Reacting to Christophe's statement:
>But I'm afraid I disagree with your point regarding first person
>consciousness as not representing anything real, >as just being a
>bio-cultural artefact as you say. I take human consciousness as being a
>reality resulting from an >evolution of representations. But this is not
>our today subject.
S: Ths was actually the subject of a past fis discussion, on 'Internalism'.
For those who may not recall it, internalism is an emerging perspective in
science (e.g. endophysics) and was preceded by viewpoints like the famous
'autopoiesis'. Basically it is the attempt to model a system as if from
the inside, using first person, present progressive modes of description.
Cosmology ought to be internalist, but cosmologists have contrived to talk
about the universe they are viewing from within AS IF they were seeing it
from outside.
Later Christophe said:
>With this background, we can consider that a meaningful information (a
>meaning) does not exist per se but comes >from a system submitted to a
>constraint that has generated the meaning in order to satisfy the
>constraint. (stay >alive for an organism, valorize ego for a human &). A
>meaning can be defined only when a system submitted to a >constraint is in
>relation with its environment.
S: This invokes Peircean semiotics, which is triadic, instead of the
erstwhile dyadic discourse of science. That is, interpretation is inserted
between input and output, and it is a 'system of interpretance' that
accomplished this, which Loet refers to in
>The expression of Bateson "A difference which makes a difference"
>presumes that there is a system or a series of >events for which the
>differences can make a difference.
Then Søren says:
>First person meaningful consciousness is
>a bio-cultural artifact useful for the construction of life and culture, but
>it is not an image of anything real.
S: This is interesting in regard to the above. It is basically a
statement denying the possibility of 'pansemiosis' -- that is, that a
semiotic reworking of all of science may be a possibility, or, that all of
nature is characterized by semiosis. I would take 'First person meaningful
consciousness' to be a highly evolved phenomenon based on a more primitive
semiosis in nature. Thus: {vague proto-consciousness {First person
meaningful consciousness}} is showing the evolutionary relationship.
STAN
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