Just taking the first two things on your list. An archaea’s sensory rhodopsin changes shape when the light changes. This starts a chain of chemical reactions hundreds of proteins long that sends a signal to the flagella. The flagella move, or stop moving, in response to the signal.
Is that not a signal and response reduced to the language of physics and chemistry?
Right, I think that absent sentience the world would exist, and although it would be everything it would also be nothing, less than nothing, since there would be no one to count it as nothing. The absolute darkness in the absence of percipients that bring the light, would be no darkness at all.
I respect that approach, though I am at least tempted toward a more “idealist” understanding of consciousness as “being itself.” From “within” this “research thesis,” even the idea of the “past before sentience” is more of an empirical claim about the future and the possible. For this approach, time is not symmetrical : the future is not a reflection of the past. The past is “part of the future.” But I don’t expect many to find this plausible or even intelligible. I connect it with Peirce and Heidegger.
Yet we imagine an awareness there that in different contexts might produce a different response to the same signal, and that is not explicable in mechanistic terms. It seems to be the awareness itself which cannot be understood in terms of physics and chemistry. I guess the question is how low does awareness go―at what level of complexity does it transition from nil to some? Or is it all some kind of illusion―an epiphenomenon? But what could that mean, if awareness is, for us, the most real thing? Is it the most real thing or are we deceived by reifying the fleeting phenomena. How will we ever be able to answer such a question definitively, when there is perhaps nothing at all really definitive about anything?
I can respect your view, but to be honest I can’t get my head around it enough to be able to judge its plausibility. And of course that may be due to my own unacknowledged biases or lack of relevant background.
I appreciate your open-mindedness toward my obscure phrasing.
I’m sort of talking about the “mystery” of all speech. When I offer my words to the other, I am sending them out to the entire world from another point of view. I “am” more “how the world is there for me” than just this body I call mine.
I understand others similarly. So I send my signs into another world which is strangely also mine, but with a difference I can’t see except that I learn painfully that it is there as an absence in what I understand so far.
The “consciousness” of the other is the “being of the world itself” from the point of view of that other considered as mere organism. Lesser understandings of consciousness as a “stuff” may have their use but seem to lose the crucial point — that the other is a world.
I can’t prove this, of course, but I also can’t make sense of proof apart from others who genuinely hear whatever case I make. So there’s a “faith” in speech in the being of the world for others. Or of others as another being of the world.
Recall the conversaions about biosemiotics with Apokrisis. There’s a distinction between signs and physical processes. Biosemiotics is built around it.
The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. The problem is that there is no obvious way to connect the two categories. This is a classical philosophical problem on which there is no consensus even today. Biosemiotics recognizes that the philosophical matter-mind problem extends downward to the pattern recognition and control processes of the simplest living organisms where it can more easily be addressed as a scientific problem. In fact, how material structures serve as signals, instructions, and controls is inseparable from the problem of the origin and evolution of life. Biosemiotics was established as a necessary complement to the physical-chemical reductionist approach to life that cannot make this crucial categorical distinction necessary for describing semantic information. Matter as described by physics and chemistry has no intrinsic function or semantics. By contrast, biosemiotics recognizes that life begins with function and semantics. …
The problem…poses an apparent paradox: All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws ~ Howard Pattee, The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis.
So, no. Signs are not only physical. They convey meaning. That’s what Talbott’s point is about ‘organisms of meaning’. And the ‘umwelt’ of Jakob Von Uexküll.
The reason you see it as ‘physical’ is because the territory has been divided between physical and…what? If it’s not physical, then …
Bringing in Spinoza is another register altogether. I mean, it might be relevant, but would need a lot of detailed analysis.
Another Talbott example:
Think first of a living dog, then of a decomposing corpse. At the moment of death, all the living processes normally studied by the biologist rapidly disintegrate. The corpse remains subject to the same laws of physics and chemistry as the live dog, but now, with the cessation of life, we see those laws strictly in their own terms, without anything the life scientist is distinctively concerned about. The dramatic change in his descriptive language as he moves between the living and the dead tells us just about everything we need to know.
