Category: Comminding

When we say the meaning of the text is ‘clear,’ we are testifying to an experience described metaphorically as ‘seeing the meaning through’ the text. By this metaphor the text is transparent. This occurs when the act of reading is effortless, so that we are not conscious of the text as ‘coded’ or of interpretation as such. When we are conscious of the text as coded – usually because we are unable to decode it through an unconscious meaning process – we say that the text is opaque.

If someone points to a text that is transparent for you and asks you ‘What does this mean?,’ your first impulse may be to say that it means exactly what it says. But then you realize that such a response is not helpful for someone to whom the text is opaque; and only someone in such a predicament would ask such a question. In order to deal with this predicament you have to raise the decoding (meaning) process into consciousness somehow. And in doing this, you sacrifice the transparency of the text. This sacrifice is motivated by compassion. (And so is any genuine question about the meaning of the text – for the one asking the question is motivated by trust that the text is meaningful although it is still opaque to him.)

Even a text which has been transparent may lose its transparency if the reader notices an ambiguity in it. Perceiving an ambiguity entails having to make a conscious choice, and thus makes us conscious of the text as coded. If you manage to recover the transparency of the text without losing its ambiguity, the text has gained for you an added dimension of meaning. Thus the ‘fall’ from ambiguity into opacity is ‘redeemed’ by a deeper, richer transparency.

To make anything explicit requires an entire code or symbol system to be functioning implicitly.

While a sign is functioning symbolically within your act of meaning – i.e. while it is in actual use – you can’t pay attention to, or even mention, its function. As Douglas Hofstadter put it (modeling his epigram after a familiar saying), you can’t have your use and mention it too. Likewise Michael Polanyi: ‘we cannot look at our standards in the process of using them, for we cannot attend focally to elements that are used subsidiarily for the purpose of shaping the present focus of attention’ (Polanyi 1962, 183). In scientific practice, you can’t make your measurement (observation) and describe your measuring device at the same time:

even though any constraint like a measuring device, M, can in principle be described by more detailed universal laws, the fact is that if you choose to do so you will lose the function of M as a measuring device. This demonstrates that laws cannot describe the pragmatic function of measurement even if they can correctly and completely describe the detailed dynamics of the measuring constraints.

— Pattee (2001)

Likewise in the realm of cognition or experiencing, of which science is the public expression: if the creative or forming power could emerge visibly from behind the forms which are its expression, then it could not be seen as a form; the seer would instead be ‘blinded by the light.’ As we have already heard from Thomas 83: ‘The light of the Father will reveal itself, but his image is hidden by his light.’ Or as Moses Cordovero put it, ‘revealing is the cause of concealment and concealment is the cause of revealing’ (Scholem 1974, 402).

Meaning is formed in the interaction between felt experiencing and something that functions symbolically. Feeling without symbolization is blind; symbolization without feeling is empty.

— Gendlin (1962/1997, 5)

Gendlin’s second sentence closely resembles a famous Kantian statement, quoted as follows by Cassirer (1944, 56): ‘Concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.’ Is Gendlin then repeating something already said by Kant? That depends on whether ‘intuitions’ are equivalent to ‘feeling’ and ‘concepts’ to ‘symbolization.’

As the human conversation with nature, science is our ongoing attempt to decode the message sent to us constantly by Nature, which message is the phenomenal world. This conversation will continue as long as our actions into the natural world have unexpected consequences. Skeptics may well doubt whether that message really means anything, but a scientist as such cannot be such a skeptic.

Nobody can doubt that we know laws upon which we can base predictions to which actual events still in the womb of the future will conform to a marked extent, if not perfectly. To deny reality to such laws is to quibble about words. Many philosophers say they are ‘mere symbols.’ Take away the word mere, and this is true. They are symbols; and symbols being the only things in the universe that have any importance, the word ‘mere’ is a great impertinence.

— Peirce (EP2:269)

Peirce does not say that symbols are the only realities – quite the contrary. He says that they alone have importance, which implies significance, or meaning; which in turn implies that reality is their Object.

Different symbols can fill the same niche in meaning space, and two different acts of meaning can find expression in the same text. This inherent ambiguity or ‘polyversity’ of language is rooted in our biological heritage as complex adaptive systems.

