[Fis] "Percepts" and self-reference and meaning - [chaotic issues]

Sat Jan 25 18:03:16 CET 2025

Dear Pedro,
I would like to speak to your question again.
You ask about the nature of the subject/person (in the LoF dialogue and/or beyond that discussion).
Certainly that book and our discussions in language presuppose a subject like us who can read and reason and make distinctions as we make them. 

We also look out on our worlds and see other makers of distinctions in a wider sense of the term - Bacteria, Eukaryotes, Multicellulars, Mammals and their Central Nervous System,  and so on. And we are always looking at these through our own eyes, and thinking about the autonomy of such subjects. Indeed we think about and work with and live in our world recognizing the autonomy of other human subjects.

And we know that our language is a communal construction.

Yet we each, perhaps as a construction of that language, adhere to the notion of a personal subject.

So the nature of “personal subject” is something that we can each explore and possibly communally via language and community.

In the book LoF and in the literature of cybernetics there is talk of the “observer”, as though we knew what this meant.
We do not know.
And not knowing, we can regard this notion as subject (sic) for research.
To ask about the nature of the observer is the same (I suggest) as to ask about the nature of distinction.
Best,
Lou

> On Jan 23, 2025, at 1:30 PM, Pedro C. Marijuán <pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Lou and FIS Colleagues,
> 
> Let me ask you just a couple of questions on the subject implicit in your distinction scheme. I assume it is human, an enlightened logician. And this person makes use of an unfettered system of perception --jumping then from percepts to concepts, as you say, and achieving a higher state of consciousness and problem solving via emptiness and the Heart Sutra. Right? No thought collective instances are intervening or involved, at least directly. And no ostensible limitations are precluding advancement of thought...   And about other possible 'distinctional' subjects, i.e. non-human subjects --Bacteria? Eukaryotes? Multicellulars? Mammals and their Central Nervous System?
> 
> One could state, too succinctly, that any of these living entities have adapted to their niche by abducing or intercepting ad hoc information flows, which in the basis become sort of molecular-recognition distinctions that are processed in successive steps and finally elaborated into meanings that adaptively change the ongoing behavior and selfproduction processes. So... it is about surviving via the information flows adaptively catched from the niche, which in the human case is a social niche.  
> 
> Further, we humans have developed an amazing knowledge system of several thousand disciplines, where distinctions pile up on distinctions, assembled into theoretical constructs, experimental methods and multifarious approaches. The actual ways and means to move within that gigantic tangle have been pragmatism, traditions, and bureaucracy. Lots of the latter as we know well from the institutions in charge of knowledge handling. Right. But nowadays we have a new invitee to the chaotic "Fiesta of Knowledge": AI. 
> 
> In what extent this new invitee will get free of the most conspicuous knowledge limitations of our individual minds? What kind of information flows will enter into its gut and what kind of new 'meanings' will be produced? Unfortunately, almost nobody is interested in the nuclear matter that has forced us into a Babel of spattering disciplines, into unending explanatory/'translatory' exchanges: our entrenched cognizing limitations. We prefer, and take refuge into, the security of the well-framed 'microscope'. 
> 
> I assume this at the other extreme of logical underpinnings, sorry, but in my eyes it has some relation...
> 
> Best--Pedro
> 
> El 20/01/2025 a las 8:46, Louis Kauffman escribió:
>> Dear Jason,
>> I have already answered this in some other ways, but lets try again.
>> 
>> Diagrams
>> (a) A diagram is not particularly static. It could be a movie or an injunction to make a movie.
>> It could be a dance or a ritual, a temple or a war.
>> 
>> That is how you might view the diagrams about topology of DNA recombination.
>> And it is in that mode that diagrammatic work and the possibility of creating a diagram from the “microword” by electron microscopy, led to the understandings about 
>> Knotted DNA and topological enzymes. These in turn have had an effect at some medical levels since if your topo enzymes do not work, your cells cannot divide and you die.
>> 
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.excedr.com/resources/topoisomerase-overview*:*:text=In*20pharmaceuticals*2C*20topoisomerases*20are*20used,anticancer*20therapeutics*20other*20than*20chemotherapy__;I34lJSUlJSUlJSU!!D9dNQwwGXtA!SX2W0ZTBn1BupyIlwWOW7kWPyXuBBrjTEALBjXa3OdR0fCzMtb_4agmc2rHsItLeZUs15HbylQAneGaS$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.excedr.com/resources/topoisomerase-overview*:*:text=In*20pharmaceuticals*2C*20topoisomerases*20are*20used,anticancer*20therapeutics*20other*20than*20chemotherapy__;I34lJSUlJSUlJSU!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VN3_KOI3NVnHHrQCUBhk-CmKe_3eXVjVC6CDnsTgT_aqTDe_YRSaOTbYTVnZXUUn-RfO2h_ygvadEF65$>.
