Outline of Natural Semantics; 20
Points
In an effort to strategize how
the meaning environment can be charted, how knowledge can be charted, how
a coordination strategy for knowledge can be tackled, how the “stuff” of
life seems different when wrapped in meaning rather than stripped of it
and how various aspects of society could be improved by accepting rampant
and ideals-eroding meaning, the following outline is proposed.
1.
Reality is better understood as a society composed of many societies
including the society of subject and object. By “society” is meant
not only the usual human societies but any thing, being or collection of
these.
2.
If I am a society and I accept you as a society,
then our differences
and our radical under-knowability
are assumed as given as we construct and discover our paired society and
seek to make it produce a pleasing economy in goods of our choice such as
joy, support, struggle, humor or learning. We are neither facts nor
subjects but builders in ever evolving societies.
3. The
usefulness of reality as a society of
societies results from:
1) its reversing the
simplicity priority of Western-derived philosophical
traditions to acknowledge the initial condition of multiplicity as well as
to acknowledge the accomplishment of culture to extract simplicity; 2) its
bridging mind-matter dualism by positing subjects and objects as
subject-object societies; and 3) its reconfiguring of many human
institutions such as communication, economics and psychology by valuating
indeterminate wholes rather than by endlessly chasing, arguing over and
getting lost in factors of determinacy.
4.
Knowledge is understood
here naturalistically as a behavior
or a probable behavior with another
(an adaptation to another or a regular alliance with another) as an action
with another that is only partially initiated and left as potential.
Meaning is the complete set of such relationships even where the
relationship is subconscious, only microscopic such as respiration or
delusional by any standard. Knowledge thus constellates a portion of
meaning awarely available for us to rearrange. Knowing anchors the
important growing tips of societies in their alliances. Knowing is a
constant creation and rearranging of relationships with other societies
that is characterized by relevance to knower, cooperative potentials of
known and strength of connection.
5.
The “society” of what has been called object
and subject
is the most salient society
from which to view the compact of mind and matter. Every object exists as
object by being embedded in a subject’s patterns of relevance. An object
is an adaptation into our relations, a domesticated partner, an agreement.
“It” is a society by its multiplicity of relatability.
6. Every
subject is grounded in the consuming, maintaining, opposing or
transforming alliances it keeps with objects. A subject is not nowhere
peering out at an external reality from some hypothetical god’s-eye-view
but instead is a finitely distributed and active pattern of relationships.
7.
The public space of our traditional
social life should be separated like meaning and knowledge into the
radical sum of all actual meaning in the environment and into the aware
space discovered and usable in public interaction. The names coined for
these are the lifescape and the conceptscape.
The conceptscape corresponds closely to culture with the only difference
being that the conceptscape is much more inclusive and includes not only
small subcultures but also even the “cultures” of individuals. The
lifescape, the web of all meaning of all creatures stands between the
aware sphere of the conceptscape and the sum of all possibilities, the
physical space. We can never leave the conceptscape but the lifescape can
grow into physical space and the conceptscape can grow into both.
8.
Validating both primary societies, lifescape and conceptscape,
provides a path to deal with the rampant contemporary complexity in both
spheres as well as a consistent mechanism to let larger, established
social groups set conceptual standards. These two “societies” of lifescape
and conceptscape have continually divided philosophies into religious
types that adjust to the territory’s (lifescape’s) vastness through
physical and emotional adjustment tactics or into ideal types that harness
conceptual logic into effectiveness. Not including the idiosyncratic
complexity of the lifescape leads to diverse estrangements of the heart
and unreformable dogmas. To use only the powerful conceptscape to view
into another human’s depths is to crash about crudely and dysfunctionally
while destroying the basis of sociality. On the other hand, not treating
the hard-won concepts of the methodological sciences and cultural heritage
groups as powerful clusters in their own rights leads to relativistic
dissipation. The validation that status societies give to concepts is
enough normative help to epistemology as well as the best we can ever hope
for given there are no external sources of validation.
9.
