Dear Joseph and colleagues,
In some important respect, language is only a clever means to an end. It
is a way for transmitting knowledge from an individual to another.
Following Dunbar (2010), the real issue is the mental, cognitive
mechanisms and abilities that underly language... and seemingly we are
not quite unique in that regard. The continuum of communicating and
cognizing capabilities goes downwards (or upwards) quite smoothly:
modern Homo, archaic Homo, Homo erectus, great apes, advanced mammals...
In other words, part of the response to the important point raised by
Karl, Rafael and others, and continued so long, also lies in the
province of neuroscience. Neither literature, philosophy, logics, etc.
can provide the most cogent scholarly response (in our times!) without
the recent neuroscientific findings, which unfortunately have not
entered into the general scientific communication yet (as Gordana
commented, living philosophers would talk about dead neuroscientists,
and the living neuroscientists about dead philosophers). However, if I
am not too wrong, we might be close to a neural breakthrough similar to
what the genetic code represented for biology about two generations ago.
My optimistic stance is that one of the most interesting places to
contribute to the scholarly circulation of new cognitive ideas so badly
needed might be this very list. In that regard, some parties could find
interesting my personal neuroscientific version of the problem... (see
two paragraphs of mine about that):
The NCT scheme (“Neurodynamic Central Theory”) addresses a new way of
explaining the organization of brain information processes (Marijuán &
Panetsos, 2011). It establishes the correspondence between neurodynamics
and behavior by means of a central theory grounded on dynamic
connectivity (conectome) and on optimality (principles of brain
economy). As the core of this theory, it is proposed the development of
an informational "behavioral-processual engine" ingraining the
multidimensional operations of composition-decomposition of sensorimotor
afferences and efferences with the realization of an action/perception
cycle, producing adaptive behavior and associative learning (efficient
knowledge) as outcomes. A number of disparate behavioral and cognitive
aspects might be unified out from the development of this theory,
including the recently coined brain’s “dark energy” (Raichle, 2006,
2010) and the global “workspace” proposed by Changeux, Dehaene, and
others (Dehaene et al., 2001).
To reiterate, a new integrative theory is badly needed, a radically
whole new approach rather than the piece-meal approach followed in most
theoretizations of neuroscientific disciplines. The ongoing
neurocomputational, neuromolecular, neuroinformatic and neuroimaging
revolutions (to name but a few of the emerging disciplines responsible
of the enormous experimental data-accumulation taking place in
neurosciences) have not been accompanied by any parsimonious synthetic
approach yet. Very recent findings about the "Conectome" need to be
elaborated and generalized, both in their theoretical interpretation and
in their experimental content (Zamora-López, 2010; Sporns, 2011). The
dynamic "Conectome" has to be interpreted in terms of supersystem
configurations of an information processing engine realized by cortical
areas and medial nuclei, along an optimization process of local/global
nature, and following symmetry-breaking/symmetry-restoration operations
that make each cortically stored information unique and recoverable
(Collins, 1991; Collins & Marijuan, 1997; Turvey, 2004). In the
optimality aspect, the NCT scheme integrates those findings with
principles of maximum economy in space and time, and with
symmetry-breaking and group theory concepts for distributed processes
that will configure a hierarchical-heterarchical scheme of information
processing, learning and adaptive behavior (Marijuán, 2001).
thanking the attention,
---Pedro
joe.bren...@bluewin.ch escribió:
Dear John,
The reference you cited looks like essential reading and I have
ordered it. Thank you for calling it to our attention.
I believe, also, that the conventional view of meaning leads to its
erasure, and this exactly why a Derridean view of writing (and speech)
is required in which erasure does not mean the total loss of meaning.
As far as signs go, the area of debate is clear. A theory of signs (or
sign-relations) is essential to the understanding of information and
questions of reality and illusion. You believe that Peirce delivers
this and I do not. The reason is that the critical fallibility, I
think, is not in our representations, about which there should be no
debate, but in taking signs (Peirce's icon and index) as
representations in the first place. Doing this leads straight to the
illusions we as realists wanted to avoid.
Thus when you write: "A proper understanding of how signs, and thus
logic, works can avoid these problems", I agree, but wish to suggest
that neither standard logics, nor Peirce's logic, also
truth-functional, grounded in language, can do the job. Something like
Lupasco's extension of logic to real processes, his "Logic of Energy"
(1951), may be required. I am looking forward to the Taborsky opus to
help develop this approach.
Best regards,
Joseph
----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----
Von: pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
Datum: 05.05.2011 14:36
An: <fis@listas.unizar.es>
Betreff: [Fis] The world of singularities, beyond language - John
Collier
Message from John Colier
------------------------------------
Hi all,
This is interesting, as it brings up some ancient issues that
continue to roil philosophy. I think that C.S. Peirce has the best
answer to these puzzles (and does not eliminate the wonder). For
his (realist) pragmatacism Peirce adopts the pragmatic principle
that all of the meaning of a sign is contained in our the totality
of our expectations for possible experience. He realized that this
can be vague, and subject to change based on further experience.
In particular, he thought that it is the possibility that our
expectations can be contradicted by experience that commits us to
a real external world, beyond our ideas, and requires that we
should regard our representations as fallible. This allows for the
sort of leaps Rafael mentions (and which are the subject of my
doctoral dissertation). I also agree that the usual notion of the
observer is flawed, as it does not typically recognize our
involvement in the world. It is a philosophical illusion that we
alone determine meaning, and that our meanings are determinate. In
THE DYNAMICAL BASIS OF INFORMATION AND THE ORIGINS OF SEMIOSIS, in
Edwina Taborsky (ed) Semiosis. Evolution. Energy Towards a
Reconceptualization of the Sign. Aachen Shaker Verlag 1999 Bochum
Publications in Semiotics New Series. Vol. 3 (1999): 111-136, I
argue that the conventional view of meaning ironically leads to
the erasure of meaning.
In /Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized/, Clarendon Press
(2007), we argue (and this is grounded in Peircean principles)
that the thing in itself is a metaphysical illusion, and does not
fit modern science. Peirce also argued against such metaphysical
illusions. If you maintain the illusion, then you get caught in
nominalism and antirealism. A proper understanding of how signs,
and thus logic, works can avoid these problems.
My best,
John
---------------------------------------------
--
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------
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