Dear Pedro, The framework you present is interesting and deserves some comments. You write: “Without entering self-production of the living there can be no sense, no meaning”. I agree. You positions meaning generation with the coming up of life in evolution, assuming there is no meaning generation in the world of inert matter. But what is life? The best definition I know: “the sum of the functions by which death is resisted” [Bichat]. So life is organized around maintaining its nature, around satisfying a “stay alive” constraint (not that circular if you position the constraint as local vs ubiquist laws). But we should keep in mind that the nature of life is a mystery for today science and philosophy. Then come humans: “But, little problem, how can the gap to the human dimension be crossed?" Humans are indeed living entities, but with self-consciousness and free-will in addition. And these performances also are mysteries for today science & philosophy. Also comes in language ” amorphously structured around the advancement of one's life”. And, key point: ”most of our social exchanges are supradetermined by status, self-image, ambitions, affinity, collective identities, deception, self-deception, attraction, etc. Rather than noise, it is life itself!” The only point I would disagree with you is the last part of the sentence, as human behavior is much more than life itself. The constraints that humans have to satisfy contain some specificities like valorize ego and limit anxiety. The field of human constraints is not that well understood. Probably because it is closely linked to these mysterious human specificities. So we are looking at a difficult subject: understand information flow within entities that we do not understand. The former can indeed feed the latter but I feel that an evolutionary thread should be explicitly considered in order to make available a background that we understand. (More on this in http://philpapers.org/archive/MENCOI ). Best Christophe From: pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es To: joe.bren...@bluewin.ch; avi...@gmail.com Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2013 20:52:58 +0000 CC: fis@listas.unizar.es Subject: Re: [Fis] social flow Dear FIS colleagues, Many thanks for the comments exchanged. Welcome to Roly, the first party of the Xian's conference publishing in the list (I mean concerning the invited speakers, as Bi-Lin who also posted recently was a Xian participant too). I agree with Roli's interpretation and Joseph's points, and also with the direction started by John. It is one of the few times we are producing interesting ideas on social information infrastructures. Perhaps at the time being the "received wisdom" on communication & social information is not working terribly well. For instance, Jakobson six communication functions could be perfectly collapsed into three, or expanded into nine... I have found a similar "relativity" in the not so many approaches to cellular / biological communication. One of the essential points to reconsider is, in my opinion, the lack of connection between communication and life itself. Without entering self-production of the living there can be no sense, no meaning. The notion of information flow (rather than the "signal") has helped me to cohere the cellular intertwining scheme. But, little problem, how can the gap to the human dimension be crossed? Essentially human communication is not logical, but bio-logical... amorphously structured around the advancement of one's life, and that includes masterminding well organized motor apparatuses, as those involved in language production and language interpretation ("cerebellar computation"). Logics is a byproduct of this motor/perceptual system underlying our concepts and the interlinking of our exchnges, which becomes mastermined by the fitness demands within social groups --responding to Bi-Lin's off line comments too. Actually most of our social exchanges are supradetermined by status, self-image, ambitions, affinity, collective identities, deception, self-deception, attraction, etc. Rather than noise, it is life itself! Haven't we a lot of work to be done in these essential matters? best ---Pedro De: Joseph Brenner [joe.bren...@bluewin.ch] Enviado el: jueves, 21 de noviembre de 2013 20:22 Para: Roly Belfer; PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ Cc: fis@listas.unizar.es Asunto: Re: [Fis] social flow Dear Roly, Dear Pedro, Thank you for taking this thread in a for me very interesting direction. As you know, interesting means what I find my logical system can confirm, improve, validate, etc. The two notes share one feature that one might criticize, namely, that they deal essentially with present, conscious material, whereas "information flow" almost by defintion seems to involve components that are absent, potential, unconscious, etc. Similarly, the application of the Square of Opposition in Roly's reference would at first sight appear to be explanatory, but on closer inspection, I find everything reduced back to binary logic, arrows in a box. What has to be added, pace Jakobson, is some notion of the actual dynamics of what Roly calls "a mutual relateable framework". And let's not be too greedy: let's get the pairwise interactions right and then see where we can go with more complex ones. Cheers, Joseph ----- Original Message ----- From: Roly Belfer To: Pedro C. Marijuan Cc: fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2013 4:44 PM Subject: Re: [Fis] social flow Dear Pedro Thank you! there is some sort of synchronicity here: I was just recently thinking about Roman Jakobson and his 6 levels of semiotic analysis. Especially the phatic expression, as some kind of white noise that is necessary for the interpersonal informational "handshake". That is, an infosphere - be it organic or more like artificial info networks - would need to have actants operate in a mutually relateable framework (even if it is only pairwise). The meaningless/senseless datum is important for establishing the lines of communication, and perhaps some emergent properties (such as intimacy, grouping, pre-communicative acceptance). Do you know of any quantified work re Jakobson? (I keep this around for different purposes) Best Roly On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es> wrote: Dear FIS colleagues, Just a wandering thought, in part motivated by the highly formal contents of the other discussion track. What are the major contents, topics, and styles in our social, spontaneous exchanges? Seemingly the response is that most of those exchanges are just casual, irrelevant, performed for their own sake. There are scholarly references about that---though our own perusal of social life may quite agree. The information flow, the circulation of social information, becomes the message itself (echoing McLuhan), amorphously gluing the different networks of the social structure... Flowing naturally in spontaneous exchanges and also fabricated and recirculated by the media. Our talkative species needs the daily dose --otherwise mental health resents quite easily. I am these days reading Robert Trivers (2011) on self-deception and how the info flow we are conscious of becomes a highly self-centered concoction for for our own social self-promotion. I think it partially dovetails with the above: "we are the content." best ---Pedro -- ------------------------------------------------- Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA) Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ ------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
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