No biologist who had been speaking of the behavior of the living dog will now speak in the same way of the corpse’s “behavior.” Nor will he refer to certain physical changes in the corpse as reflexes, just as he will never mention the corpse’s responses to stimuli, or the functions of its organs, or the processes of development being undergone by the decomposing tissues.
Virtually the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the fateful transition no one will any longer think of genes as being regulated, nor will anyone refer to normal or proper chromosome functioning. No molecules will be said to guide other molecules to specific targets, and no molecules will be carrying signals, which is just as well because there will be no structures recognizing signals. Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary.
The corpse will not produce errors in chromosome replication or in any other processes, and neither will it attempt error correction or the repair of damaged parts. More generally, the ideas of injury and healing will be absent. Molecules will not recruit other molecules in order to achieve particular tasks. No structures will inherit features from parent structures in the way that daughter cells inherit traits or tendencies from their parents, and no one will cite the plasticity or context-dependence of the corpse’s adaptation to its environment ~ The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings
I think Apo was great on this topic. Our signs become as “inexpensive” as possible, as free as possible from “matter.” But the sign is inescapably qualitative or material, however minimally, in my view. This doesn’t limit the accumulation by the sign of an intense “significance.” Indeed, our glory as humans may even be located in the saturating significance we can load on our signs. Because this significance is historical, developing over or “as” time, we are indeed “time-binders” or even “bound time.” The compressed past shines at us as the future.
Yes, he’s missed. Although we always ended up falling out over his commitment to naturalism vs my transcendentalist leanings. But I learned a ton from him. I’ve read a lot of biosemiotic-related material now.
I hope he pops back in. I could never finally agree on a big picture with him, but I learned from him, and he was original.
Right. Basically early Heidegger uses “the environmental” for unwelt or around-world. Objects in general are of course significant for the organism, and signs are objects with a significance that is more historical-conventional. We didn’t have to use red octagons for stop signs, but we did. At least in the USA.
The scientific image is the deworlded lifeworld, the reduced lifeworld, where only a skeleton of its original significance is acknowledged, which is great for making maps. Maps work precisely by “lying to us.” A hilly terrain is presented on a flat image. A river is just dry blue ink on paper.
I do recall those conversations. I also recall that Apo was a physicalist when it comes down to it. There is no question about there being a conceptual distinction between signs and physical processes, but again this comes back to Spinoza’s point about extensa and cogitans not being substantively different, but rather being different modes or attributes.
So I favour a dual aspect rather than a dual substance or dual world view. Given that we are constrained in our discourse by the inherently dualistic nature of language, it is very difficult if not impossible to disentangle conceptual distinctions from purportedly ontological differences.
For me this is a good example of the kind of misunderstanding that comes from a lack of regard for context. Signs, symbols, languages and codes cannot be understood to obey the laws of physics, although their instantiations and the physical processes correlated with them might be so understood, albeit, I would say, probably not fruitfully. Physics is simply the wrong paradigm within which to talk about signs and meaning.
That said, I remember Apo highly recommending a book: *Life’s Ratchet:How Molecular Machines Extract Order From Chaos *by Peter Hoffmann, which I bought and read about half of. At the time I just couldn’t get the picture Hoffmann was presenting. Maybe one day I’'ll give it another try. There is always too much I want to read and not enough time!
This is a good point. How can we imagine others who don’t share time and space with us ? I can only guess that Kant may have understood God to be beyond these forms of representation.
I’m moved to address this again, perhaps from a slightly different angle, just for further clarification of how it looks to me. Okay, so that is where I misunderstood your idea of the forum. I was thinking you mean the human conversation, which would require language to participate. We could say animals are in it in the sense that we observe and speak about them, but they obviously cannot experience themselves as being within the (human) forum.
