Second-Best Morality) On Oct 14, 2015, at 10:29 AM, Stephen Jarosek wrote: such as the need for an axiomatic framework, or a review of important principles. Interdisciplinary thinking requires such openness to ideas, as none of us can be experts on everything. Yes, the need for openness in thinking broadly is readily apparent. It would very helpful to your readers if you would clarify what you are seeking to communicate in either "an axiomatic framework" in the sense of the breadth of such a framework, or " a review of important principles". Is your concern about a general logic for interdisciplinary thinking? Or, about a semantic framework that encompasses a particular philosophy of logic or metaphysics or epistemology? These questions are phrased in such a manner as to give you full license tell the readers how such an open space can be constructed with minimal constraints. Cheers Jerry ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm . ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . 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