General Semantics is perhaps best classified as a personal growth system providing tools to help us integrate with our advanced symbolic and technological environment through updated understanding and use of the methods and findings of science.

General Semantics - names a discipline based on learning and using the scientific method in our daily lives in the context of a classification system that distinguishes among plants, animals, and humans using the dimensions of energy, distance, and time. As any discipline does, it has its beliefs, values, ethics, and behavioral prescriptions. 

Showing posts with label general semantics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label general semantics. Show all posts

2009-04-02

Non-identity and Non-allness

Non-identity and non-allness name belief-principles of general semantics to apply in reevaluating our initial reasoning.

Of course, our initial reasoning must be consistent and coherent.  It must strictly conform to scientific principles, valid logic, and correct mathematical techniques. This first stage reasoning process must strictly eliminate all fallacies, document and justify any assumptions, and carefully measure any observations.  Any conclusions from that reasoning is thus assured that it follows logically.  Only in this way can contrary results of actual testing disconfirm assumptions or inferences.

Once our intitial reasoning is up to scientific standards,  we can apply the above principles by re-evaluate our initial reasoning to see if we might see some abstraction, assumption, or inference differently. Can we alter our perceived objects by changing the asbstraction - thus creating a different starting premise? We question the "idenity" of our abstracted objects by remembering non-allness - our abstraction missed things,  and non-identity - could we have come to a diferent object?  Can we revise our assumptions stimulated from those and other abstractions -  also creating a different starting point? Can we alter our inference structure, and thereby create a branching path in our prior reasoning to different higher level abstractions?

Upon revaluation of our reasoning and the prior results using the perspectives of non-identity and non-allness, we then must re-validate our new objects, assumptions, and inferences as we did with our initial reasoning - again - to insure strict adherence to the scientific process, valid logic, and correct mathematics.

Of course, familiarity with and use of these principles allows us to carefully consider our initial objects, assumptions and inferences at the beginning of the cycle, putting us ahead in the game at the beginning.

2009-03-30

A little more "Consciousness of Abstracting".

Science News: This Week (2009/3/29) corroborates my claim that the brain uses nigh all its inputs, including memory, to understand its current situation - including what words it hears.

In the brain, the gift of gab — or at least the gift of knowing what someone’s gabbing about — depends on sight, not just sound. If a listener sees a talker’s lips moving or hands gesturing, certain brain networks pitch in to decode the meaning of what’s being said, a new study suggests.

Based on some of my other reading about brain circuitry, it appears that any circuits in the brain stimulated by the  totality of incoming  stimulation contribute to invoking related past experience.  This, it would seem, would include proprioceptive, interoceptive, hormone flux state, etc., information.  Other sources I read some time ago reported that motor neuron areas have been observed to be active when the subject was directed to think about words meaning some activity.  For example, 'run' activated motor areas for the legs.  Brain involvement in understanding language, it seems to me, would be but a small portion of brain involvement in the business of living, and since understanding and acting on language is continually used in daily activities, more brain function may be involved in language use than the limited areas evaluated by past medical and other research as critical.

Just one more bit of information to help us remember that even our direct object level experience involves interpretation, illustrating another incidence of "the map is not the territory", and we evaluate our conscious experience as a dynamic map.

2009-03-28

misrepresentation or "map intentionally not similar to territory."

Except for one quote of Korzybski, the blog
http://generalsemantics.blogspot.com/ is all about Scientology.
Not updated since 2006. Don't these things go away sometime?

What "is" General Semantics?

General Semantics is perhaps best classified as a personal growth system providing tools to help us  integrate with our advanced symbolic and technological environment through updated understanding and use of the methods and findings of science. General Semantics - names a discipline based on learning and using the scientific method in our daily lives in the context of a classification system that distinguishes among plants, animals, and humans using the dimensions of energy, distance, and time. As any discipline does, it has its beliefs, values, ethics, and behavioral prescriptions.