Integral Semiotics

[Balder]

Here's a new piece of writing by Ken (though some of it looks like it is copied from an older text). 

Integral Semiotics

I have skimmed it, but I'm too swamped at the moment to give it careful attention.  I look forward to coming back to this in a few days.

[Balder]

Wilber has posted a follow-up article, this time on the Giga-Glossary.

 

I'm still too busy to write right now, but look forward to engaging with these articles (and with your post, Joe) once I'm back from various travels....

[Balder]

Tim Winton has an interesting paper on Integral semiotics and post-metaphysics.  I attended his presentation on this at the conference (which was good), but I haven't read the paper yet (planning to soon, in my long and growing list!).  The conference papers are available here.

 

And here is the abstract for his paper:

 

The Meaning of Planetary Civilization: Integral Rational Spirituality and the Semiotic Universe, by Tim Winton

 

Abstract:

This paper composes a formal constellation of distinct, but overlapping, philosophical, methodological, and theoretical commitments enactive within the integrative world-space. This approach is proposed as a basis for exploring a pragmatic meta-worldview capable of carrying meaning making necessary for the formation of a healthy and enduring Planetary Civilization. The heart of this challenge lies in finding a coherent and culturally extensible contemporary integration of humanity’s most persistent and foundational dualism–that of materialist and spiritualist views (with their respective ontic/realist v espistemic/idealist orientations) and the over-arching meaning making cosmologies they respectively support. I contend that current integrative approaches are still early in the developmental process of forming such a view, and that while they move us ever closer to a viable nondual orientation, they are ultimately perceived to fall on one side or the other of the divide and therefor fail, as yet, to locate a meaningfully comprehensivist stance capable of uniting all of humanity under one cosmological structure. In this paper I seek to develop an integral pragmatasist approach, which I refer to as integral Semiotic Realism, as a distinction supportive of resolving the cosmological divide. An integral cosmology is then proposed based on the post-metaphysical injunction prescribed by the semiotic enactment of Planetary Civilization through the signification of Integral Rational Spirituality. This endeavor fits within and contributes to the development of Integral Post-Metaphysics, Integral Pluralism and an integrative Realism and strives to locate unity in their diversity.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Question: When one reaches 3rd-tier supermind state-stage and no longer identifies with any state or stage, is that the end of the line? Or does evolution continue on from there?

"The Awakened individual’s Kosmic Address includes the Kosmic Address of every phenomenon in the universe."

It seems this supermind Enlightenment is the end, since it includes ALL other kosmic addresses. What about the withdrawn which has no address since it isn't yet actual?

[Edward theurj Berge]

Also see this post, Lane's reply to Wilber's essay.

[Edward theurj Berge]

This Desilet article pre-dates the kennilingus semiotics paper but is applicable nonetheless, since kosmic addressing is still the key. Especially of the Awakened ones. In the article Desilet criticizes Wilber's earlier work in IS but as Wilber maintains the same kosmic addressing system the critique is still valid, especially of the metaphysics of presence. The following also reminds me of Cook-Greuter's recent ITC comments in this post.

"Wilber adheres to his own version of a myth of the given in the belief that, for all practical purposes, clear, transparent communication and translation are as good as given when factored through his Kosmic addressing system. However, for Derrida, regardless of sophisticated sets of enactments or operations, transparency can never be taken as given. An absence of certainty in communication, a failure of objective location, persists. 

"Traditional metaphysics and its construction of notions of absolute transcendence which easily slide, however unintentionally, toward authorization of modes of certainty. Attitudes of certainty contribute to predispositions toward conceptual models and hierarchical arrangements immune to destabilizations, profound reversals, and unpredictable transformations. These kinds of models, consistent with restricted economies, ultimately imply forms of mastery and control that are without warrant. Institutionalized in small communities such models in no small measure account for the persistence throughout history of authoritarian cults.

"In Gary Hampson's apt phrasing, if there is a way out of postmodernism it is to pass through it, and Wilber has yet to genuinely pass through it."

Also see my own lengthy critique in this thread.

[Edward theurj Berge]

I'm reading Winton's paper from the ITC conference (referenced above). It's about rhetaphor! More later. He even uses the lemniscate!

