Philanthro
In Uk we get environments by reducing complexities. We ask what are their sensory organs, and how they are connected within the animal, and how do the nerves come together in the central nervous system of the animal – this is the innerwelt. It is a mirror structure of the environment. The animal can only experience the things in its environment of what it can process within its nerves.
From there on we construe progressively the complexity of the environment. We start with 0 and add progressively the different sensory organs in the animal. Three inputs are enough to construe and environment.
We do not construe, but reduce complexity. This is from the human point of view at least so that we preconstrue too much, this would be anthropocentric.
All this becomes clear if we look at for example a paramecium. It flows in some liquid. And actually, it has 2 actions at hand. Or 1. Either it hits an obstacle whereupon it contracts and moves away, and the other, which is more passively produced, is that instead of hitting an obstacle, it hits something digestible and ingests whatever it encounters. There is no nerve contraction for this however. This is enough to talk of an environment.
Liquid with stimulus and liquid without stimulus. The stimulus can be either chemical or mechanical. Chemical equals digestion, and mechanical equals flight.
This theory is a total interpretation of the environment. Everything that is accessible to the animal is approached, there is no rest left in the environment. This is a kind of holistic interpretation. It is an interpretation of everything that is, and in which everything can appear for the animal becomes evident.
”The earthworm’s world is made up only of earthworm things.”
These creatures have their own world which are incompatible to other kind of worlds. In every world we have a total picture, but which are totally incompatible, there can be no overlap between eg. an earthworm and a dragonfly.
We have gestaltphenomenon, there is one picture, but it is present depending on what allows it to be perceived.
Darwin talks about the transformation of environments and their constant adaptation. For Uk this is not the point. We have to understand the animal holistically in one moment of time. It is a kind of structuralism avant la lettre, where we compare immobile configurations. This is why, in the restricted scope of Uk, adaptation to a foreign environemnt and struggle for an external life are clearly nonsense. Nothing new can appear for the thing which only has organs that allow certain things to appear.
KANTIANISM STUPID – just straight up denying darwinism lol.
Every animal is what it is insofar as it stays within the parameter of its own organical configuration. Uk transports this theory into a theory of the state.
The productivity of life is what comes up with new forms. The activity of life is not the exterior transformation. Uk is rather a vitalist of evolution, which is often opposed to mechanism of evolution.
”The animal and its environment is conceived of as a functional unity determined by the B_auplan_. It is an ontological setting in which innerworld and outerworld are connected. The plan is the residuum of the idea that life configures itself by producing plans.
All stimuli unrelated to the organism’s bauplan are undifferentiated. They can only be differentiated through the nervous system, other stimulus must be neutral, or fundamentally unknowable. Things outside the bauplan is essentially the thing-in-itself.
Uk distinguishes between higher and lower animals according to their accessibility to diversity. A higher animal has more diversity in the signs that it can read. Higher animals especially may have an understanding of the form of an object. They can envision different sides of the object they perceive. A paramecium only reacts by contracting itself against objects it cannot eat. Higher animals configure perceptively the environment around them.
The earthworm likes leaves and needles, and take them into their holes. But whoever tried as an earthworm to drag down a leaf into their hole, it would be difficult. You are not as strong as you think you are. So you have to drag the leaf from the soft part of it. So the question is how the earthworm can distinguish between sides of a leaf. One theory of Uk is that the earthform is moving around the leaf, and according to the distance that the earthworm has to go around the leaf, the earthworm distinguishes the short from the long part of the leaf. It is by registering the muscular efforts taken to go around the leaf that it learns on which side of the leaf it is. So in the earthworm there is a capacity of the earthworm to propriocept the leaf, that is perceive it through its muscular efforts.
The representation of the leaf is entirely different from our representation of the leaf, and it has nothing to do with the form of the leaf itself. It is an inner interior picture of the muscular effort of the worm, which we cannot really imagine. It is non-memetic. There is no mimesis, no imitation. The inner form of the leaf does not imitate the outer form, it is a pure self-production of the earthworm. Insofar as the earthworm depicts the outer form, this is non-mimetic. Our visual representation in painting will be memetic.
Primary properties are those concerning size and number, and they are closer to the thing is in itself than for example the apprehension of colour and temperature which is distorted by our organic system (pseudoaristotle).
Not a picture theory, but a biosemiotic.
Shape as a perceptive mark, the sign of complex environments. The shapes of the things are perceived as being exterior to the animal to itself. The shape perceived by the earthworm is entirely interior, its signs were based on its own movements. In other animals there are different organs for perceiving. The things perceived are located in the outer world then. Bees make the distinction between open and closed forms. These differences can be seen by a bee, and this would be the visual representation of the bee, and it is known because bees avoid one and appreciate the other.
Uk uses the words Zeichen and Merkmal. Perceptive marks and signs are the same things for Uk.
Uk critiques the schema of stimulus/response in the explanation of complex environments and complex behaviour. If a certain stimulus encountered by the animal triggers a certain reaction, how can it be that not always the same reaction unfolds after the stimulus? Why is there like a quasi-choice that the animal has? Why can it react in multiple ways? To explain this diversity of reactions we realise that we need to add something – that is the subject, that which decides what kind of reaction it will respond with.
It has been remarked by MP intra-organic conditions, atugenous rhythms of excitation, threshold values & other internal factors are equally deceisive in determining actions & environment. The whole organism of the subject is relevant in deciding what kind of reaction must come from a stimulus.
This explanation departs from the subject. Traditional mechanism does not do this.
Between the subject and the external reality there is a semiotic relationship.
