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Peircean cosmogony's symbolic agapistic self-organization as an example of the influence of eastern philosophy on western thinking

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Charles S. Peirce developed a process philosophy featuring a non-theistic agapistic evolution from nothingness. It is an Eastern inspired alternative to the Western mechanical ontology of classical science also by the American transcendentalists. Advaitism and Buddhism are the two most important Eastern philosophical traditions that encompass scientific knowledge and the idea of spontaneous evolutionary development. This article attempts to show how Peirce's non-mechanical triadic semiotic process theory can embrace the quantum field view better than the mechanical and information views in a theory of the emergence of consciousness. Peirce views the universe as a reasoning process developing from pure potentiality to the fully ordered rational Summon Bonum. The paper compares this with John Archibald Wheeler's "It from bit" cosmogony based on quantum information science, which leads to the info-computational view of nature, mind and culture. However, it is missing a phenomenological foundation. David Chalmers' double aspect interpretation of information attempts to overcome the limitations of the info-computational view. Chalmers supplements Batesonian and Wheelerian info-computationalism -both missing a phenomenological aspect - with a dimension that corresponds to the phenomenological aspect of reality. However, he does not manage to produce an integrated theory of the development of meaning and rationality. Alex Hankey's work goes some way towards establishing a theory that can satisfy Husserl's criteria for consciousness - such as a sense of being and time - but Hankey's dependence on Chalmers' theory does still is not able to provide what the connection between core consciousness and the physical world is.

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... Actually, Luhmann [22] in his autopoietic system theory also sees the social as communication. Peirce's triadic reasoning and dynamic ontology [29,35,36] and logic of relatives [37] goes far beyond what John Archibald Wheeler [38,39] and Wheeler & Ford [40] developed through the scientific based philosophy of "It from bit", where information in the form of bits or even qubits at the quantum level is the most fundamental level of reality (discussed in more detail in [41,42]). Ontologically, Wheeler's idea is that a quantum level existing below ordinary physical matter consists of information. ...
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A Naturphilosophie e a Freiheitsschrift de Schelling como proveniência do princípio fundamental do sinequismo de Peirce.
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ch. 13 in Carlos Vidales and Søren Brier (Eds.) CYBERSEMIOTICS: A TRANSDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE. Dordrecht: Springer (Biosemiotics 21), pp. 317-398. Preview (Abstract, Appendices and References) available on https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-52746-4_13 For the first two pages of the introduction see the upload in the entry just above! The aim of this chapter is to set out the basic coordinates of a cybersemiotic philology of Buddhist knowledge forms in order to further develop the non-anthropocentric dimensions and process-philosophical potential of both Buddhism and Peircean semiotics. This is also meant to lay the foundations for an interculturally and philologically enriched cybersemiotics. Proceeding from the logical conception of philosophical categories and their philological explication, the transdisciplinary model of a semiotic philology of thought forms (Lettner, diss. thesis, forthc.) develops an intercultural explication of “thought forms” with regard to the three interdependent pillars of philosophy (epistemological “knowledge forms”), philology (textualised “language forms”) and cultural studies (“life forms” as culture-related practices). In a first step, the reconstruction of paradigmatic modes of knowledge representation will be exemplified with regard to the approaches of Aristotelian philosophy, various positions of premodern Indian Buddhism as well as the paradigms of modern science and postclassical physics. In the second step of a cybersemiotic interpretation, Peirce’s synechistic understanding of habit will serve us to enlarge the culture-specific notion of life forms as pragmatically grounded thought forms by making it converge with the ethologically informed, biosemiotic notion of “life forms” embraced by cybersemiotics. Exploring cybersemiotics as developed by Brier (2008) from the perspective of Indian Buddhist philosophy intends to work out the phenomenological purport of Peirce’s approach, with its move of locating agency in the process of semiosis, by comparing it to the Buddhist psycho-ontological view of agency expressed in the fundamental principle of “dependent arising” (pratītyasamutpāda). In view of such synergies, we can bring the cybersemiotic interest in the unfolding of knowledge “from our bio-psycho-socio-linguistic conscious being” (Brier 2008) to bear upon the Buddhist notion of “no self” (anātman/ anattā). Thus, Kant’s transcendental subject, whose unity of apperception was dynamised by Peirce’s semiotic transformation of the categories, can now “go intercultural” by further desubstantialising signification in terms of a Buddhist cybersemiotics. Such a deconstruction of the supposed stability of “objects” and “concepts” as exemplified by the substance-philosophical belief in an ontological priority of “objects” will be accomplished in view of 1. the Buddhist explanation of unitary, stable objects existing “in name only” (prajñaptisat) with regard to “apperception” (saṁjñā) and the famous criticism of “conceptual construction” (kalpanā) by the epistemologist Dignāga (ca. 480–540) and 2. the cybersemiotic view of “objects and concepts as cognitive invariants” (Brier 2008) inspired by von Foerster’s second-order cybernetics and the creation of self-organised Umwelten (in the sense of Uexküll).
