| Pleroma Creatura Sentiens | the physical universe the universe of life the world of awareness, of intelligence |
The ground, the apple, and Newton may all exist (or have existed) but there are important differences among them not habitually appreciated by authorities of the past (and present).
Bateson's original two are still the essential categories: but see the utility of distinguishing Sentiens within Creatura: a significant subset.
2009 03 10
I'm revising my taxons of existence while posting these sections, all must be revised. Be aware, as you read, that the changes all concern ambiguity in Sentiens: the world of intelligent self-awareness. Sentience can lead to science, that is, to responsible, truthful, honest understandings of experience; sentience can also lead to pathologcy, to superstition. There is no correlative available to the living to tell objectively which is which. Today's superstitious blather is yesterday's religious certainty. Today's scientific bedrock may be tomorrow's superstitious blather. Majorities being on the side of the blather seems perpetual, the faithful count themselves among the blessed while their inquisiton tortures new victims.I am now proposing to present Sentiens as composed of sanity and pathology in a mix impossible to separate, objectivity eluding us, the more so as factions set up authorities, and the authorities authorize inquisitions.
Within my proposed subset Persona, I now further propose an ineradicable ambiguity: between individuals nominated as persons, and individuals excluded, individuals whose personhood is denied: Persona/Geekoma.
proposed improvements temporarily render the post as draft status:
I also nominate a subset within the subset of Sentiens: Persona: the world of persons, of humans ... entities with entities those entities call rights.
My theory of Macroinformation also necessitates an additional subset of Sentiens: Pathologica: the world of unsane semantic entities. The rock exists in Pleroma but not in Creatura; the Blarney Stone exists in Pleroma and in Sentiens: some claims made for the Blarney Stone exist only in Pathologica. The moon exists in Pleroma and in Sentiens and in Persona, but a moon made of green cheese exists not in human experience but in Pathologica: human imagination divorced from survival-intelligence.
My hope of a future for our over-grown un-self-critical species necessitates a complementary subset to Pathologica, which, in honor of Korzybski, I name Santiens: the world of honest, intelligent, self-aware, scientific theory-honing, model-making, in short, the world of semiotic and semantic sanity: the world Korzybski, Bateson ... pk try, and largely fail, to give us.
Pathologica and Santiens are natural enemies, are at war. Civilization postures as though sanity rules; but its behavior proves, to me, that pathology rules, that earth will fail to birth an enduring Sentiens, and that if there's Sentiens in the universe apart from earth, then it should worry about us humans spreading.
(Redrafting here necessitates additional editing.)
Please be careful with my diction: as I am. Note and apply my definitions, my caveats.
Coined terms shouldn't mislead. Pleroma and Creatura are Gregory Bateson's coinages; Sentiens and Persona are my coinages as the concepts are my extensions of Bateson's concepts. Guard though against assuming common meanings for my uncommon usages: "existential category" has no important connection with Jean Paul Sartre or his "Existentialism." I simply refer to distinct types of existence: and emphasize that common parlance, like common thinking, shows no awareness of the distinctions being made.
For example, the stone I pick up on the beach manifests its existence in the physical universe: what Bateson calls Pleroma. The sand crab I pick up a moment latter manifests the universe of life: what Bateson calls Creatura.
The stone I picked up is existentially distinct from Ireland's famous Blarney Stone. That latter stone exists in Pleroma, but also exists, exists more importantly, in the human semantic universe. That universe I classify as a subset within Creatura: Sentiens, the universe of awareness. I, pk, also known as Paul Knatz, have an existence in Pleroma: I have physical extension, I stand 5'8", weight 159 LBs ... What you're reading here though has little to do with whether I still have in me some molecule I ate from an egg last week. No: here we are engaged with ideas: things that come from my being a feeling, thinking, writing, inventing creature. The sand crab we presume cares little about my macroinformation, has no awareness of any of it, has no interest in any of it.
So: first there's time: and information (any difference that makes a difference) (energy which is matter is different from energy which is not matter. Thus: Pleroma came to be, never mind how (or why). That's the physical universe. Things replicated, but it wasn't procreating in our sense, we of generations through time. Thus: Creatura is distinct from Pleroma. Gregory Bateson was forever emphasizing that we mislead ourselves by failing to make this distinction: if you hit the cue ball so that it hits the billiard red ball ... the red ball may drop into a pocket, may hit the yellow ball ...; but if you hit the dog the way your hit the cue ball the dog may bite you. The living dog is qualitatively different than the dead dog.
I further divide Bateson's Creatura, distinguishing you and me from the sand crab with my coined category Sentiens: the universe of awareness. Further I reserve the category Persona. The sand crab is alive, but we don't attribute awareness to it: I do not classify the sand crab in Sentiens. (Another thinker, in honesty and intelligence, might.) I do classify myself, and you, in the category Sentiens. (Another thinker, in honesty and intelligence, might not.) I further classify myself and you in the category Persona. That is, I grant us additionally a special status within Sentiens: that of personhood.
Work, thinking since the other day, necessitates revisions here. Beyond Persona, I've added Pathologica, bring the blog up to date on this subject with Macroinformation.org as of several years ago.
And just now, posting comments on informational dimensions as a numbered series, it occurs to me to specify these existential sets also into a numbered series. As hinted above, I start with Existence0, and identify it, not as the universe, not Pleroma, but as Time. Scan this month of March for posts on the subjects.
Existential Estates
2006 05 24
Existence. What do we know about it? Only what we know: and we have little idea how much of what we "know" is wrong.One of my favorite jokes — ever — is my own: a joke I have no idea if anybody has ever gotten: in the first (and original) story of my series, The Model, the (student) creator of a universe tells the design critic that his theme is Existence. Later the critic commends the student's project for limiting itself, "unlike last week's," to the theme.
Huh? What's the joke? What could there "be" besides existence? I don't know. That's the joke.
Yesterday I wrote:
Did anything precede the universe? Time, I presume. But We Don't Know!
Was intelligent design involved? I/We don't know.
Not seeing any other way it could have happened proves nothing.
In the midst of our uncertainty some things seem to be true:
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