Dear Gordana and Stan:
In my opinion, these different feelings can be considered as individual
reflections of a complex process of communication among human beings. The
communication uses not only language, but also symbolic generalizations in
music, money, etc. These can be reflected as beauty, greed, etc.,
respectively, at the individual level.
Symbolically generalized media of communication can thus be coded
differently. As this differentiation among the codes of communication is
further developed (nearly decomposable), the social system can process more
complexity. Individual reflections add another (individual) dimension to
both the content (information), the meaning, and the decomposition. The
individual reflection depends on the communicative competencies of the
individual. For example, some of us will be more touched by a beautiful
piece of music than others, etc. The composer may consider it as a way to
make a living; the music shop as a commodity to make a profit, etc.
Best,
Loet
________________________________
Loet Leydesdorff
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR),
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam.
Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-20- 525 3681;
[email protected]
; http://www.leydesdorff.net/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es
> [mailto:fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Stanley N. Salthe
> Sent: Saturday, February 18, 2006 11:51 PM
> To: fis@listas.unizar.es
> Subject: Re: Fw: [Fis] art and meaning
>
> Gordana --
>
> > Thank you Stan, that was precisely what I meant by my question.
> >
> > Exactly how to define informational content of things that
> can not be
> >verbalized? (Maybe only because, as you say, our linguistics
> >communities have not conquered those rare territories such
> as dreams or
> >music or arts.)
> This includes as well poetry, which IS linguistic, but
> relies not so much on denotation, but on numerous properties
> like rythm, aliteration, rhyme, dissonance, assonance, and so
> on. As far as I can see, information in language products
> refers only to denotation. I do suppose that changes in
> rythm, the use of dissonance where one expects rhyme, and
> other breaks in expectation might be treated as informational
> in the standard sense, but this seems pretty weak.
>
> Those spheres of personal experiences we may hope will be
> explored in the future, so that at least we may learn how the
> brain processes those things.
> >
> > You said:
> > Now, technically, I think information is just any
> constraint on our
> >activity. So, do dreams, and those scents and music that
> have not been
> >harnessed by society, constrain our actions? If not, are they
> >informational? Some information is associated to meaning by
> semiosis.
> >But if dreams, fragrances and music are not information, we know
> >nevertheless that they are meaningful to us personally. So, can
> >meaning exist aside from information?
> >
> > My feeling is that in dreams informational content of our
> brains gets
> >re-structured, or re-connected in different ways. Dreams contain
> >elements from real life memories, but they are differently related,
> >distorted, intensified, etc. So I guess dreams have
> definitely informational content.
> In that sense of breaking the expected, perhaps so.
> However, I am particularly intrigued by these feelings that
> are entirely unique, never being experienced in the waking
> world, and never repeated (and so only barely remembered) in
> the dream world either. These must arise from unique
> configurations of neuronal propagations. It has been noted
> that unique configurations confront us all the time every
> day. Every situation is to some degree different from any
> other, but, of course, we do not focus upon this, rather on
> what is common between instances, and so, by way of
> classifying, we feel we understand what is happening. And
> this approach is fundamental to science. Here meaningfulness
> seems to associate with commonality.
>
> > One more interesting aspect of the problem is the
> approximate thinking.
> >We have a feeling if something is OK or not. Very often experts
> >have a feeling . Their expertise can be verbalized up to
> the point,
> >but after that, there is a feeling what is just the
> right amount
> >of something, the right measure, the right thing to do in
> certain situation.
> >Those feelings also have informative content, as they definitely
> >constrain our activity.
> Yes, this -- intuition -- is very important in daily
> life. And, indeed, it does constrain our actions. But I
> think that we cannot necessarily assign conventional meanings
> to intuitions, and so this raises the problem of what is
> 'meaning' in semiotics. As a pansemiotician, I think that if
> an intuition constrains our action, then it must be
> meaningful. I am sure those strange dream feelings, if I
> felt them in some waking context, would definitely influence
> my action, and so they would have to be classified as
> potentially having meaning. But then their meaning might be
> assigned by way of which action they invited. But that would
> completely lose the importance they appear to have experientially.
>
> > In any event, I do have a feeling :-) that meaning and information
> >are so tightly bound that anything having meaning must be
> possible to
> >express in terms of information.
> OK. But note the last example I just gave. Here a rich
> experience might impell me to step to the right instead of to
> the left, and so may save my life from a falling object. If
> we express its meaning in terms of this important result, I
> think we would miss the greater part of its richness, which,
> then would be meaningless!
>
> STAN
> >
> > Best,
> > Gordana
> >
> > Stanley N. Salthe wrote:
> >
> > Replying to Gordana --
> >She said:
> >
> >
> > It might be a pure feeling of sheer beauty or harmony
> (whatever it
> >might be). I wonder is there any meaning in >that feeling
> of being one
> >with music in the same flow, just dissolving in a moment? Not the
> >externalist meaning >that you can ascribe to a music-loving
> listener in
> >an instant of exaltation, but the subjective meaning for me as an
> >>individual. Is there meaning in a feeling? May I say that music
in
> >that case is information that impacts my >physical body, my
> receptors,
> >my brain, and changes its structure so that in the next moment in my
> >life I will >experience things differently?
> >May I say that meaning of music for me as a subject is
> the result
> >of the difference that made the difference in my physical
> structures, somehow?
> >
> >
> >
> >This raises what has been for me an issue of some interest. I
> >associate some kinds of meaning with emotion. Our culture
> invites only
> >a certain limited range of emotions. We can get an idea of
> how small a
> >range this is by paying attention to the emotional content
> of dreams --
> >actually more interesting that the images. Here we
> experience emotions
> >that are never elicited in everyday life, and that are,
> indeed, indescribable and unique.
> >They are as indescribable as the scents of many of the various
> >essential oils taken from plants. Some of these associate with
> >numinous feelings, as with encense (frankincense, olibanum) or Peru
> >balsam, which have been smudged in (at least) churches and
> synagogues
> >for centuries. But many (for
> >us) float free of any particular association, as they have not been
> >harnessed by our society. Are these 'untamed' fragrances --
> and those
> >dream emotions -- meaningless? This brings me to music. I
> now listen
> >largely to Romantic keyboard music -- Schubert (the father
> of musical
> >Romanticism), Chopin (The soul of Romantic music) and Schumann (the
> >spirit of Romantic music). It seems clear to me that these artists
> >have INVENTED certain emotions that literally did not exist prior to
> >their discovery on the keyboard in the Nineteenth Century.
> Now, these
> >emotions are also indescribable, but in this case it is
> clear that they
> >can be (have been) shared by many persons in the experience of art.
> >But, do we all agree as to the 'meanings' of these passages?
> We don't
> >really know, do we? It seems likely that neurologists might
> be able to
> >discover some general shared responses to them elicited in us during
> >experiments, but would these be 'describable' (translatable
> to language)?
> > Now, technically, I think information is just any constraint on
> >our activity. So, do dreams, and those scents and music
> that have not
> >been harnessed by society, constrain our actions? If not, are they
> >informational? Some information is associated to meaning by
> semiosis.
> >But if dreams, fragrances and music are not information, we know
> >nevertheless that they are meaningful to us personally. So, can
> >meaning exist aside from information?
> >STAN
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> fis mailing list
> fis@listas.unizar.es
> http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
>
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Sun Feb 19 08:15:12 2006