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A transdisciplinary theory of cognition and communication based on the process self-organizing and autopoietic system theory of Niklas Luhmann integrated with a triadic semiotic paradigm of experience and interpretation with phenomenological and hermeneutical aspects of C.S. Peirce, goes beyond info-computationalism in its integrating of phenomenological and hermeneutical aspects of Peircean semiotic logic with a cybernetic and autopoietic systemic emergentist process view. This makes the emergence of mind and transdisciplinary view of sciences possible.
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After Thomas Sebeok’s proposal of global semiotics in the 70s, an attempt to move beyond anthroposemiotics to the realm of zoosemiotics, phytosemiotics, endosemiotics, and, ultimately, to the all-encompassing realm of biosemiotics was made. Semiotics was then established as a serious candidate as the transdisciplinary base of science and humanities –particularly from the triadic and pragmaticist semiotic proposal of C. S. Peirce. However, the semiotic attempt to explain the fundamental aspects of living systems from the standpoint of meaning production and reproduction demonstrate that in order to explain the meaning-making process in living organisms a systemic, biological, cybernetic and informational approach was also needed. The integrative visions have discovered some basic similarities among these theoretical perspectives from which it has been possible to recognize complementarities among them. At the same time, it also made possible to identify variations at the very bottom of each approach, which resulted in a complex task of theoretical integration. Thus, in order to uncover these tensions and complementarities, I will focus my attention in the process of communication in an attempt to move from cybernetics to semiotics and further on to cybersemiotics considering some aspects of biosemiotics, first and second-order cybernetics, Peircean semiotics, and information theory. The goal of this chapter is to overcome the problem of defining the limits and boundaries of communication as a physical, biological, and social phenomena and its nature as an academic field by proposing communication as a transdisciplinary concept from the point of view of cybersemiotics (Vidales, Commun Soc 30:45–67, 2017b), from which it is also possible to address the process of communication, explained in what Brier (Cogn Semiotics 4:28–63, 2009) considers to be the levels of cybersemiotics, and the consequences it may have for the explanation of meaning-making processes in living systems.
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This text proposes a conceptual model to understand and study the communicative phenomenon. It does this by understanding communication as a phenomenon of life, so that it can be conceptualized as an expressive behavior that results in an expressive act within the framework of the theory of evolution, which makes the expression as a unit viable of primary observation of communication. Although it is based on a concept of communication slightly different from that assumed in the cybersemiotic program, we consider that the biophenomenological proposal of the communication presented here can serve as an articulation for the development of at least three of the arms proposed by Brier in his Star Cybersemiotics, so that it contributes to the development of this ambitious and necessary transdisciplinary program.
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The rise of science in the last 400 years, in the academy and in socio-economic life in the West, has culminated in a crisis in the human endeavor of ‘knowing’. Western policy makers have promoted the upgrading and uptake of science in the name of short-term economic goals by way of downgrading forms of ‘knowing’ that do not demonstrate immediate applicability to problems inherent in capitalism (Cobley P, Am J Semiotics, 30(3–4):205–228, 2014). Thus, pursuits such as those associated with the arts and humanities have been marginalized for their supposed failure to conform to standards of applicable knowledge, while mathematics and other ‘theoretical’ disciplines are increasingly yoked to the demands of producing new technologies. Partly in response to this crisis, the last two decades has seen the growth of a considerable amount of theorizing and a vibrant field concerned with ‘practice as research’ (PaR) or ‘practice-led research’. This field treats artistic practices as forms of ‘knowing’ which can complement, supplement, enrich and provide alternatives to scientific ‘knowing’ without being subordinate to it. Arising from early observations on reflective practice (Schön DA, The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. Basic Books, New York, 1984; Kemmis S, ‘Action research and the politics of reflection’ In: Boud DR. et al. (eds) Reflection: turning experience into learning. Falmer Press, Falmer: pp 139–163, 1985; Boud DR, et al. (eds) Reflection: turning experience into learning. Falmer Press, Falmer, 1985), work on PaR and practice-led research, has gone some way to establishing a more explicit understanding of practice in the arts and elsewhere as fixtures in the academy, through, for example, validating practice-based PhDs. To a great extent, the work in this area during the last 20 years – in relation to practice in general (Schatzki K-C, von Savigny E (Eds.) The practice turn in contemporary theory. London: Routledge, 2001; Borgdorff H, In Dutch J Music Ther, 12(1):1–17 (originally published in 2006 in the Sensuous Knowledge series, 02 [Bergen: Bergen National Academy of the Arts]), 2007; Smith H, Dean RT (eds) Practice-led research, research-led practice in the creative arts. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2009a; Barrett E, Bolt B (eds) Practice as research: Approaches to creative arts enquiry. I. B. Tauris, London/New York, 2007) and in relation to specific practices such as creative writing, performance, dance, experiment, community arts, etc. – exemplifies a philosophy of knowing. Yet, in doing so, this work struggles with various theoretical perspectives that have usually arisen out of traditional conceptions of disciplinary boundaries. Possibly the most sympathetic philosophy of knowing in relation to the cause of PaR and practice-led research – a perspective that is absent from the literature on the topic - is offered by cybersemiotics (Brier S, Cybersemiotics: Why information is not enough!. University of Toronto Press, Toronto/London, 2008; Brier S, Entropy 12: 1902–1920. https://doi.org/10.3390/e12081902, 2010). As cybersemiotics has long contended, the emphasis on knowing as an ‘engineering problem’, addressing a “syntactic-structural aspect in cognition, thought, and communication”, has led to “a decreased interest in the cultural-societal and historical dimensions of the meaning of human cognition and communication” rendering “the social sciences, humanities, and arts much less important in finding the processes of the construction of meaning than most researchers within these domains themselves believe” (Brier S, Cybersemiotics: Why information is not enough!. University of Toronto Press, Toronto/London, 2008, p. 56–57). Cybersemiotics proposes a thorough transdisciplinary approach to this problem, comprising a marriage of evolutionary perspectives on cognition and biology with a formulation on self-referring autopoietic observership derived from semiotics and second-order cybernetics. This paper introduces a cybersemiotic perspective on the capacity of arts and other practice for knowing, suggesting pathways for developing PaR and practice-led research, as well as reviewing the literature of this new configuration in cybersemiotic terms.
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Setting out to explore phenomenological affinities between Charles Sanders Peirce’s phaneroscopy and Abhidharma Buddhist theories of consciousness and perception, this paper draws upon synergies between semiotic methodology (“roots”) and Buddhist applications (“routes”) in the spirit of intercultural philosophy. A Peircean interpretation of Buddhism and, reciprocally, a Buddhist development of Peirce’s philosophy can build upon a deeply phenomenological stance in both cases. As with a pansemiotic universe of signs and relations, what matters about the physical world in Buddhism is its being cognised by a sentient being. However, rather than to construe an interpreting mind by means of a psychological subject, the Buddhist “scholastic” analysis of commonsense subjects and objects into minimal experiential events (dharmas) accords well with locating agency in the semiosic arising of consciousness moments.
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In order to self-critically investigate the methodological assumptions of semiotics, the present paper sets out to explore the Buddhist epistemological and soteriological ideal of signlessness. In keeping with the aims of a cybersemiotic philology of Buddhist knowledge forms (Lettner in Vidales and Brier, Intr. to Cybersemiotics, in press), I will argue that Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmaticist theory of thought-signs offers itself as a valuable approach for providing a semiotic reading of Buddhism as well as for developing Peircean methodology with regard to Indian Buddhist theories of consciousness and the cosmos. In a first step, I am going to offer a Peircean interpretation of “dependent arising” (Pāḷi paṭiccasamuppāda; Sanskrit pratītyasamutpāda) with regard to the semiosic genesis of karmically conditioned and psychophysically embodied “forms of consciousness” as modes of living embodiment: that is, “life forms”. In a second step, we are going to consider how the Buddhist path towards liberation achieves a transformation of consciousness precisely by going against the grain of conditioned causality, as the suffering implied by a potentially unlimited cycle of “becoming” (and semiosic activity!) gives way to signless awareness.
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Der Versuch Luhmanns operationalen Konstruktivismus mit einem an Peirce angelehnten und durch Karl Otto Apel erweiterten Pragmatismus in Einklang zu bringen. Dazu begibt sich ein Ausflug in Hegels "Ideenlehre" zwischen die Zeilen und hilft die Struktur der Einheit aus Luhmannschem Denken und einem Universalpragmatismus deutlicher zu machen und - vielleicht - erstmals zu weben.
