Here's a post today by Edwina Taborsky that bounced back from 25 gmail accounts. I'm resending it partly as a test and partly as a convenience. I noticed that it had a huge amount of formatting markup in the body of the email, so I'm sending it as plain text, and it included 3 images of author names, but the plain text version also showed the names, making this easy. Also I deleted header and footers. That does seem to help. I didn't notice any italics or bolding that would have been lost by what I did. You can view the original at https://list.iu.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2025-08/msg00092.html and, if you are logged in, you can ask the server to re-deliver it to you. Also, if you get bored of my discussion, remember to scroll down if you seill want to see Edwina's post here.
Images still get through gmail's filter sometimes, maybe images are a contributing factor in bounces but not always decisive. I guess it's not a great test since I'm testing 3 ideas at once. Mike Bergman suggested that he found that sometimes in sending a PEIRCE-L post, he accidentally sent it to list.iupui.edu instead of list.iu.edu and that it's only recently that they don't get through to everybody. I've looked through source files of PEIRCE-L messages to explore that idea but couldn't find evidence of it, but the processing by my email program or by IU.list.edu may have removed the evidence. Meanwhile I've removed from the PEIRCE-L message template itself the new header of the last few days. Gary F (gnox) told me that the body of the message came as an attachment to the header. I suspect that that's a result of his email program. I know my email program Thunderbird does some inconvenient things that it ought not to. But I see the body of a headered PEIRCE-L message even when I turn off "display attachments inline". On 8/17/2025 10:39 AM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
List Thanks to Mike Bergman for the references he provided. They do indeed show , in my view, how the Peircean semiosic analysis can be found in other scientific outlines - despite the fact that these analyses are not using Peircean terminology. That’s important - the terminology should not be a barrier to acknowledging that these scientific analyses are also semiosic analyses. What is a semiosic analysis? I think that it is one that examines how Matter is interactionally operative within Mind; that is, Matter as a ‘reasonably discrete spatiotemporal entity’ exists as it is within the formative rules of Mind [matter is effete mind 6.25] and interacts, in a triadic function [O-R-I] and using the three categories...with its environment’s other spatiotemporal entities to ‘live’ or ‘be’ [in the case of a crystal’. For example: Minimal physicalism as a scale-free substrate for cognition and consciousness Open Access Chris Fields, James F Glazebrook, Michael Levin "A well-established literature extends the concepts of consciousness—the capability of having phenomenal experiences, however basic or minimally structured—and cognition to phylogenetically basal systems, including free-living or facultatively communal unicells, whether pro- or eukaryotic ET Comment: My understanding of Pericean consciousness is that it is Firstness or Feeling [ see his long outlines of protoplasm having both feeling AND Mind. 6.255, where he writes that protoplasm “not only feels but exercises all the properties of mind”. " this extension to more basal organisms was initially motivated by observations of communication, learning, and behavioral flexibility, and by functional similarities between the mechanisms supporting information processing and learning in basal systems and in more complex systems such as mammals. Both molecular and bioelectric mechanisms of cellular information processing, memory, communication, and error correction are, in particular, evolutionarily ancient and conserved across phylogeny ET comment: The above interactional processes can all be examined within the triadic semiotic action and the three categories. Note - communication is both 1ns and 2ns; learning is 3ns, behavioural flexibility is all three. We can see evidence of qualsign, dicisign and legisign triads in all these processes. And the below list from the article: -MP is completely scale-free, applying in the same form to interactions between molecules, cells, tissues, organisms, social groups, or ecosystems and their respective environments. Hence it predicts common mechanisms that can be probed empirically at any scale. It makes no assumptions about the structure or dynamics of the environment, at any scale, beyond its being a physical system. -MP requires every property of either itself or the environment to which an organism or other living system is differentially sensitive to be specified explicitly in terms of the information processing employed by the organism or system to detect and respond to that property. This includes properties often taken for granted, such as the existence of external objects or their embedding in three-dimensional (3d) space, and applies regardless of whether detection and/or response is recorded to memory or “reportable” via any specific assay -MP treats information and energy as formally equivalent, explicitly enforces conservation of energy, and hence requires the thermodynamics of classical computation (Landauer 1961 <>; Bennett 1982 <>) to be represented explicitly. It requires the thermodynamic cost of memory to be accounted for at every scale, and automatically enforces a metabolism—cognition tradeoff…. ET comment - the ‘formal equivalence of information and energy [ which I compare to Mind and Matter, can be compared to Peirce’s 6.73 comment that “It is certainly a desideratum in philosophy to unify the phenomenon of mind and matter”. My point is that information processing, within the three categories and the interactional triad, which is to say, semiosis, is ongoing at the cellular and quantum levels.. The question then moves to: Would this scientific research into the quantum and cellular - as well as social realities - benefit from the use of the Peircean framework [ eg, the triad, the categories, the ten classes, the concept of Mind and Matter.].? I think it would - simply because the framework, so thoroughly outlined by Peirce, is already there! Edwina
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