A clear-cut example is seen in the genetic code. The code is made up of triplets of nucleotide bases, of which there are four kinds: G, C, A, and T. Each triplet, or codon, specifies one of the twenty different amino acids that make up a protein. Since there are sixty-four different possible codons – actually sixty-one, if we leave out three stop codons – which makes a total of more than one per amino acid, the code words are degenerate. For example, the third position of many triplet codons can contain any one of the four letters or bases without changing their coding specificity. If it takes a sequence of three hundred codons to specify a sequence of one hundred amino acids in a protein, then a large number of different base sequences in messages (approximately 3¹⁰⁰) can specify the same amino-acid sequence. Despite their different structures at the level of nucleotides, these degenerate messages yield the same protein.

— Edelman (2004, 43-4)

This biological usage of the term degenerate is quite different from the mathematical sense used by Peirce (polyversity strikes again!); here degeneracy refers to the ability of different structures to serve the same systemic function. As Ernst Mayr (1988, 141) points out, this complicates evolutionary theory because it means that mutations consisting of base-pair substitutions can be ‘neutral’ with respect to selection. But this inconvenience is not one we could dispense with, as Edelman goes on to explain:

Degeneracy is a ubiquitous biological property. It requires a certain degree of complexity, not only at the genetic level as I have illustrated above, but also at cellular, organismal, and population levels. Indeed, degeneracy is necessary for natural selection to operate and it is a central feature of immune responses. Even identical twins who have similar immune responses to a foreign agent, for example, do not generally use identical combinations of antibodies to react to that agent. This is because there are many structurally different antibodies with similar specificities that can be selected in the immune response to a given foreign molecule.

What Edelman calls degeneracy is called ‘multiple realizability’ by Deacon (2011, 29), who gives the example of oxygen transport in circulatory systems. This is realized by hemoglobin in humans and other mammals, but by other molecules in (for instance) clams and insects.

For us humans, degeneracy is perhaps most interesting for its role in generating conscious experience. Neural processes related to the experience of having a world can be analyzed in terms of ‘maps,’ and the relations among these maps turn out to be degenerate. Visual experience alone may involve dozens of them, cooperating (in Edelman’s theory) by means of

mutual reentrant interactions that, for a time, link various neuronal groups in each map to those of others to form a functioning circuit.… But in the next time period, different neurons and neuronal groups may form a structurally different circuit, which nevertheless has the same output. And again, in the succeeding time period, a new circuit is formed using some of the same neurons, as well as completely new ones in different groups. These different circuits are degenerate – they are different in structure but they yield similar outputs …

— Edelman (2004, 44-5)

By its very nature, the conscious process embeds representation in a degenerate, context-dependent web: there are many ways in which individual neural circuits, synaptic populations, varying environmental signals, and previous history can lead to the same meaning.

— Edelman (2004, 105)

Even within a given context, there are many ways for implicit guidance to become explicit. So naturally different texts can yield the same meaning, and different verbal expressions of belief can yield the same practice.

Another aspect of this degeneracy is that different theories may articulate the same implicit models: for example, Edelman’s ‘theory of neuronal group selection’ appears to have the same significance as Bateson’s theory of ‘the great stochastic processes’: in each case evolution and learning are processes which differ only in time scale. ‘In this theory,’ says Edelman,

the variance and individuality of brains are not noise. Instead, they are necessary contributors to neuronal repertoires made up of variant neuronal groups. Spatiotemporal coordination and synchrony are provided by reentrant interactions among these repertoires, the composition of which is determined by developmental and experiential selection.

— Edelman (2004, 114)

The necessity of ‘variance and individuality’ is not confined to brains. ‘The biologist is constantly confronted with a multiplicity of detailed mechanisms for particular functions, some of which are unbelievably simple, but others of which resemble the baroque creations of Rube Goldberg’ (Lewontin 2001, 100). Degeneracy rules – and not only in a figurative sense, for it plays a crucial role in ‘the control hierarchy which is the distinguishing characteristic of life’ (Pattee 1973, 75). This differs from the hierarchy of scale in that it ‘implies an active authority relation of the upper level over the elements of the lower levels’ (75-6). This relation is also known as ‘supervenience’ or ‘downward causality’ (Pattee 1995), which is part of Freeman’s ‘circular causality’, as it ‘amounts to a feedback path between levels’ (Pattee 1973, 77). The development process in a multicellular organism offers an example. Each cell carries a copy of the entire genome in its nucleus; how does it manage to differentiate into a liver cell, or a blood cell, or a specific type of neuron? It receives ‘chemical messages from the collections of cells that constrain the detailed genetic expression of individual cells that make up the collection.’ Like all messages, these are coded, but the coding/decoding function is not to be found in the structure of the molecules carrying the message, whether they be enzymes, hormones or DNA. Likewise the control function is not found in any special qualities of those elements of the system which appear to be in ‘control’: rather it is found at ‘the hierarchical interface between levels’ (Pattee 1973, 79). The control function is degenerate in that the choice of particular elements to exercise control is to some degree arbitrary, and a different choice does not make a significant difference in the control itself.