Contemporary complexity
is so all-reaching that the
use of fixed ideas has become unworkable. No traditional society has coped
with this degree of complexity. It is around us and also shown to be
within us. On the one hand the shared meaning (conceptscape) from a
researching and interconnecting world shows up as the remarkable
complexity from publishing and databases that themselves cannot even be
catalogued. The mental environment itself has become a deceptive and
inundated semantic minefield that includes: a graphics revolution, an
advertising avalanche, zillions of memes and the revolution in
communications technology. On the other hand the personal factors that
each of us has been dissected with and that we are invited to use (lifescape)
include an unfathomable list: socio-economic determinants, psychological
history, patterns hardwired into the body from the species history or
through development, hormonal chemistry, emotional bondings/IQs, the
incredible cognitive complexity of even simple thoughts such as the
identification of a chair as a chair, or the incredible amount of
potential perceptual information impinging subliminally on our senses.
Below all these the physical environment that we have constructed such as
our houses and electronics are more vast, more interconnected and thus
more susceptible to normal decay. “Can’t keep up” is the usual response.
10.
The conceptscape is contained in the
lifescape, the web of all meaning, which is contained in the universe of
possibilities. Always the
unity of the present forces multiplicity into
its reduction as possibilities are terminated. In the human sphere
awareness and action are the two primary reductions into the present; both
are possibilities realized. Life, in general, destroys complexity to
arrive at the present thereby creating new potentials and relationships.
Instead of “free will” life has taken a facsimile route of producing
complex determinants in complex societies (organisms) with an integration
mechanism to continually force the diversity into more unified action.
Living in a society, struggling and surrendering in a body, is to have
emotions, is to struggle and relax as the fit of one’s society into the
larger society of the environment changes; it is to move in rhythms rather
than to move with the conceptscape’s tempo of logic. The conceptscape is
the creation of a collective society of semantic societies where
complexity has been forged into shared relationships.
11.
Interlocking both primary
societies (of lifescape and conceptscape) shifts the focus of living from
the operational pushing of mechanical buttons towards appreciating and
adjusting social wholes. The first message of a social reality philosophy
is to be, know and sculpt your own society, or your own best mind. The
shift moves from compliance to joy, from doing
to being. What at first might seem like the awkwardness of coping with
so many societies will likely be the real promise of the global
village–using the richness of diversity as multiple and expanding avenues
to participatory joy. This subverts the modern day collision of cultures
from a hurdle of coping to an opportunity where each culture/society is a
source of being and a source of creating new hybrids of being.
12.
Interlocking both primary societies offers an expanded paradigm of communication that is not just the
basically assaultive shoving of
messages but is also the
larger frame of actually evolving contexts (local portions of the
lifescape), the movement and growth of various societies. We can huff and
puff with words/signs and information in the conceptscape’s pipelines of
messages but actual relations will evolve as they will. The two
“societies” are in interplay; to forget actual, rich contexts is to court
ideological bashing and withdrawal while to forget words/signs and message
content of the conceptscape is to remain babbling. If we meet and depart
in communicative encounters that presume diverse and incompletely knowable
personal societies, then there cannot be the “miscommunication” of the
conceptscape alone’s missed equivalences; there will always be personal
societies’ partially melded successes. In this view communication is the
same as action where a rupture from the complex moves into the singulars
of the conceptscape’s constructions. The difference to action is that
communication’s action is on the semantic web itself.
13. Interlocking
both primary societies subverts the economics focused
on the exchange of fixed
objects (conceptscape) and expands it forwards towards a genuine
spiritual-material ecology and backwards to its origins where extensive
mental alliances turned traditional ecological pathways into the dedicated
alliances of the humans. Economics was born in ecology, the lifescape, and
moved into the conceptscape as relationships in the ecological web became
awarely hardened into expectations–of an animal’s tracks, of a seed’s
growth, of a stock’s return. And economics can return to ecology–to a new
ecology of the conceptscape’s human material hybrids--by a recovery of the
meaning that places us in our producer/consumer roles and in our social
identities. We can imagine and begin to create such a future
spiritual-material ecology by letting the rich, actual relations of our
individual lives breathe life into all interactions and exchanges and by
acknowledging all the specific dependencies and advantage-taking of our
individual economic patches.
14. Interlocking
both primary societies fosters a morality that respects both the larger society (the conceptscape) and the particular of the individual so that neither is
imposed on the other. This avoids the asphyxiation of the individual or
the relativizing of all values, and it promotes real aesthetics of living
so that beautiful moral societies can take shape. By avowing the open
beauty of societies morality is not just a “personal code” because the
society of the code is brought out as a public entity and meshed with
other social concerns.
15.
