Category: Content and Context

rePatch ·15

Conscycles

And they leap so looply, looply, as they link to light.

— Finnegans Wake 226

Symbols (and even natural or non-symbolic dicisigns as self-representing signs) are the semiotic equivalent, or mental manifestation, of the brain processes that appear as consciousness. This self-representation is a feedforward-feedback cycle like the meaning cycle. Thomas Metzinger explains:

In conscious visual processing, for example, high-level information is dynamically mapped back to low-level information, but it all refers to the same retinal image. Each time your eyes land on a scene (remember, your eye makes about three saccades per second), there is a feedforward-feedback cycle about the current image, and that cycle gives you the detailed conscious percept of that scene. You continuously make conscious snapshots of the world via these feedforward-feedback cycles. In a more general sense, the principle is that the almost continuous feedback-loops from higher to lower areas create an ongoing cycle, a circular nested flow of information, in which what happened a few milliseconds ago is dynamically mapped back to what is coming in right now. In this way, the immediate past continuously creates a context for the present— it filters what can be experienced right now. We see how an old philosophical idea is refined and spelled out by modern neuroscience on the nuts-and-bolts level. A standing context-loop is created. And this may be a deeper insight into the essence of the world-creating function of conscious experience: Conscious information seems to be integrated and unified precisely because the underlying physical process is mapped back onto itself and becomes its own context. If we apply this idea not to single representations, such as the visual experience of an apple in your hand, but to the brain’s unified portrait of the world as a whole, then the dynamic flow of conscious experience appears as the result of a continuous large-scale application of the brain’s prior knowledge to the current situation. If you are conscious, the overall process of perceiving, learning, and living creates a context for itself— and that is how your reality turns into a lived reality.

— Metzinger 2009, 31-32

Wild wide web

The semiotic point of view is the perspective that results from the sustained attempt to live reflectively with and follow out the consequences of one simple realization: the whole of our experience, from its most primitive origins in sensation to its most refined achievements of understanding, is a network or web of sign relations.

— John Deely (1990, Chapter 2)

The knights who know knit

In the marvelous thirteenth-century legend called La Queste del Saint Graal, it is told that when the Knights of the Round Table set forth, each on his own steed, in quest of the Holy Grail, they departed separately from the castle of King Arthur. “And now each one,” we are told, “went the way upon which he had decided, and they set out into the forest at one point and another, there where they saw it to be thickest” (la ou il la voient plus espesse); so that each, entering of his own volition, leaving behind the known good company and table of Arthur’s towered court, would experience the unknown pathless forest in his own heroic way.

— Joseph Campbell (1968), 36

But by writing thithaways end to end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down, the old semetomyplace and jupetbackagain from Ham Let Rise till Hum Lit Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?

— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 90-1

Wild goose chase: 2. fig. An erratic course taken or led by one person (or thing) and followed (or that may be followed) by another (or taken by a person in following his own inclinations or impulses); in later use (the origin being forgotten) apprehended as ‘a pursuit of something as unlikely to be caught as the wild goose’ (Johnson); a foolish, fruitless or hopeless quest.

— Oxford English Dictionary

The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing? I surrender to the belief that my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits the entire biosphere or creation.

— Gregory Bateson (1979, 98)

Awakening symbols

Is it possible for one person to be “enlightened” separately from others? We might ask the same question about a single symbol.

Is it possible that one single symbol could be awakened in isolation from all others? Probably not. Just as objects in the world always exist in a context of other objects, so symbols are always connected to a network of other symbols. This does not necessarily mean that symbols can never be disentangled from each other. To make a rather simple analogy, males and females always arise in a species together: their roles are completely intertwined, and yet this does not mean that a male cannot be distinguished from a female. Each is reflected in the other, as the beads in Indra’s net reflect each other.…

The fact that a symbol cannot be awakened in isolation does not diminish the separate identity of the symbol; in fact, quite to the contrary: a symbol’s identity lies precisely in its ways of being connected (via potential triggering links) to other symbols. The network by which symbols can potentially trigger each other constitutes the brain’s working model of the real universe, as well as of the alternate universes which it considers (and which are every bit as important for the individual’s survival in the real world as the real world is).

— Hofstadter (1980, 359-60)

On this page, Hofstadter is referring to the instantiation of symbols in the brain, perhaps as ‘a neural network plus a mode of excitation.’ But what he says here is consistent with the concept of ‘symbol system’ in Turning Signs, with Peirce’s use of the word ‘symbol,’ and with his remarks about the ‘perfect sign.’

Gebrauch in der Sprache

For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

— Wittgenstein (PI I.43)

What a word means also depends on where and when you use it. ‘Queen Anne’s Lace’ is one of several popular names for the common weed Daucus Carota – in North America. In England, ‘Queen Anne’s Lace’ is the name of an entirely different plant, Anthriscus sylvestris (Heiser 2003, 44).

Meaning

Nothing is meaningful in itself. Meaningfulness derives from the experience of functioning as a being of a certain sort in an environment of a certain sort.

— Lakoff (1987, 292)

Meaning is something signs do—not something found at the end of the rainbow. And being signs ourselves, we do it all the time, whether we mean to or not.

Universe

The universe is the only text without a context. Every particular mode of being is universe-referent, and its meaning is established only within this comprehensive setting. This is why this story of the universe, and especially of the planet Earth, is so important. Through our understanding of this story, our own role in the story is revealed. In this revelation lies our way into the future.

— Thomas Berry (2006, 23)

Cognation

Do you read me? Then you have to believe that your experience is cognate with mine. Co-gnatus, ‘born together’ (or ‘descended from the same ancestor’), derives from the Latin verb gigno (earlier geno), meaning ‘beget’ or ‘bring forth’. Its root forms -gn-, -gen- and-gon- have begotten the stems of many English words, along with its complement verb nascor (‘to be born’), through its participial form natus (or gnatus), source of English words such as nature and native.