>> 
>> So here you have a real example of how diagrammatic topological mathematics is closely allied with applications that can save lives.
>> 
>> (b) For the design of quantum algorithms and all things quantum field theoretic we use diagrams quite intensively.
>> The same is true for working out the reactions that lead to the bomb. So diagrams can also be used to kill en masse, as can all of language.
>> 
>> (c) Written language is a work of diagrams. Those little characters you string together are stylized diagrams, rather static by themselves. And if you live in China or Japan your 
>> Language is an incredible pastiche of diagrams.
>> 
>> (d) Actually all of mathematics is a pastiche of diagrams for all sorts of conceptual and calculational purposes.
>> 
>> (e) I refer you to C.S. Peirce for the role of diagrams and signs in thought.
>> 
>> (f) The greatest masters of diagrams in Cybernetics were Strafford Beer and Humberto Maturana. Perhaps you see some value in their work.
>> 
>> (f) The GUI that began with Mac and infiltrated PC is the 
>> diagrams of finitely nested boxes 
>> that are the basis of the distinctions and indications of LOF.
>> LOF is about distinctions and indications. 
>> Its diagrams are just a particular representation of that. 
>> Mac uses these diagrams and never had to pay any royalties to GSB.
>> 
>> Religion
>> (g) The Heart Sutra explains clearly how to use the unmarked state (emptiness) to solve all human problems. 
>> That it has not been applied to this end is not the fault of either GSB or the Buddha.
>> 
>> (h) I am aware that no matter what I say, 
>> someone will complain 
>> about something 
>> that comes up for them 
>> when we get near to no-thing. 
>> That is the nature of it.
>> Believe it or not, 
>> I am not an advocate of the absolute binary distinction. 
>> It is in contrast to what cannot be said.
>> See the quote below that fell into my email from Malcolm Dean.
>> 
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://books.google.com/books?id=oI9hwgEACAAJ__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!SX2W0ZTBn1BupyIlwWOW7kWPyXuBBrjTEALBjXa3OdR0fCzMtb_4agmc2rHsItLeZUs15HbylUv1ic_x$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://books.google.com/books?id=oI9hwgEACAAJ__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VN3_KOI3NVnHHrQCUBhk-CmKe_3eXVjVC6CDnsTgT_aqTDe_YRSaOTbYTVnZXUUn-RfO2h_yggIa9BkE$>    GIF by Etienne Jacob <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://bleuje.com/mp4set/2019/2019_25.mp4__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VN3_KOI3NVnHHrQCUBhk-CmKe_3eXVjVC6CDnsTgT_aqTDe_YRSaOTbYTVnZXUUn-RfO2h_ygkOzwPOE$> used to illustrate Bits forming an Information process.
>> 
>> "The tentative and non-black-and-white nature of categorization is inevitable, and yet the act of categorization often feels perfectly definite and absolute to the categorizer, since many of our most familiar categories seem on first glance to have precise and sharp boundaries, and this naïve impression is encouraged by the fact that people’s everyday, run-of-the mill use of words is seldom questioned; in fact, every culture constantly, although tacitly, reinforces the impression that words are simply automatic labels that come naturally to mind and that belong intrinsically to things and entities. If a category has fringe members, they are made to seem extremely quirky and unnatural, suggesting that nature is really cut precisely at the joints by the categories that we know. The resulting illusory sense of the near-perfect certainty and clarity of categories gives rise to much confusion about categories and the mental processes that underlie categorization. The idea that category membership always comes in shades of gray rather than in just black and white runs strongly against ancient cultural conventionsand is therefore disorienting and even disturbing; accordingly, it gets swept under the rug most of the time." 
>> 
>> (i) Oh, and what did you think Hofstader was about?
>> Did you think that he was bragging about the clarity and perfection of logic? 
>> He was telling you the story of how logic in the hands of human understanding
>> slayed the Jabberwock of the completeness of formality.
>> Don’t worry. You are not the only one who did not listen.
>> We sell you fake word makers to do your job.
>> And in the year of our T, you can buy cryptocurrency, watches and bibles  from your leader.
>> 
>> "It was one of those pictures <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VN3_KOI3NVnHHrQCUBhk-CmKe_3eXVjVC6CDnsTgT_aqTDe_YRSaOTbYTVnZXUUn-RfO2h_yglukToEj$> which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move."
>> 
>> Best,
>> Lou
>> 
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