[Edward theurj Berge]

It seems Winton takes his first wrong turn in associating Peice's Firstness with the UL quadrant (27). On 26 he quotes Corrington on this Firstness as "the undifferentiated quality and potentiality prior to any stain of the actual." And it was just as I was thinking as I read that Wilber lacked the kind of withdrawn virtual we've discussed at length in other threads. But Winton equates this with UL phenomenology, a strained correlation. Recall Bryant's 3 rings with the object a in the center, the rings being the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. The withdrawn is not 'in' any of those three but rather the latter. We'll see if Winton goes there.

[Edward theurj Berge]

He does address the nondual origin on 29, with that as the center of his figure 7, while noting we cannot access it directly, only inferring it transcendentally. But that to me sounds like the First Axiom of Firstness, not the inside perspective of the suobject. The latter is much more like Bryant's imaginary translational perspectives, with Bryant's symbolic domain akin to Winton's sign. Both have the unimaginable as the chewy center.

Also on 30 Winton equates this center with the unity and interrelateness of everything with everything. As we've seen in OOO this center if specific to each constructed individual, not a universal goo like this. And in OOO the center does not depend on its exo-relations to everything else. I've had my own criticisms with Bryant on this in the OOO thread. More as I read further.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Just a quickie before work. I'm thinking that the withdrawn virtual is adual, in the sense that it is antecedent to duality. Whereas the actual is nondual in the sense of the interdependency of the opposites.

[Balder]

Trying to catch up here.  I think there is some justification for Winton associating Peirce's Firstness with Wilber's UL / subjectivity (I did the same in Sophia Speaks).  I found a blog entry today which offers a pretty pithy summary of Peirce's categories:  Peirce - Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness / Peircean Categories and....

 

And, Joe, yes, I think an understanding of (or familiarity with) Winton's Pattern Language is helpful for getting a fuller picture of what he is proposing.  As you may recall, I started a thread here on his Pattern Language back in July of last year.

[Balder]

Wilber has posted the conclusion to his entry on Integral semiotics here.

[Edward theurj Berge]

I can understand the confusion. In looking over this Peirce dictionary on Firstness it seems he also had a variety of ways to describe it, not all consistent. Sometimes Firstness seems to be one of his 3 categories akin to Bryant's 3. At other times its like what we've described elsewhere as a basic awareness. At other times Firstness appears to be more like Bryant's withdrawn object a. Some Peirce quoted excerpts supporting the latter interpretation, with commentary:

"Firstness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else."

Even a basic human awareness is not itself free from distinction, reference or categories per L&J's (and others') work. We many not be conscious of those distinctions but they are there.

"Firstness is the mode of being which consists in its subject's being positively such as it is regardless of aught else. That can only be a possibility. For as long as things do not act upon one another there is no sense or meaning in saying that they have any being, unless it be that they are such in themselves that they may perhaps come into relation with others. The mode of being a redness, before anything in the universe was yet red, was nevertheless a positive qualitative possibility. And redness in itself, even if it be embodied, is something positive and sui generis. That I call Firstness. We naturally attribute Firstness to outward objects, that is we suppose they have capacities in themselves which may or may not be already actualized, which may or may not ever be actualized, although we can know nothing of such possibilities [except] so far as they are actualized." 

Very much akin to Bryant's notion of the withdrawn, as it distinguishes the possibility of qualities which is not itself actual qualities.

"The immediate present, could we seize it, would have no character but its Firstness. Not that I mean to say that immediate consciousness (a pure fiction, by the way), would be Firstness, but that the quality of what we are immediately conscious of, which is no fiction, is Firstness."

Here he admits that there is no immediate consciounsess, a fiction. I'd argue though that this quality of which we aware is much more a transcendental deduction that any sort of immediate awareness thereof.

"Here would be an utter absence of binarity. I cannot call it unity; for even unity supposes plurality. I may call its form Firstness, Orience, or Originality. It would be something which is what it is without reference to anything else within it or without it, regardless of all force and of all reason."

Khora anyone? Again, we are never directly conscious of this withdrawn state of affairs.

"Freedom can only manifest itself in unlimited and uncontrolled variety and multiplicity; and thus the first becomes predominant in the ideas of measureless variety and multiplicity. [...] The first is predominant in feeling, as distinct from objective perception, will, and thought." 

Here it is like Deleuze's multiplicity, with Peirce's 'feeling' apperception more like Plato's 'bastard reason?

"It precedes all synthesis and all differentiation; it has no unity and no parts. It cannot be articulately thought."

Again, it is not an assholon unity or part and cannot be thought.