[Fis] Life goes on--Cellular Imperative

[Pedro C. Marijuan]

Dear FIS Colleages,

Another way to explore the problematic outskirts of language could be by 
examining the vital necessities any individual has along his/her 
developmental process and look at the way specific processes of 
communication are instantiated around them. No doubt that an enormous 
percentage of those necessities are fulfilled thanks to cooperation with 
other individuals via communication. From babies and toddlers to 
youngsters and adults. As the life cycle advances, communication gets 
more sophisticate and the linguistic tools achieve a growing preeminence 
(storytelling). But the idea is that both in the prelinguistic stage and 
in the linguistic stage we find the "invisible hand" of the life cycle, 
with all its imperatives, governing our exchanges. And that imperative 
along the life course of the individual, taking a multifarious aspect of 
emotions, feelings, drives, predispositions, propensities, etc.,  
appears as a consequence of our being cellular, of the very "cellular 
imperative" that governs the communication processes of every living 
cell. Maintenance (homeostasis), reproduction, and communication with 
the environment integrate a  functional whole that transpires along the 
further dimensions of complexity evolved (see Damasio 2018, as a very 
recent instance, although more interesting authors could be cited)... It 
is in this context where a new approach to biological information and 
intelligence may take shape. Both have to be referred necessarily to Mr. 
life cycle. Otherwise, they will appear as ungrounded and arbitrary (we 
see it in plenty of fields)..

Putting it in a different way (less stringent, more relaxed): parts of 
biology, neuroscience, philosophy and humanities may be aligned under 
the inspiration of information science and may provide a vantage point 
of view not only on info & intelligence but also on knowledge, data, 
integration,  stories, social cohesion, etc. In the past messages I have 
been praising Booker's work (2005) as a valuable step ahead. If anyone 
googles about him, he appears quite idiosyncratic about contemporary 
"taboos" in science and in politics, but I do not think this strangeness 
invalidates his literary criticisms and his penetrating analysis of 
storytelling as a fundamental of social life. Of course it is not an 
easy "informational" connection. In order for us scientists to approach 
the humanities' views we have to walk more than the cautionary "extra 
mile" so to shake hands with them. Interspersed along Booker's really 
long book --in the order of 300,000 words, he spent 30 years working on 
it-- there are plenty of abstractions that can be extrapolated towards 
the universe of communication that our lives demand--that whatever kind 
of life demands. Could we try to put together some of those elements 
along the ongoing fis discussion?

All the best
--Pedro

El 16/10/2018 a las 0:20, Dai Griffiths escribió:
>
> Hi Pedro, and list
>
> > 'Narratives all the way down' would find an obvious, inevitable 
> block with the origins of human language.
>
> Fair point.
>
> The regression I was pointing at is in our explanations. I would be 
> happy to say "It's narratives all the way down within the domain of 
> language and other formal systems". It is within that domain that I 
> worry about distinguishing narrative (as opposed to non-narrative), 
> because the domain seems to me to be composed of narrative.
>
> When we step outside language, we are indeed confronted by a 'huh', or 
> perhaps by an 'om'. This can be an enlightening place to visit, but 
> the sages have cautioned us against trying to describe that place in 
> the narrative of language. Of course, that won't stop us trying on 
> this list...
>
> Dai
>
>
> On 11/10/18 13:34, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:
>> Dear Dai and List,
>>
>> Thanks for the question. Looking for the ground of a narrative, we 
>> would find something else than other narratives. In the ground, 
>> similarly playing an important role, we may find basic necessities, 
>> instinctive reactions, emotions, feelings, fundamental social roles, 
>> etc. They belong to the genetic, epigenetic and to the developmental 
>> learning, often acting in our minds via the unconscious. This basic 
>> stuff of "human nature" is intensely intertwined with narratives, 
>> where it plays, in my view (and Booker's), the generative role. 
>> 'Narratives all the way down' would find an obvious, inevitable block 
>> with the origins of human language. During maybe 800.000 years or so 
>> 'protonarratives' were almost restricted to guttural sounds 
>> ("huh"style, which continues to be the most spoken "word"--Enfield 
>> 2017). In any case, the problem to subsume narratives within any 
>> single psycho-cognitive school, Gestalt in this case or Jungian in 
>> Booker's, is that we do not capture them quite appropriately within 
>> the single perspective. I referred to evolutionary psychology and 
>> social psychology as the most adequate frames to utilize--paying 
>> additional attention to other approaches from the formal sciences 
>> (i.e., the Borromean model?). I was amazed to see, under his own 
>> Jungian words, that Booker was focusing into a generative "triadic 
>> scheme" and the general "rule of three" among other intriguing 
>> interactive dynamics. But we go far beyond the present discussion...
>>
>> Nice comment on narratives in the mental concoction of time. I quite 
>> agree. Perhaps it deeply dovetails with Karl's combinatoric 
>> cyclicity, and with the "elusive concept of information" from 
>> Krassimir, implying the entangling of different kinds of narratives, 
>> among which we agree we must restrict ourselves to those fulfilling a 
>> series of rigorous conditions--the different sciences explicitly 
>> approaching information. With the necessity of carefully selecting 
>> the fundamental ones as Xueshan has argued. We are limited!
>>
>> About the grounding of narratives, there is a great sentence in 
>> Faust: "Im Anfang war die Tat". "In the beginning was the deed."
>>
>> Greetings to all
>> --Pedro
>>
-- 
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group

pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------


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