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The current state of knowledge portrays either a reductionist view of consciousness, for ex. , the seat of consciousness is characterized as quantum gravity affects in microtubules (of the cytoskeleton) or a more recent viewpoint is that consciousness is the result of a large-scale integration of information in the brain. The reductionist theories of consciousness claim that subjective experience is physical in nature and governed by physical laws... In this volume we have assembled the best minds to forge un understanding on how it is possible that an objective brain produce subjective experience.
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What, exactly is Peirce's Extreme Scholastic Realism? Is it compatible with his pragmatism? And does it have any relevance today? Absolutely, Haack replies: Peirce's subtle realism throws a harsh light n the nominalism so prevalent in philosophy of science today.
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Compares Peirce's and Popper's epistemologies. Both claim to be fallibilists in e-search of the truth; Peirce's approach, Haack argues, is far superior. [Later Haack will conclude that Popper's epistemology is even worse than she earlier realized---a disguised form of skepticism. See "Just Say 'no" to Logical Negativism" (2013).
Conference Paper
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Charles S. Peirce's ambition was to ground and expand logic on a fundamentally new basis–a general theory of representation that he called semiotic–which could account for the continuous nature of thought and communication operating mediationally in human experience to generate knowledge. He was convinced, through his professional work as a scientist, that absolute accuracy is unattainable, and his pragmatism regards truth as a limit successively approached by increasingly refined investigations, which depend on communication among collaborating investigators. Peirce's theory has been recognized as a new philosophical perspective responding to (and reconciling the effects of) Cartesian dualism, materialism, and reductionism–the demand for an absolute foundation for knowledge that prevents us from explaining how communication is possible at all. The Existential Graphs are the key instrument in fulfilling his ambition.
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Conference Paper
Charles S. Peirce's ambition was to ground and expand logic on a fundamentally new basis–a general theory of representation that he called semiotic–which could account for the continuous nature of thought and communication operating mediationally in human experience to generate knowledge. He was convinced, through his professional work as a scientist, that absolute accuracy is unattainable, and his pragmatism regards truth as a limit successively approached by increasingly refined investigations, which depend on communication among collaborating investigators. Peirce's theory has been recognized as a new philosophical perspective responding to (and reconciling the effects of) Cartesian dualism, materialism, and reductionism–the demand for an absolute foundation for knowledge that prevents us from explaining how communication is possible at all. The Existential Graphs are the key instrument in fulfilling his ambition.
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Conscious behavior serves to optimize feelings, eg, Epicurean delight, “dopaminergic reward,” Freud's “pleasure principle,” spiritual bliss, and altruism (it feels better to give than to receive). However, Darwinian evolution is viewed as genetic survival, perhaps because science cannot yet account for feelings or consciousness (“qualia,” the “hard problem”). Sir Roger Penrose proposed mental properties including qualia accompany self-collapse of the quantum wave function by objective reduction (OR), a threshold in the structure of spacetime geometry. Such OR qualia would be occurring ubiquitously in random environments throughout the universe, but be noncognitive and merely protoconscious. The Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR theory suggests OR events in cytoskeletal microtubules within brain neurons are organized, or orchestrated by inputs, memory, and vibrational resonances, and terminate by orchestrated OR to give meaningful conscious moments. Supporting evidence for Orch OR includes (1) anesthetic gases act to erase consciousness in pi resonance quantum channels within microtubules, and (2) microtubules have quantum resonances coupled to mechanical vibrations, eg, in megahertz. On a grand scale, Orch OR implies life originated, and the brain evolved to orchestrate and optimize pleasurable protoconscious OR qualia present in the universe. It is suggested here that billions of years ago in the primordial soup, pi resonance clouds of dopamine-like amphipathic molecules coalesced within micelle-like precursors of biomolecules, organelles, and cells. In these quantum channels (collectively the quantum underground), quantum events were shielded from random, polar interactions, enabling more intense and pleasurable OR qualia. Pi stack geometry in micelles and biomolecules optimized OR qualia and precipitated life. Microtubules, and eventually the brain, evolved to orchestrate OR-mediated resonance, optimizing pleasure and its behavioral pursuits.
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Observing is a paradoxical operation: a duality as unity, and a distinction between distinguishing and indicating, that is, a distinction that is repeated in itself. One can speak of scientific observation only if such an operation of distinguishing- indication is achieved through concepts. If one observes observation one cannot avoid observing the paradox. When a second-order observer wants to know how the observed observer observes, it has to observe how the observed observer deals with its own paradox, how it de-paradoxizes the paradox. Even scientific communication is an actualization of the paradox of observation, and therefore it is in principle incapable of dealing with logic. A theory of scientific observation should then be concerned with how science has nevertheless managed. The point comes to be: who observes with the aid of the concept of communication, and how does it observe?
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