BODY { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px;
}Exactly- Peircean semiosis, with its three modal categories and
their subsets [1-1, 2-2; 2-1; 3-3; 3-2; 3-1]; and the semiosic
process of DO-IO-R-II-DI-FI, functions as a Complex Adaptive System
[CAS].
This is exactly as described, a self-organizing system with
anticipation, adaptation and both stability and novelty. My only
quibble with the title is 'How Mind Emerged from Matter'. My own view
is that neither was primary; both emerged and function together. After
all - you can't have matter without Mind, i.e., without an
organizational pattern - even of the basic atom; and certainly, I
reject any concept of Mind as an a priori reality and/or as existing
without being articulated as Matter.
Edwina
On Thu 01/08/19 12:40 AM , Gary Richmond [email protected]
sent:
List,
In the online 'Semiotics Research Group', Cary Campbell posted this
video of a lecture by Terrence Deacon at the University of Tartu.
The video of Terrence Deacon's (University of California, Berkeley)
"The bridge from information theory to semiosis", 15.07.2019 available
to see on UTTV at https://www.uttv.ee/naita?id=28688
Several years ago Gary Fuhrman and I considered discussing on
Peirce-L Deacon's difficult but, in our opinion, critically important
book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter.
We finally decided that it would probably prove too challenging to
discuss it in an online forum (considering, for example, its length,
and the difficulties posed by some of Deacon's neologisms, terms
necessary to characterize several concepts he introduces in the book
necessary to set forth his argument). So while the book is deeply
informed by Peircean semeiotics (as was his earlier book, The
Symbolic Species), we dropped the idea of an online discussion,
concluding that it would probably be of interest only to a very few
here, such as those grounded in certain facets of information and
systems theory in its relation to biosemiotics.
The video offers, among other things, an excellent introduction to
Incomplete Nature. Here is an excerpt from a review of it in The New
York Review of Books:
Terrence W. Deacon approaches these questions [such as the origin
of life] with the apparatus of dynamic systems theory, which
describes the operations of complex systems that are autonomous,
self-maintaining, stable over time, and resistant to the tendency
toward disorder called entropy. The model of such systems, at a
primitive level, is the biological cell, which makes up further more
complex dynamic systems such as organs and whole organisms. The cell
maintains its integrity over time by means of an enclosing membrane
that is selectively permeable, letting in only such molecules as will
serve its self-preserving needs: performing basic metabolism and
expelling waste products. It is a self-organizing unit (unlike a
humanly constructed machine) that admits of teleological
description—it has goals toward which its activities tend—and
that contains the essential ingredients of life. One of its central
capacities is counteracting the effects of the second law of
thermodynamics: it creates order and resists chaos.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/07/can-anything-emerge-nothing/
[1]
Best,
Gary
Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical ThinkingCommunication StudiesLaGuardia
College of the City University of New York
Links:
------
[1]
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/07/can-anything-emerge-nothing/
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