Acknowledging the lifescape of meaning below and within knowledge gives
psychology an actual and clear domain to
work in. The lifescape make the “unconscious” visible, and subjects as
knowledge alliances is a clear way to bridge the duality of consciousness
of the therapy encounter–where reality is put on one side and feelings on
another. There’s no surprise here as psychology has labored patiently
exposing personal investments and relationships within our firmest
beliefs. Further, all issues of identity are collaborative in being both
constructed and discovered.
16.
Interlocking both primary
societies shows politics as a natural
thing as every society within the conceptscape is continually redefining
itself from within and without. Struggle, cooperation, toleration and
infiltration are all necessary aspects of various phases of societies in
interaction. Politics is, moreover, a concommitant of every knowing and
caring act as these create an alliance or an aversion with a degree of
strength anchored in each knowing act’s web. Under the Socratic regime of
truth politics was relegated to the non-excusable, but the pretense to
sameness under truth repeatedly fell from its pedestal into the nasty
differences of all meaning’s myriad interests.
17. The social-interdependence approach to reality offers a
compromise
between Western conceptual thinking and Eastern taming of the conflictual
by techniques of acceptance, or between conquest and retreat.
It does this by focusing on the
experiential-operational interface, the grips of knowledge, and offering a
measured swinging in attachments. Between the tightly knowledge-gripping
societies seen in the Western conceptscape and grip-releasing detachment
seen diaphanously in the East there are many styles of holding one’s
society together. What is possible is a dancing of cares, within and
between us.
18. Leaving philosophies of the conceptscape with fixed values behind such
as is implied here brings up the repressed ubiquity and
necessity of death
in that an acceptance of change and conflict is also an acceptance of
loss. Choosing relations and thoughts reinforces some and tramples others.
Selection and death operate constantly in our relational patterns. The
rich relational field of multiple societies has all the risks of nature. A
full accounting of death/loss must include not only human lives but also:
the lives of other creatures, modified existing physical aspects of the
world, cultural practices bypassed, choices not taken, potentials not
realized, thoughts discarded, memories lost and our bodies’ changed. Our
only choice is to steer where it happens (hence the interest in non-zero
summed “games”) and to vary the growth/speed of death.
19. From the vantage of society thinking it is more correct to say that:
 | Reality as societies is a useful description of both the
biological organism and of the complete set of relationships for an
organism from/to its niche and food web. |
| An organism has both an internal society (physiology) and an
external society (mind). |
| The origin of these two primary societies comes from the
chemistry of reactants and products where the direction of reaction
can join in chains that are either looped back to the original
reactants to form closed loops (an internal society) or are open-ended
from/into the environment to describe concentrations and probabilities
of an external society. Reactant-product chains thus form geometries that are
either circular or radial. |
| The external society (mind)
of an organism includes all non-internal pathways and relationships
with any part of its internal society that are either probable or prepared for from its history. These relationships are
characterized by discontinuities as compared to the more continuous
relationships of the internal society. The discontinuities can be of
time, distance or signal/noise ratios. Life is then characterized as
double-facing societies--internal, circular, continuous and external,
radial, discontinuous. |
| Pre-prepared pathways that are outward facing waiting to engage
inputs can be said to “expect” the inputs. The discontinuity at the
radial pathway often evolves into a cluster of helper paths
facing outward in prepared support. Radial pathways and relations thus
proliferate (e.g. a sense organ such as an ear). Even neutral elements
such as cell walls are outer-directed in resisting external physical
forces. |
| The evolution of complex societies/organisms results in a
proliferation of outward-facing, discontinuous social couplings.
Radial pathways can be at chemical, motor, support, perceptual or symbiotic,
etc.
levels. |
| Organisms with
outward-facing couplings raise the degree of social couplings across
the whole environment of reality to a point where more and more
features and creatures in its surroundings become enlaced in their
relevance relations or in their external society. |
| Humans were the first creatures whose external societies
attained circular closure so that features of the environment had
relevance to each other so that fewer and fewer parts of the
environment were without relevance, i.e. were outside the humans’
external society. In other words reality itself, the lightly
interacting whole society, became an interacting society as the
relevance of human society expanded into it to the point where
interactions among relevances themselves were generated. |
| As the cultural
supraorganisms of societies evolved, the laws of conservation of
logic, social hierarchy and science became visible in the overall
society of the universe. But even these like all societies are beyond
any foreseeable closure. |
