RE: [Fis] meaning of meaning

Dear Soeren,

It is not very clear why you so strongly oppose any point of view that is functional and cybernetic. My impression is that cybernetic explanation of meaning tries to follow the "Occam's razor" principle, while biosemiotics, by multiplying "fundamental levels", doesn't (at least, explicitly).
The definition/concept of meaning is very vague, and thus a more strict formalization would be required to argue whether meaning is reducible to cybernetic/information terms or not. Ranking together "life, mind, emotions and meaning" (as you have stated it) does not provide a clue what could be the invariant property of all these phenomena, especially the one that distinguishes them from other information/cybernetic phenomena.

Both your comments on Bateson ("the difference that makes difference") and Steven's semiotician perspective of meaning imply that, for "revealed" meaning, the key is the agent that reveals this meaning. When one says that something is "meaningful in the context", it means the life 'context', the dynamics of interactions with the environment (Umwelt) of the agent. Agent then must have representations of the environment stored somewhere (my suggestion - agent's internal memory); whenever new situation, or object, or sign, appears (which is identifiable by agent), it is aligned with one of the representations, and new, or existing, meaning emerges - emerges *between* agent and a perceived object/ situation/ sign. Because every individual has very distinct structure of memory (no two individuals are the same in their genetics, education, lifepath etc.), meaning of the same social observation, or of the same musical masterpiece, or of the same book, will always be distinct, agent!
-specific. In respect to the recent discussion on music: there can only be an absolute meaning of music if there were an absolute listener (but any individual will reveal his/her own meaning in the same Bach's fugue - and it will happen every time this agent would listen to even the same piece).

Another important aspect to be touched in the discussion is axiological dimension of meaning: what is meaningful is valuable, and what is valuable is meaningful. To living system, valuable strategies and objects are those evolutionary-efficient (not always for a human though: alchogol and drugs "break" evolutionary-developed mechanism of pleasure that could point to proper behavior). The typical lifecycle and Umwelt of a living system is a result of evolutionary adaptation; objects that are "meaningful" for this living system (its mate, its pets, its food, its shelter etc.) also valuable for its survival. Considering some part of environment as not important, or meaning-less, is not just a scholastic exercise - it may cost the species its chance to survive (esp. when a new dangerous predator intervenes). Social evolution has a lot of similarities with this (e.g. consider a firm trying to grasp a new market trend or to identify potential competitors). Human is especially succ!
essful in adaptation - including new objects and situations into lifecycle and Umwelt, recognizing new meanings....

Our intellectual ability to understand meaning of postings in this acknowledged discussion is a developed version of the same ability that helped the humanity to outnumber any other mammal and spread all over the surface of Earth. This ability, in my opinion, can be, and should be, understood through cybernetic / information perspective.

