Re: [Fis] A definition of Information

From: Soeren Brier <sbr.lpf@cbs.dk>
Date: Mon 23 Feb 2004 - 23:26:24 CET

Dear Rafael

This would be the case if I was not in a Peircean philosophical framework. I refer to my question to Stan. In Peirce the ultimate reduction would be to Firstness and its pure feeling and tendency to take habits (law of mind) which is in both our mind and in nature. That is not a reduction. Every sign process is coming about combining Firstness with Secondness and Thirdness created through the tendency to take habits. The assumption is that this is a common foundation for mind and nature. I see no way that we can explain or give good model for signification and communication from a mechanistic view of nature that sees nature a a basic independent reality that through self-organization develops forms that interact as information and then life 'emerges' and meaning? How?

The framework is important and so is the commitment to place meaning not only in human society but in a grander view including nature and Cosmogeny. But I see that you may even protest to this. If so I would ask for your frame of explanation.

Loet writes: "I don't wish to deny that we are sometimes behaving like apes, but even this is encadred as a specific domain of human communication. The functional differentiation of the coding feeds back on
what was previously not yet differentiated (e.g., considered "natural"). But once the richer format of communication has become available, the old forms are overwritten and provided with new meaning. The expression of aggression also obtains symbolic meaning. The cultural layer overwrites the natural one
by making more dimensions of the communication possible. "

I would say the our basic body signs are further modulated by culture, but they are still functioning with those basic situations the were made to (mating, fighting , hunting, fear, defense, care of kids etc.) although these situations are also differentiated. Language also obtain a partly independent development, but all meaning exchange refer back to embodied sensitive beings. "nature " does not disappear it is just folded into culture. Science seems to think that we have developed certain communications like mathematics that are body free. But Lackof and Johnson has shown that this is not the case.

----- Original Message -----
From: Rafael Capurro <capurro@hdm-stuttgart.de>
Date: Monday, February 23, 2004 3:26 pm
Subject: Re: [Fis] A definition of Information

> Soeren,
>
> meaning, I mean, (implicit or explicit) linguistic meaning, is in
> itself a
> high complex phenomenon as we know it from hermeneutics since
> centuries... I
> believe that is, on the contrary, not only simlplistic but
> *misleading* to
> try to find an *explanation* of this reducing concepts to signs,
> signs to
> forms, forms to energy, energy to... i.e. to more an more *simple*
> phenomena, which are indeed also highly complex. In other words,
> we would
> try to explain a complex phenomenon that we do not even *master*
> it itself,
> by leting it *follow* from another phenomenon that we also do not
> understandwell and at the end saying that we have a general theory
> of things, because
> all things are signs that develop themselves *like this*...
> cheers
> Rafael
>
>

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Received on Mon Feb 23 23:27:41 2004

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