Dear Jim and colleagues,
At 14:24 10/02/2006, you wrote:
>Dear Colleagues,
>With some trepidation I enter this discussion to let you know that in
>the realm of the arts this discussion of meaning is of intense
>interest. In fact, I have done several recent pieces built around
>these questions, although not at all in a discursive or openly
>didactic way... I hope that the
>images and statement will at least give you a hint of the
>implications of your discussion in my field.
would you mind if I practice some "free-wheeling" about? ---If I do not
remember too wrongly, there is a nascent "neuroesthetics" discipline, but
maybe oriented towards the neuronal operations related (mostly) to visual
arts and not addressing the peculiar meaning problem in the generality of
arts. Why do human individuals need arts at all? "To obtain meaning" (to
access varieties of meaning scarcely present in ordinary life) would be the
most economic response. By fabricating artificial soundscapes or visual
landscapes we enact intellectual episodes of remarkable gratification --for
producers and consumers of art-- implying thus a new source of "value" and
"fitness" within social groups. Am affraid that those three terms are
densely interlinked, well, say around the black hole of a much needed
theory of mind....
By curiosity, in these recent paintings there is a lot of "kineticism",
What about the alternative variety of predominant "contemplationism"?
Romantic and metaphysical landscapes perhaps?
Stop nonsense. I turn to more familiar waters:
(Stan)
>This is a good view of biosemiotics. I think there is a possible problem
>here involving "well established sequences and protocols" in
that there
>could be a danger that these are (or can become) merely arbitrary -- the
>products of evolution discourse. The reason is that the environment, in
>any of its innumerable facets, could change significantly enough so that
>some of the protocols no longer can relate to it effectively...
>One line of thinking within neoDarwinism emphasizes this relationship,
>so that a population is viewed as simply trying to keep up with
>environmental change
> -- just trying to' stay in the game'. This line of thinking conflicts
> with another
>neoDarwinian tradition that emphasizes the process of adaptation -- that
>is, the process of evolving these "established sequences and
protocols".
>These two lines of thought have not been resolved into one theory.
I agree. Perhaps that evolutionary problem of theoretical biology could be
put in a more amenable way through a "bioinformational" perspective (rather
than biosemiotical). Biological meaning can be obtained from a well
established communication process if the system has capacity to
self-reconstruct, by synthesis and degradation of its active components.
Say, if we could put together the genomic dimension of the cell,
transcriptomic, proteomic, degradomic, metabolomic, signalomic, etc., we
would be able to say--aha- insulin & glucose gradients "mean" this
whole--exact--signature of molecular changes for a healthy pancreatic cell;
while if we look at the pancreatic cell of a diabetic patient what we find
is an utterly different signature (eg, leading to apoptosis in many cases).
The problem is how to express that "molecular meaning" in understandable
language, involving realms of giga-data: thousands of genes, enzymes,
metabolites, signals, messengers, etc. "Systems" biology at its best!
This dovetails with a comment from Igor (off line)
> I think, another property of meaning so defined has to be pointed out:
> repetition and reproducibility. A singular event cannot have meaning and
> cannot be classified. I still have a question: what is meaning:
> -- a process of adaptation
> -- a result of adaptation (state of the system)
In line with the above, there is a process of meaning construction, and its
temporary result may be that a cellular checkpoint has been crossed (eg,
reproduction phases, apoptosis, etc.) and then a new cellular regime is
distinguishable. Properly speaking the living has no "state" but "phase"
(along the advancement of a life cycle).
best regards
Pedro
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Received on Wed Feb 15 13:49:26 2006
