[MD] meaning, awareness and understanding

[Ham Priday]

Scott --

You said:

> If the world of an amoeba were fully described in Newtonian
> mechanistic terms, there would be no value involved in the
> amoeba's reaction. What the Newtonian leaves out is that in
> avoiding the acid, there has been a placement of the particular
> situation within some general context: the amoebic species has
> cognized that acid is harmful, better move away.

You MoQers like to borrow terms from Pirsig's novels, make nice sounding but
false metaphors from them, and then convince yourselves of their profound
truth.  It drives me up the wall!  As I've said before, the amoeba does
not -- CAN NOT  -- 'cognize', 'recognize', 'cogitate' or 'value' anything.
It has no brain or nervous system.  A clinging vine does not encircle a
drainpipe because it values water.  An electron does not jump to a proton
because it values a positive charge.  Such assertions are pure fiction and
have no place in serious philosophy.

There are forces in the universe, particularly in living organisms, that
tend toward homeostasis for the survival of the species.  But these
mechanisms are not values to the organism; the euphemistic use of value here
is incorrect and misleading.  The proper term for such "goal-seeking"
behavor on the part of an insentient universe is Teleology, and the Jesuit
paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin (in his "The Phenomenon of Man") and
biologist Edmund Sinnott ("Biology of the Spirit") argued that evolution
began at the inorganic level, geogenesis, progressed through the origin of
living material, biogenesis, to animal behavior, psychogenesis, and finally
to the mind of man, noogenesis.

But if teleology is really value, WHOSE value is it?  An amoeba isn't a
conscious creature; hence it can't value, based on your previous statement
that "value implies [presupposes] awareness".  Any value attributed to a
purposively directed universe must therefore reside either in the Creator or
in the conscious sensibility of man.

> A particular encounter with acid, then, is a semiotic
> event -- this acid invokes the general pattern. This
> does not mean that an amoeba is in itself employing
> semiosis. But, I would argue, for the amoeba to
> follow a static *pattern of value* means that semiosis
> is being employed. I would venture that instinct is the
> word we have for this. The alternative to this is that
> it just moves away "automatically", or deterministically.
> That, I claim, denies that the pattern of moving away
>  is a pattern *of value*.

Kindly explain to me how an amoeba would use semiosis if it could (or did).
Are you suggesting that an amoeba might be conversant with words and
symbols?  Also, do you consider a "pattern of value" possible in the absence
of any conscious apprehension of it?  If so, then you are not talking about
what I understand as value.

-- Ham