[[ Everything in nature is created by its meaning. ] — Jakob von Uexküll (1940, in Favareau 2009, 111) ]
We owe the concept of Umwelt <http://gnusystems.ca/TS/nsd.htm#umwelt> to Jakob von Uexküll. In a 1934 paper he introduced it to the reader as follows: [[ This little monograph does not claim to point the way to a new science. Perhaps it should be called a stroll into unfamiliar worlds; worlds strange to us but known to other creatures, manifold and varied as the animals themselves. The best time to set out on such an adventure is on a sunny day. The place, a flower-strewn meadow, humming with insects, fluttering with butterflies. Here we may glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow. To do so, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of its colorful features disappear, others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes into being. Through the bubble we see the world of the burrowing worm, of the butterfly, or of the field mouse; the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us. This we may call the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal. … We thus unlock the gates that lead to other realms, for all that a subject perceives becomes his perceptual world and all that he does, his effector world. Perceptual and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt. ] — Uexküll, in Favareau 2009, 90-91 (translated by Barry Stone and Herbert Weiner) ] Uexküll's ‘soap bubble’ is a precursor of the perceptual or ‘cognitive bubble’ introduced in Chapter 6 <http://gnusystems.ca/TS/rvl.htm> of Turning Signs. The closure of ‘perceptual’ and ‘effector worlds’ is a version of the meaning cycle <http://gnusystems.ca/TS/mdl.htm#meancyc> concept. This world is your world: that is, the immediate experience of having this (world) is nothing other than yourself. Yet the world in its appearing, the phaneron (Peirce), has elements common to all possible experience: some Quality, some Otherness, some Mediation (Peirce: Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness). Charles Kahn on Heraclitus <http://gnusystems.ca/meanlist.htm#Heraclitus> : [[ It is true that wisdom, or the search for wisdom in sound thinking (σωφρονειν), begins with self-knowledge (XXIX); and Heraclitus went in search of himself (XXVIII). But what he found within his own psyche was a logos deep enough to be co-extensive with the universe (XXXV). So the true recognition of one's self is a discovery not of what is private and personal but of what is ‘shared by all’: the unity of all nature which is the deep logos, the deepest structure of the self. And this unity is discovered in thinking, phronein, which is ‘common to all’ (XXXI), and common not only because for Heraclitus all things think but because it is precisely in thought, when it is in sound condition – as in the case of the dry soul – that one can embrace the structure of the whole universe. ] — Kahn (1979, 251-2) ] Charles Peirce on the continuity of intelligence: [[ Whatever the philosopher thinks that every scientific intelligence must observe, will necessarily be something which he himself observes, or seems to observe. I have several times argued, at some length, that the unity of personality is in some measure illusory, that our ideas are not so entirely in the grasp of an ego as we fancy that they are, that personal identity differs rather in degree than in kind from the unity of “public opinion” and gregarious intelligence, and that there is a sort of identity of dynamic continuity in all intelligence. Accepting this opinion, a man is not radically devoid of the power of saying what every scientific intelligence must observe, if he has the power of saying what he observes himself. If he is in dynamic continuity with his whole self, he is in the same kind of continuity, albeit less intimate, with the whole range of intelligence. He can observe, in a fallible, yet genuine, observation what it is that every scientific intelligence must observe. Such observations will, however, require correction; because there is a danger of mistaking special observations about intelligences peculiarly like our own for observations that are open to every “scientific intelligence,” by which I mean an intelligence that needs to learn and can learn (provided there be anything for it to learn) from experience. I would here define experience as the resultant of the mental compulsions from the course of life; and I would define learning as the gradual approximation of representations toward a limiting definite agreement. My theory has to be that not only can man thus observe that certain phenomena are open to every scientific intelligence, but that this power inheres essentially in every scientific intelligence. ] — Peirce, unidentified fragment (NEM 4, ix-x) ] Gary f. } (from each equinoxious points of view, the one fellow's fetch being the other follow's person) [Finnegans Wake 85] { http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ Turning Signs blog
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