Basically then, the two most important classes of signs in every animal is the perceptive sign and the operative sign. These give rise to the 2 dimensions of the environment. There is a part of the environment that can be classified under the label of perceptive and operative. This is according to the kind of sign that is unfolded.
”Everything that a subject perceives belongs to its perceptive world, and everything that it produces, to its operative world. These two worlds of perception and production constitute the environment”
The object is recognised by a certain sign by which it shows itself. We interpret this signs as being the signs of objects.
We perceive the greenness of the sky, and we add a kind of objectivity to the sky and say that it is a green sky. Theoretically we understand that we add the form of the object, and the quality comes from the way in which our body treats the situation. The true thing we call sky is fundamentally different however. If we stripped off the very quality we perceive we may strip the object itself.
The operative world are all the objects that fit the animals feeding and locomotion. Everything that the animal can treat, relate to and transform through its own operations. ”The operative mark that the effectors of the subject impart to the object is immediately recognisable, just like the wound which the tick’s mouthparts inflict upon the skin of the mammal on which it has landed.”
There is a change occuring in the environment, which is the operative sign itself – it is the transformation something undergoes when it has been transformed by the action of the animal – new information is added to the world.
The very milieu of the animal is part of the operative sign. They are dimensions in which the actions of the animal unfolds. The air and the upwind is part of the eagle’s world.
Uk says that the things of the operative world do not have to be perceived explicity by the animal. Maybe the fish has no clue about the water like us with air.
The functional circle is a general schema that underlies the relationship between any animal and the world, and the unity it establishes with its world. They are what differentiate the relationship between animal and environment, between perceptive signs and operative signs. A set of operative signs are always bound to another set of perceptive signs and vice-versa. Some perceptive signs trigger some operative signs. There is a functional circle of what is perceived and what is operated on.
Higher animals have a lot of different functional circles at hand.
”I was with a schizophrenic dog this summer, it was reacting to a bunch of functional circles that weren’t there it was weird”.
Functional circles are closed.
There are a lot of functional circles in an animal. The prey circle, the enemy circle, the reproductive circle, the medium circle etc. etc.
It is a kind of mirror structure, a correlation, between what happens in different parts of the circle.
The operative mark extinguishes the perception mark. As soon as there is an operation that has been triggered by a certain perception, the animal does not remain contemplating with the perception of before. It forgets everything that came before. Uk does not believe that the tick continues the smell of the butric acid once it starts sucking the blood, it becomes unaware of what came before, and the circle is automatically engaged. There is a blind realisation of certain actions which the animal does not need to register consciously. Some animals do, but for many it is unnecessary. Consciousness is superfluous to most animals.
The animal exists within the functional circle. It goes from perception, to action, to perception etc.
Perceptive marks and operative carriers appear unified in a single object only to the human observer. This is on a behavioural plane. They might be completely distinguished in the animal. We cannot really know.
Every sign can be an object of itself.
The desired outcome of a functional circle is always the realisation of an operation.
In animals with higher complexity, we see that one and the same animal sometimes has multiple actions in its disposal against one and the same thing. To explain this, Uk would say that one and the same stimuli can be the bearer of different qualitative colourings depening on the kind of functional circle in which it is involved. This colouring is the reflex of a different functional circle.
According to the functional circle, one and the same stimuli can as such be different. The colourings are basically that different things are inserted into different functional circles.
Organism’s mood is correlated to a color-tone in the object: this is a new kind of sign, the operative image. The animal sees in the sea anemone the kind of action it wants to perform, which depends on the kind of subjective state in which the hermit crab is in. This means the sea anemone is perceived with the operative image of whatever it needs to do, like getting protection, or feeding.
Organisms enrich their perceptive environment according to the actions with which they can come to realise upon their objects. – In line with the functional circle and mood in which the animal finds itself.
The color tone is how the mood of the subject is reflected in the object. The color tone goes hand in hand with an operative image anticipated in the animal.
MP calls the hermit crab’s use of the anemone as a beginning of culture, a species of preculture without Nature.
”Stimuli from the external world are globally translated in a nervous sign language (nervöse Zeichensprache).”
Uk defends a sense of meaning that is not necessarily conscious. There is translation on the sole psycho-physical level of the organism without linguistic and conscious elaboration.
All objects are as such meaning-carriers (Bedeutungsträger); signs become a susbstitute for ontology. Being at its most fundamental sense is a system of signs.
External reality is at the same time polysemous and indeterminate. It has multiple meanings and because for each species have incompatible meanings, it becomes wholly indeterminate. It only becomes determinate in the sense that there is some animal that in its species relates to the stimuli from its central nervoussystem.
”The task of biology is to expand the outcome of Kant’s research in two directions: i) to take into account the role of our body too, in particular of our sense organs and central nervous system and ii) to investigate the relationships with the objects of the other subjects.”
He uses Kants theory to figure out that the things that appear to animals are part of its apriori apparatus.
Uk avoids a clear division between nature and culture. In MP we see that he gives us the clue to understand that culture is only the complexification of nature and all that surrounds us. Culture is already located and originated in organic systems. He presents a kind of gradualist position on the relationship between man and animal. Not a frank seperation but the only differences are differences in the complexification of the signs accessible to the species.
Humans have cognitive access to the sign’s complexity. This is special for humans. We don’t only have access to the sign on the behavioural plane but on the cognitive plane.
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”The stone, which lies as a relationless object in the hand of the observer, bcomes a carrier of meaning as soon as it enters into a relationship with a subject. Since no animal ever appears as an observer, one may assert that no animal ever enters into a relationship with an ’object’. Only through the relationship is the object transformed into the carrier of a meaning that is impressed upon by a subject.”