Kind regards

Pavel

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Soeren Brier [mailto:sbr.lpf@cbs.dk]
> Sent: Monday, February 09, 2004 00:07
> To: "Pedro C. Marijuan"
> Cc: fis-listas.unizar.es
> Subject: Re: [Fis] meaning of meaning
>
>
> Dear Pedro
>
> The model of meaning you suggest here strikes a very crucial
> problem in the discussion of meaning in a scientific context.
> It seems to me that your suggested model is:
> 1.Purely functional
> 2. Cybernetic in it foundation.
> I therefore think that it has some of the shortcommings I
> (Brier 1992, Cybernetics & Human Knowing 1:2/3) have analyzed
> in Gregory Bateson's definition of information as "a
> difference that makes a difference" in my paper "Information
> and Consciousness: A Critique of the Mechanistic Concept of
> Information" (see
> http://mail.cbs.dk/en/mail.html?sid=0rQrZh9uIVk&lang=en&cert=f
alse). Bateson write :
> "In fact, what we mean by information - the elementary unit
> of information - is a difference which makes a
> difference,...." (Bateson 1973, p. 428).
>
> Allow me to quote from my own paper
>
> "To Bateson mind is a cybernetic phenomenon, a sort of mental
> ecology. The mental relates to the ability to register
> differences. It is an intrinsic system property. The
> elementary, cybernetic system with its messages in circuits
> is in fact the simplest mental unit, even when the total
> system does not include living organisms. Every living system
> has the following characteristics which we are accustomed to
> call mental:
>
> "1.The system shall operate with and upon differences.
>
> 2.The system shall consist of closed loops or networks of
> pathways along which differences and transforms of
> differences shall be transmitted. (What is transmitted on a
> neuron is not an impulse, it is news of a difference).
>
> 3. Many events within the system shall be energized by the
> respondent part rather than by impact from the triggering part.
>
> 4. The system shall show self-correctiveness in the direction
> of homeostasis and/or in the direction of runaway.
> Self-correctiveness implies trial and error." (Bateson 1973 p. 458)
>
> Mind is synonymous with the cybernetic system which is
> comprised of the total, self-correcting unit that prepares
> information. Mind is immanent in this wholeness. When Bateson
> says that mind is immanent he means that the mental is
> immanent in the entire system, in the complete message
> circuit." (Brier 1992, p.79)
>
> The problem with Bateson and your suggestion, I think , is
> that it can only work in a Peircean framework or some other
> kind of objective idealism. Bateson do not want to separate
> mind and intellect and talks about the intelligence of
> emotions. But when you look into his philosophical frame work
> he never left Wiener's idea that. I quote my analysis again:
>
> In "Mind and Nature" (1980 p.103) Bateson further develops
> his criteria for a cybernetic definition of mind:
>
> "1.A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components.
>
> 2.The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by
> difference, and difference is a nonsubstantial phenomenon not
> loca-ted in space or time; difference is related to
> negentropy and entropy rather than to energy.
>
> 3.Mental process requires collateral ener-gy.
>
> 4.Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains
> of determination.
>
> 5.In mental process, the effects of difference are to be
> regarded as transforms (i.e. coded versions) of events
> preceding them. The rules of such transformation must be
> comparatively stable (i.e. more stable than the content) but
> are themselves subject to transformation.
>
> 6.The description and classification of these processes of
> transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent
> in the phenomena."
>
> These criteria are all famous within cybernetic understanding
> of mind, and I will not discuss them further here. My
> critique is concentrated on the foundation of the second
> criteria: "difference is related to negentropy and entropy..."
>
> It is problematic, that Bateson is following Norbert Wiener's
> idea of a basic community between thermodynamics and Shannon
> and Weaver's theory of information based upon a shared
> starting point in the concept of entropy.
>
> Regarding the problem of the relation between the concept
> "information" and the concept "negative entropy". Bateson
> writes (Ruesch & Bateson 1968, p. 177):
>
> "Wiener argued that these two concepts are synonymous; and
> this statement, in the opinion of the writers, marks the
> greatest single shift in human thinking since the days of
> Plato and Aristotle, because it unites the natural and the
> social sciences and finally resolves the problems of
> teleology and the body-mind dichotomy which Occidental
> thought has inherited from classical Athens".
>
> However, Shannon's theory of information has never had
> anything to do with the semantic content of messages. Shannon
> and Weaver (1969 p.31-32 ) write:
>
> "The fundamental problem of communication is that of
> reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a
> message selected at another point. Frequently the messages
> have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated
> according to some system with certain physical or conceptual
> entities. These semantic aspects of communication are
> irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect
> is that they are selected from a set of possible messages."
>
> So, what people and animals conceive as information is
> something quite different from what Shannon and Weaver's
> theory of information is about. As von Foerster (1980 p.
> 20-21) concludes:
>
> "However, when we look more closely at these theories, it
> becomes transparently clear that they are not really
> concerned with information but rather with signals and the
> reliable transmission of signals over unreliable channels
> ..." " (Brier 1992, p. 82-83).
>
> The cybernetic view point fits nicely into a neodarwinistic
> viewpoint of meaning for the organism as weel as the species
> is 'survival value'. As such the cybernetic functionalism and
> objective information concept fits nicely with neodarwinism.
>
> But I am dissatisfied with the possiblity of defining life,
> mind, emotions and meaning on this foundation, because there
> is not a theory of qualia in this whole paradigm - a paradigm
> that is also prevailing in the attempt to make a 'science of
> consciousness'. My alternative is like Stan's and
> biosemioticians to use Peirce's semiotic philosophy as the
> fra,mework, because it includes a theory of qialia, mind,
> meaning and signification. What we discuss is how radical we
> want to interpret Peirce. Here Stan is the most radical in
> his pansemiotism, biosemiotic at the other side. But the
> major disagreement is between the cybernetic informationalist
> and the Peircian semioticians. Cybersemiotics is an attempt
> to unite the two paradigms in a broader framework integrating
> the core knowledge in the both.
>
> But anyway this point connnects FIS to the whole
> philosophical problems of mind and matter, qualia and meaning
> and 'what is life'? - and I am not satisfied with
> Schr�dingers answer to that question.
>
>
>

_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Tue Feb 10 09:38:13 2004