I agree with you about the darkness, or as I call it the invisible, that surrounds us as something that manifests within the forum (or lifeworld?) but I would say that is so because the assumption of a world external to all our bodies, and not given even remotely completely within cognition, seems to me to be inescapable.
Yes, that would make sense if he understood God to be able to apprehend the noumenal.
I might say (hoping you would agree) : “are signals and responses not at least electro-chemical?” The total “significance” of the entity/event would be “spread out” in the wider context. A stop sign as “purely material” (in a reduced sense) would not be a stop sign. It plays a role in a larger ongoing pattern. It’s like the difference between the melted metal of a coin and the value of the unmelted coin in a form of life.
I think we agree on this, so I’m just clarifying. Put otherwise, the metallurgist cannot exhaustively explain or explicate coins just because they are made of metal.
I have tended to emphasize the human component, so that’s on me. But yes I treat dogs, for instance, as “having the world with me.” The eyes of a dog are “windows to another world” which is also my world.
I don’t think they can conceptualize it. But I think (?) they recognize particular human beings and comport themselves expectantly in terms of prior experience with that human being. Do they empathize ? I think so. This is all very blurry, I admit. But I’m inclined to speculate about a “base mammalian affective structure” that our impressive human sign-system is “built on top of.”
I connect this to dialogical thought. How I do essentially comport myself to the other ? As a friend or foe ? What deep down role am I trying to play with them ? Under the “smoke” of a high conceptuality ?
Right I agree―signals and responses are at least electro-chemical. We don’t seem to possess the conceptual machinery to understand their capacity for signalling and responsiveness solely in those terms though. The problem seems to be that without conceptual machinery we can’t understand anything at all, and conceptual machinery does not have the capacity to understand itself perhaps, because our attempts to understand anything are conceptual attempts to get beyond the conceptual to the substantive―a human limitation .
We can rehearse different ways of understanding, but we always seem to fall into believing there must be some concrete fact of the matter concerning what we are trying to understand that will render all but one view false or inadequate, when the reality seems to be that all our views are in their own ways possibly true, yet inadequate to the godly task we have set ourselves.
Yes, I agree.
I also agree about dogs’ recognitive capacities, and I do think they (proto) conceptualize in terms of visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile and motor “imagery”. But of course this is just an educated guess based partly on observation of behavior and fellow feeling. I do love dogs, I think sometimes more than I love (most) humans.
I like your last question. It reminds me that Jung reminds us that we all carry the “shadow”. I’ve been enjoying the conversation muchly, but I must go and do some work now…
I definitely feel the strong intuitive claim of an “enclosing world” in the sense of “before and beyond all consciousness.” It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve seriously explored a different basic approach to the situation. After Finitude had an unintended side-effect on this reader. So did radical empiricism.
If one re-interprets “from-a-point-of-view-ness” as other than “internal representational stuff,” the game is blown wide open. I’ve also really changed my thinking about language and meaning, precisely by insisting on the “materiality” (“sensory” quality ) of the sign. The sign as perceptual object is always “from-a-point-of-view” — along with its “personal historical significance.” Old-fashioned positivism was insufficiently empirical, as it reached for its analytic statements ( according to the ear of a disavowed god.)
Some signs “seem to point at” a realm of radical non-presence at the basis of possible presence. So we arrive at “ancestral statements” and Kant’s X. We arrive at discussions of the “meaning” of signs that are taken to refer back beyond the time of reference. Our scientific models can “travel back in time” with the flick of the bit of floating point number. But for me this “bit” is concrete, a drop or increase of voltage — and this is itself “meaningful” (empirical) in terms of possible perceptions.
It’s all pretty messy, but I am at least working from a sense of the future as the fundamental reality. Which sounds wild and silly maybe but I’m trying to point at the enduring structure of the lived “now” in its perpetual unfolding. Obviously Heidegger is an influence here, though I try to judge his work against my experience and not the other way around.