Gregg,

Very interesting. When you describe biosemiotics, I can't help but think that it sounds similar to what Jung was trying to describe with his archetypes and collective unconscious. Is that a fair comparison?

~ Jason Bessey

On Saturday, May 11, 2019, 10:11:24 AM EDT, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi TOK List,

 

  I spent yesterday afternoon reading an interesting book, Michael Gazzaniga’s The Consciousness Instinct. For those who don’t know, Michael Gazzaniga is a famous cognitive neuroscientist. He worked with Roger Sperry on split brain patients and is famous for his “interpreter function” of the left hemisphere. I discuss an early book of his here.

 

  I was finding his newest book interesting, but a bit tedious as the first half is essentially a review of ideas about consciousness, such that I did not learn much. But it took a fascinating turn in chapter 7, which was on the physics concept of complementarity (wave particle duality and observer/observed entanglement) and accelerated in an interesting way in the next chapter on “Nonliving to Living and Neurons to Mind”. He reviews the work of Howard Pattee, who is a retired theoretical physicist turned biologist who pioneered work on biosemiotics and what he called the “epistemic cut.” This refers to the “unavoidable conceptual separation of the knower and the known” or the difference between “the symbolic record of an event and the event itself”. Attached is the page from Gazzaniga’s book that describes it. Here is another description of the epistemic cut, also called “the schnitt”. I had never heard of the term before, but I am very happy to learn of it.

 

  Here is the basics of what Gazzaniga ends up offering, which I think we can make clear with the ToK: Via complementarity and diving into a basic understanding of quantum mechanics following the work of Pattee, Gazzaniga highlights that there is an object/subject duality everywhere. At the level of the quantum, there is the problem of entanglement and superposition. At the level of Life, it refers to how cells operate based on semiotics (i.e., are information processing and communication systems). For some good quotes on how Pattee views the world, see here:  http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/pattee/. Here is a choice one:

 

It is my central idea that the essence of the matter-symbol problem and the measurement or recording problem must appear at the origin of living matter. Symbols and records have existed since life existed. If this view is correct, then it is a more hopeful strategy to begin by asking what we mean by the first primitive record rather than question what we mean by our most sophisticated and abstract records. In effect, this strategy forces us to make an objective criterion for a recording process.

 

Why am I excited about this? A couple of reasons. First, given the connections between Gazzaniga’s Interpreter and JUST, especially the JH, he is headed toward a conception of human self-consciousness that lines up directly with the ToK version. But what he is doing is going deep, through neuro-mental objective/subjective sentience, into the layer of the cell, and into quantum mechanics (much like John Torday does). By following Gazzaniga’s line of thought (following Pattee), I can see clearly that what he is advocating for connects deeply to two of the things the ToK System does, that other systems of knowledge do not.

 

  First, unlike all other systems, the ToK INCLUDES the human knower-known epistemic cut. That is, it includes what I call the “H” Factor, which is the Human Knower. The most direct way it achieves this is because of the Justification Hypothesis and systems theory. (Please note here that a theory of knowledge, epistemology, and a theory of justification are almost identical. Via JUST placed on the ToK, I can place the evolution of social into formal into scientific epistemology in context of the universe—see slide two).

 

  Second, the ToK also includes a very specifiable relationship between information/communication/semiotics and the natural, Newtonian, lawfully determined world. That is, it frames and describes the relationship between energy, matter, information, and scientific knowledge in a way that no other system does.

 

  See the attached ToK diagram (slide 1), which places the word “semiotics” at the joint points, because that is another way of conceiving the joint point. That is, Life is Bio-semiotics, Mind is neuro-semiotics, Culture is Language-Semiotics. And then there is the semiotics of scientific knowledge. Enlightenment 1.0 was based in an inert, general, view-from-nowhere knower that could simply observe the fully, lawfully determined behavior that was completely reversable across time. However, this is NOT how the actual world works. The actual world of scientific knowledge embedded in the universe requires clarity about the nature and place of the epistemic cut. The ToK shows us how to do that. It shows us where the Science Human Knower is in the universe of behavior (the “H” factor), and it shows were the observer/observed relations are, from the quantum to the living to the mental to the cultural and to the meta-Cultural knower.  Indeed, the bottom lists “quantum semiotics” as a way to note that physicists had to develop a completely different language system to talk about the science of quantum mechanics (what Alexander calls quantum organics).

 

  My pitch is that with the ToK (Unified Metaphysical Empirical Language) System we finally have a truly holistic picture of the knower/known relationship across the various levels and dimensions of complexity. Thus, we can bridge the epistemic cut and achieve greater clarity on the deepest conceptual problems that have plagued scientists and philosophers since formal epistemologies emerged on the scene in the Axial Age.

Best,
Gregg

 

 

############################

To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1

############################

To unsubscribe from the TOK-SOCIETY-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: http://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=TOK-SOCIETY-L&A=1