Of course, this is also the general nature of social control hierarchies. As isolated individuals we behave in certain patterns, but when we live in a group we find that additional constraints are imposed on us as individuals by some ‘authority.’ It may appear that this constraining authority is just one ordinary individual of the group to whom we give a title, such as admiral, president, or policeman, but tracing the origin of this authority reveals that these are more accurately said to be group constraints that are executed by an individual holding an ‘office’ established by a collective hierarchical organization.

— Pattee 1973, 79

The control function is not a property of, and does not belong to, the individual who executes it. When someone tries to appropriate that function for himself, we call him a tyrant – a person who tries to control others for his own sake instead of serving the higher level of organization.

The polysemy of the term hierarchy is rooted in that of the Greek ἀρχη, which can mean either ‘a beginning, origin’ or ‘power, dominion, command’ (LSG). In English, first has a similar ambiguity: it can denote either one end of a time-ordered series or the ‘top’ spot in a ranking order.

In speaking of ‘control functions,’ we often need to distinguish between two kinds of ‘law’ or ‘rule,’ which we may call logos and nomos. The logos (or ‘logic’) of a system is its self-organizing function, while nomos is ‘assigned’ (LSG) artificially rather than arising naturally. Nomos is the kind of law which is formulated and ‘ordered’ so that it can be obeyed or ‘observed,’ while the ‘laws of nature’ are formulated (by science) in order to explain why the universe does what it is observed to be doing already. The distinction is denied by creationists, for whom nature itself is artificial (having been intentionally designed and manufactured by a God whose existence is prior to it), and perhaps by some who consider every formulation of science to be a disguised assertion of power. And the distinction is indeed problematic, because nomos in Greek can mean ‘usage’ or ‘custom’ as well as ‘law’ and ‘ordinance’ (LSG again). Are the ‘rules’ of a ‘natural’ language nomoi or logoi? I would say that the deepest grammatical rules are examples of logos, while the more ephemeral standards of usage are much more arbitrary, and therefore examples of nomos, even before they are formalized. But the boundary between them is fuzzy. You could put the question this way: How natural is human nature?

You will recall from Chapter 6 that ‘the lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs’ (Heraclitus). Only the priests at Delphi could decode the messages from the oracle; the ancient Chinese, on the other hand, developed a more widely accessible oracle using a ‘code’ published in the I Ching or ‘Book of Changes.’

The I Ching includes many layers of text, interpretation and commentary, but its basic framework is a system of 64 signs, called hexagrams because they consist of six lines. Each line can be either whole or divided, so the basic ‘alphabet’ of the system is binary; since each ‘word’ is made of six ‘letters’ arranged vertically, the number of possible ‘words’ is 2⁶ = 64. For a more detailed reading, each hexagram can be considered as an ordered pair of trigrams, and each line can take on more specific meaning in its context. To consult this oracle is to first pose a question about a given situation, and then determine which of the 64 hexagrams answers the question when applied to the situation. The determination process bypasses conscious control by introducing a random element (or, as some would prefer to say, by allowing divine or cosmic forces to determine the result).

The fact that the sign obtained can be read as relevant to the question (to any well-formed question) implies that the code ‘carves’ the universe of possible situations into 64 types. Since 64 is a very small number of pieces to carve the whole world into, we could refer to them as archetypes. Any of these archetypal situations could be actualized (or replicated, as Peirce might say) in an indefinitely large number of specific instances, and an archetype can be read into almost any situation. By focussing on one archetype and crossing it with the actual situation indicated by the question, we can derive a pragmatically useful comment on the situation in ordinary (and vague) language, perhaps with some help from the Chinese text of the I Ching. The advantage of this for the questioner is that it brings a new perspective to the problem that she could not have anticipated, but which is guaranteed relevant by the ubiquity of the 64 archetypal situations. There is no need to posit anything mysterious or supernatural going on here, though it may help the reader of the oracle to take it as a revelation, just as it may help the reader of any text to believe that it communicates the intention of its author.

