Re: [-empyre-] sidebar - continued discussion between John KlimaandBill Seaman - part 2

[marcus bastos <bastos.marcus@gmail.com>]

<<Yes - this is in part the challenge. Deep biological questions
related to sentience / The Hard Problem  (Defining new approaches to
Strong AI): What is at operation in our biological/physical
functionality that enables sentience to arise in terms of the
following>>
I am curious about the limits of this model. Some descriptions of
mental processes deal with the hypothesis that meaning is not fully
controllable (and that it is not immanent, not once fixed, generated,
and from then on stable). In other words, it might not be possible to
fully sense what enables sentience.

The very use of mind functioning instead of thinking indicates this,
since the former does not suppose an individual agent in charge of the
flux of thoughts (and here I do not mean only a human agent, but any
kind of autonomous sign production device). When supposing that signs
refer to signs, those to other signs, those to yet another signs, and
so on (as Peirce and Deleuze did, for example), meaning becomes the
result of a huge intermingling, constantly re-negociable. It is not
about functionalities but about redundancies.

On that context, the role of noise, and of the unpredictable, becomes
very important. This supposes taking noise, and all sort of blurred
communication processes, as "meaningful". Isn´t it fascinating, for
example, how programming 'mistakes' can produce usable results? What
if these were thought of as digital Freudian slips? What if we toyed
with the possibility that digital meaning is built equally from
conscious and unconscious processes (or rather, controllable and
uncontrollable processes)?

To sum, as a gentle provocation: what if it is not possible to
generate meaning, only to re-generate it?
(And here, it would be useful to remember, as stated by Lévy-Strauss,
in "Introduction à l´ouvre de Marcel Mauss" (quoted by Deleuze in "On
several regimes of signs", A thousand plateaus), that "the world
started to mean something before it was known what it meant, meaning
is given without being, for that reason, known".