2009 03 26
I must insert, coordinating the prose later:Pleroma is Bateson's term for the physical universe, Creatura is his term for the universe of life. All universes, according to Prigogine, come into being in time.
Now, according to me: space applies to Pleroma. All extension that I can conceive of (other than duration, in time) occurs in Pleroma. Creatura and its subsets, Sentiens, for example, are Not material universes. Creatura is an informational universe. It extends in time only, not at all in space. Life has no weight. Information has no weight. Creatura, Sentiens (and its dark pole, Dementia), Persona (and its dark pole, Geekoma) are purely intensional universes: they have no extension. They exist in time, but Not in space.
My body has mass. These days I reach nearly 5' 8" and weight not quite 160 pounds. That body exists in Pleroma. It is subject to gravity, to momentum / inertia ... But my life is not subject to gravity: except by metaphor. It is not subject to momentum, except by metaphor.
My essays on Extension and Intension were posted at Knatz.com in the later 1990s. With all my work online destroyed, I recreated at a blog which Google then froze. Now I repost them here. Look for Extension, dated 2009 03 26.
The Universe of Self-Awareness: Homo sapiens, for example
2006 03 19
Information, any difference that makes a difference, complicates as we move toward complexity among the universes distinguished here. Photons radiate Pleroma, the physical universe: that's information. In Creatura, the universe of life, the louse climbs a tree, smells no blood passing below, and drops off to try another tree. The louse takes no information over timet to be a trigger. No information = information. Rain falling on a seed in a fertile setting has a different effect on the seed from no rain. Rain on the seed in an infertile setting has a different effect, and no rain over timeprolonged has a still different effect.Creatura is Pleroma multiply-intensified: in multiple dimensions (including multiple meta-dimensions).
Where a creature has a brain stem / nervous system complex enough for feedback, for multiple-referencing, something new happens. Information takes multiple leaps into informational complexity.
Right now I'm just creating files in which to gather notes on information at different levels of existential complexity: Pleroma, Creatura, (Gaia,) Sentiens, Persona. (These rooms are yet only partly furnished.)
2006 05 24
Sentiens seems to be a late developer within Creatura. Both physical and organic complexities need a bulk of experience before awareness emerges.
Astronomer Fred Hoyle saw cellulose amid the star dust, light year long strands of it.
Men have long seen mind in the universe but science has yet to.
But then science is even younger than Sentiens.
Pleroma is oldest and most extensive. Creatura is less old and less extensive: unless we're wrong about that too. Sentiens is I believe just getting started: has a lot of growing, catching up, to do.
With Sentiens the concept of macroinformation begins to apply.
Continue to Persona: The World of Personhood
Note: I'm in the midst of revising not just the prose but the categories. Sentiens is a double universe, an ambiguous universe, divided between incompatible worlds I shall call SanoPathica, made of a pathological component and a semiotically responsible, sane component. I'm sure of the concepts, I'm confident in the truth, but I'm still thinking about the names to coin for them.
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