Re: [Fis] Re: meaning of meaning

Dear Rafael and colleagues,

Many thanks for the philosophical reflections on meaning. Probably the vast
'opennes' about the concept that you have described is related to the
backwardness (or extreme complexity?) of the neurosciences' fields and the
relative lack of connection among them. We are still missing a central arch
or theory on human (or mammal, for that matter) "informational" and
cognitive processing integration. It is not just a personal remark, rather
it comes from leading neuroscientists such as Edelman, Arbib ('a theory of
the person' missing for the latter), Crick, and others.

I would add only a little to the points on the 'sociality' and 'porosity'
behind the meaning of our symbolic concepts: just that something similar
seems to happen when one tries to identify the 'meaning' of a biological
'signal' at the cellular level. A defeating networking of molecular,
ontogenetic, and evolutionary occurrences appears. Thus, one is tempted to
get throughout the autopoietic road and deny the problem (both of
information and meaning) by 'bringing forth' an emergent world. But I think
it is better to persist step-by-step along the molecular.biological
approach. Actually this is a great problem, shared (though in a little
twisted way) with the contemporary discussions on 'systems biology' from
the recently framed bioinformatic turfs of genomics, proteomics,
transcriptomis, and metabolomics (Viktoras was somehow connecting with this
biomolecular approach too, introducing 'purpose' and 'function' to talk
about meaning).

In my opinion, the challenge is to go directly from molecular recognition
to cellular meaning (perhaps abduction would appear somewhere in the
middle, directly by itself) without introducing from the outside helping
concepts that smuggle a surrogate solution, or a whole ad hoc doctrine.
Maybe biosemioticians will not share this direct quest for the molecular
'informational mechanisms' producing meaning out from received signals--or
they will. The idea is not to reject reductionism, but to complement it
with an interesting 'integrationist' approach.

Also, Koichiro has intriguingly connected this problem with the complexity
and networking underlying economic self-production. I would add that
economic autopoiesis, like cellular one, necessarily needs consideration of
those events that contribute negatively too (about those elements which
degrade, either by themselves or forcedly). Otherwise, the economic
self-actualization would be condemned to the eternal load of backwarded
agents (e.g., menhir builders would be thriving around happily). Actually,
in European countries we have this sort of problems quite often, about
backward enterprises the members of which do not easily accept the
actualization conveyed by the 'meaning' out from the economic 'signals'...

Seemingly, this line of thinking would imply that meaning has a 'ecumenic'
reach throughout most of the informational realms. So, not only behind our
symbolic language. �?

best regards

Pedro

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Received on Fri Jan 30 13:58:29 2004