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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (1763)	10/17/2000 2:24:11 PM
From: cosmicforce	Respond to of 28931

Solon, I think we are describing different aspects of the duality of consciousness or awareness. An offer to define extrinsic meaning vs. intrinsic meaning to prevent semantic disagreement in this context. extrinsic meaning: Solon's description of an externally referenced appraisal of the information, context and use of another's information (that of the rock by lonely me, in his example). intrinsic meaning: My description of a self-referential system's quantitative and qualitative presence and possession of information, context and use of its information. I had left open the possibility of an extrinsic meaning in my "Granite bolder in the stream". I suppose I was suggesting this by my choice of the words "I am". We get into shades of gray here. No extrinsic meaning can occur without intrinsic meanings (those meanings native to the information set). No intrinsic meaning can exist with some extrinsic meaning (there is no purely self referential system using itself as the only context, IMO I think that Awareness or Consciousness (my dictionary shows them as synonyms) may have the same baggage and personal nature of the word "meaning". Maybe it is just me, but "meaning" to me is how I model the data and put it into a larger context. That is a synthetic data-altering process, IMO. Consciousness as I propose using it is a continuum from simple storage, retrieval and use of information in a literal, minimally coded form [simple consciousness], to that of an abstract, compacted, non-representational form [complex consciousness]. I think consciousness can include both intrinsic and extrinsic meaning and emerged unscathed. There is still not one precise definition of what we mean. I don't think there should be any confusion as long as we assign the type of meaning or consciousness we are talking about. We have no idea what the complex consciousness of a rock is. My point is even if we give the rock a simple consciousness (or possessing intrinsic meaning of its circumstances) that it is still possible that we don't know the complex consciousness (or extrinsic meaning ) that rock holds in the external context. DNA seems a way to transport extrinsic meanings for previous data sets across generations of complex organisms based upon carbon. But even in the rock, the coding of its chemistry can be interpreted as a highly coded history of its origin. The exact crystal lattice for each rock is different and exists due to cause, IMO.