The same technique of carving up the universe of discourse into a relatively small number of archetypal parts also operates in astrology with its signs of the zodiac, the Tarot deck with its correspondences to the ‘paths’ of the Kabbalistic ‘Tree of Life,’ and so on. In each case, the ability to read highly generic forms into complicated matters – or to lift the archetypal out of the mundane – can induce a feeling of equanimity while simplifying the decision-making process. Of course the results are not testable in the scientific sense, because one’s personal intentions are inseparable from the ‘experimental’ situation. And of course these methods can be abused; but then so can more “scientific” methods.

In this context, let’s try a reading of the Heraclitus fragment: ‘the lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs.’ For the Delphic oracle to ‘speak’ could mean that it offers a statement at the level of articulation which is normal for natural human languages. To ‘conceal’ could be to intend a statement at that level of articulation, but to encrypt it into a code which only the priest can decode back into human language. But Heraclitus says that the ‘lord’ does neither of these things, but rather produces a sign (whose meaning is highly indeterminate). Any interpretation or ‘translation’ of that sign into more precise language clarifies its pragmatic meaning, but loses the vagueness which makes the oracular language archetypal. Consequently a vast number of more or less valid statements can be generated by the interpretive process.

Heraclitus was and is famous for the seemingly cryptic quality of his own statements, an effect enhanced by the fragmentary nature of his works as we now have them. His intent in the fragment quoted above may have been ‘to justify his own oracular and obscure style’ (Kirk and Raven 1957, 212). But this style is common to many scriptural texts, such as the Tao Te Ching or the Gospel of Thomas; the seedlike quality that renders them inexhaustible is precisely their vagueness.

The Tao is elusive and intangible.
Oh, it is intangible and elusive, and yet within is image.
Oh, it is intangible and elusive, and yet within is form.
Oh, it is dim and dark, and yet within is essence.

— Tao Te Ching 21 (Feng/English)

The word code is itself a coded symbol, subject to polyversion, which means open to misunderstanding. If the word could only mean a cipher or other mechanistically-operating device, it would be nonsense to assert that all messages are coded, as Bateson did. If we want to understand this usage, then, we need to look deeper into the niche occupied by the word in the meaning space represented by Bateson’s text.

Avoiding simplistic notions of ‘code’ turns out to be important in other contexts as well; but writers who point this out often omit mention of more cogent usages, and thus appear to be rejecting any and all use of the term. For example, Fauconnier and Turner (2002, 360) refer to the ‘falsity of the general view that conceptual structure is “encoded” by the speaker into a linguistic structure, and that the linguistic structure is “decoded” by the hearer back into a conceptual structure. An expression provides only sparse and efficient prompts for constructing a conceptual structure.’

The authors object to calling the ‘constructing’ process a ‘decoding’ process if (or because) it would imply that the actual (felt) meaning of a properly decoded message is the same as the speaker’s felt meaning that was coded in the message. But the determination of a meaning, or an interpretant, is not reversible; there is no “decoding” of a sign into the object or the prior sign that determined it; interpreting is another determination process. Yet there has to be some connection between the speaker’s experience and the hearer’s; to deny this is to deny that communication is possible, which is hardly a useful assumption. Fauconnier and Turner assume that such a connection exists in their very next sentence: ‘The problem, then, is to find the relations between formally integrated linguistic structure on the one hand and conceptually integrated structures built by the speaker or retrieved by the hearer on the other.’ In speaking of conceptual structures ‘retrieved’ by the hearer, the authors clearly imply a link between speaker’s meaning and hearer’s meaning.

One way of expressing the link is to use a container metaphor: the concept is in some sense taken out of (or retrieved from) the message by the hearer. But we have no way to place experiences or conceptual structures side by side and see how well they match, because neither party in the exchange (nor any third party) has access to those concepts, except through the medium of the expression. This seems to be the point made by Fauconnier and Turner – but it also seems to be the point encapsulated in Bateson’s statement that all messages are coded. The objection raised by Fauconnier and Turner is a useful caveat for users of words in the code family, not a valid reason for avoiding those terms altogether.

Edelman and Tononi (2000, pp. 93-94) raise a similar objection to the use of “code” terminology, referring not to linguistic processes but to those of memory “storage” and “retrieval.”

The problem the brain confronts is that signals from the world do not generally represent a coded input. Instead, they are potentially ambiguous, are context-dependent, and are not necessarily adorned by prior judgement of their significance.

Again, the point here in saying that input to the brain is generally not coded is essentially the same point Bateson raised by saying that it is coded: namely that actual meaning is constructed by the brain and only mediately determined by ‘input’ from the external world. Edelman and Tononi are objecting to the misconception that such ‘input’ is represented in or by the brain as stored information in such a way that the input could be restored or retrieved from the brain or its processes. And again, they are not denying a connection between what happens in the world and what happens in the brain, only that the former could be reconstructed from the latter, or that anyone could be in a position to judge the accuracy of the “reconstruction.” Yes, the terms code and representation can be misleading – if the reader fails to decode them appropriately! But if we try to avoid all terms which can be misleading, we will soon have to give up all attempts at communication.

Confusion of “code” with cipher also causes problems in discourse about the ‘genetic code.’

In fact, the image of genes ‘coding for’ physical features is often quite misleading. Rather, genes code for possible physical features, in ways that depend heavily on a variety of environmental factors which affect their expression.

— Clark (1997, 93)

(See Marcus 2004 for a fuller explanation.) Here the reading of the ‘coded’ message is a recursive process taking place in an environment (the body) which is itself under development. Each gene may specify a chain of amino acids, which then fold into a protein, and so on … but by the time the ‘meaning’ of the genome is fully expressed (decoded), there is generally no way to trace a specific bodily or behavioral feature back to a single gene. And needless to say, none of the coding or decoding involved here is done consciously.

Our highly developed and highly discriminating abilities to think about situations that we are not observing are developments of powers that we share with other animals. But, at the same time, one must not make the mistake of supposing that language is merely a “code” that we use to transcribe thoughts we could perfectly well have without the “code”. This is a mistake, not only because the simplest thought is altered (e.g., rendered far more determinate) by being expressed in language but because language alters the range of experiences we can have. But the fact remains that our power of imagining, remembering, expecting what is not the case here and now is a part of our nature.

— Putnam 1999, 48

Is the body language or vocal expression of, say, a wolf or a chimpanzee symbolic? It’s part of an instinctive habit-system, but its ‘terms’ have very little capacity for growth in either breadth or depth. Nor can they be combined, in the way that symbols can, to make reference more specific or more general. Wolves can talk (and listen) to us, but are not in the habit of talking about us in our absence, in the way that we are now talking about wolves.

From the human side, Farley Mowat communicated with wolves by pissing around his territory. But could he say anything to them about, say, astronomy? As a member of a symbolic species, he could even talk about things and situations that don’t exist, and about whether they could or should exist (modality). Whether this actually raises the level of conversation is debatable – but only in symbols.

Polyversity is the kind of idea which everyone recognizes as common sense when it’s presented explicitly, yet which often fails to function implicitly when attention is turned elsewhere. But that’s because we can’t attend to the sign and its object at the same time: the sign is the medium through which we cognize or recognize the object. You can’t carry a ladder while you climb it, or think about signs while you read them.

One consequence of polyversity is that, as the ancient sage put it, ‘the name that can be named is not the eternal name’ (Tao Te Ching 1). Differences arise between presence and representation.

The pit of a peach or cherry has nothing to do with the kind of pit you can dig with a shovel. We can say then that these are two different words with respect to denotation, although they are the same with respect to both spoken and written form. Thus we can pit one kind of difference against another. Likewise, something moving fast is in rapid motion, but something stuck fast is not moving at all. To quicken something is to bring it to life, and thus make it ‘quicker,’ but to fasten something is to immobilize it, not to make it ‘faster’. And then there’s the verb fast, which has yet another meaning, involving neither movement nor the lack of it.

Since the number of one-syllable sounds distinguishable in English (or any language) is finite, it is predictable that as the language develops, one sound will accidentally get attached to two or more different concepts. Then we have two words that happen to sound exactly the same: homonyms, as they are called in linguistics. Homonymy is different from polysemy, in which one word can have many ‘senses’ or ‘meanings’; yet ‘there is an extensive grey area between the concepts’ (McArthur 1992, 795).