from: The revolution of everyday life ("Traite de savoir-vivre a l'usage des jeunes generations"), by Raoul Veneigem, 1965, Gallimard 1967. Translation by John Fullerton and Paul Sieveking, 1972. p.24-25.

The WATERSHED here, refers to the transitional period between the Powell Memorandum of 1971, and the full commercialization of the internet in 1995. In the middle of this, the IBM-Microsoft contract of 1980 delivered the platform and template for neo-corporatism to drive the SEMIOTIC revolution that is now transforming the relationships of individuals to one another and to every type and scale of social organization, whether of government, law, finance, health, education, religion, or commerce.  The period coincides with the beginning of the Second Gilded Age.

The Second Gilded Age is named — ironic as the First — for its resemblance to that of the 1870s to 1890s, a period marked by laissez-faire capitalism, political corruption, and wealth inequality. It is considered to have begun between the 1980s and 2010s, in the United States' history, and to have continued up to the present. 

The narrative of a second Gilded Age erroneously suggests that the current dynamics are repeating those of the late nineteenth century. Although they share certain important characteristics, these are profoundly different historical moments. Focusing on the history of capitalism and labor, and taking a global perspective, demonstrates that the two periods were bookends — the "before" and "after" to a lengthy period when the cruelest characteristics of corporate capitalism were temporarily constrained. The late nineteenth century saw the ascent of serious efforts to rein in the power of the new capitalism and force it to bow down to the needs of civil society. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we are experiencing the decline of that effort as capitalists and their ideological and political supporters push to see how far they can go to ensure the unchallenged hegemony of corporate and property rights. The slow climb toward a more humane capitalism and the rapid descent away from it constitute two very different experiences.

These differences were also examined in the 2015 book, The Age of Acquiescence, by historian, Steve Fraser.

What fueled the resistance to the first Gilded Age, [argues Fraser), was the fact that many Americans had a recent memory of a different kind of economic system, whether in America or back in Europe. Many at the forefront of the resistance were actively fighting to protect a way of life, whether it was the family farm that was being lost to predatory creditors or small-scale artisanal businesses being wiped out by industrial capitalism. Having known something different from their grim present, they were capable of imagining — and fighting for — a radically better future. It is this imaginative capacity that is missing from our second Gilded Age.

When in a red font, EMPHASIZED words link to more detailed information. The meanings commonly inferred for these are ANTHROPOCENTRIC while those they carry here are holistic, and these, being less common in the context they are used here, are perhaps surprising.

Remote viewing, TV, is apt as a description for the digital screens of any device. Each interprets digital files according to its manufaturers' technologies and designs, providing increasing resolution and more gripping delusions of reality.

Einstein described the delusion of separateness arising from consciousness,    but post-modern separateness is no longer only anthropocentric or reductionist, it is a separation from our selves and our societies.

Validation — the perception of something as being a fact. 

Elementality — the perception of something as made up of elements.

Differentiation — the perception of difference between things.

Integration — the perception of things as being a whole.

multi-scalar

The paradigm provides a biosemiotic lens for evolution, psychology, and sociology; its focus the embodied cognition of ONTOGENY — on the learning and development of mind-body.

Perhaps unavoidably, learning and development, are multi-scalar. A paradigm of them, based on elementary rather than ANTHROPIC first principles, is then perhaps especially so, as learning and development, in some form, are the common characteristic of all BEINGS — on a 'vertical scale', from viruses to multicellular organisms, and 'horizontally', from individuals to societies.

Although there is little, if anything, new in the paradigm,  it is elementary, a meta-LANGUAGE that provides a FRAME for psychology, sociology, parenting and care, education, medicine and psychiatry; and also for their interactions with the social COMPLEX of law, governance, and business. 

The entire sequence of events involved in the development of an individual BEING over its lifespan. 

At the time of writing, neither The Free Dictionary (the American Heritage, Collins, and Random House Kernerman Webster dictionaries), Britannica, nor Wikipedia, carried any definition or general information on the term, multi-scalar. Yet despite the seemingly authoritative silence the term, multi-scalar, is widely used. as the examples (below) illustrate.

What is meant by the term here is what is referred to in the Wikipedia article, Multiscale modeling or multiscale mathematics ; dealing with problems that have important features at multiple scales of time and/or space.

Apart perhaps from its particular application of holism..

As used here the meaning, of holism, is that which appears in the American Heritage Dictionary, Emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts; Concerned with wholes rather than analysis or separation into parts.

multi-scalar examples

Gender, Migration, and the Work of Care: A Multi-Scalar Approach to the Pacific Rim, edited by Sonya Michel, Professor Emerita of History, American Studies and Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, USA, and Ito Peng, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Social Policy in the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Canada. 

Towards a Multi-scalar Methodology: The Challenges of Studying Social Transformation and International Migration, Rebecca Williamson, University of Sydney, Australia. 

Temperature-Mortality Relationships in Brazil: A Multi-Scalar Distributed Lag Non-Linear Model Framework Integrating Climatic, Urban, and Socioeconomic Dimensions, 2026, Alindomar Lacerda Silva, National Institute for Space Research, Scott Sheridan, ResearchGate. 

Beyond ethnographic scriptocentrism: Modelling multi-scalar processes, networks, and relationships, Alain Mueller, 2016. Sage Journals. 

Indigenous Peoples and Multiscalar Environmental Governance: The Opening and Closure of Participatory Spaces. 2022, Maria-Therese Gustafsson, Almut Schilling-Vacaflor. Global Environmental Politics. 

Relational Multiscalar Analysis: A Comparative Approach to Migrants within City-Making Processes, Ayse Caglar, & Nina Glick Schiller. Taylor and Francis, 2021. 

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?

paradigm - a model, or theoretical framework.

The site content is hierarchical. FRAME A introduces the top tier of content, the four FRAMES, B, C, D and E; each of which then provides the context for other more detailed texts which function in the same manner. Variously styled links connect them to each other, and to the footnotes and expansions that support them.

Links, whether icons or text, styled green or orange are internal, and when blue, external. Arrow icons, when in orange, link to short footnotes, whereas text, or green icons, with dotted green or black underscores, link to expansions containing substantial detail.

The site uses javascropt for internal navigation, and all external links are protected by the attribute, rel="noopener noreferrer" .

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought, the practices that we accept rest on.

From: Tao Te Ching, 70, Lao Tzu, 300 BCE, translated by Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo, 1993, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

abduction.

The truth is that the whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by induction. Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step. 

The description of the paradigm on this site is an ABDUCTION,  a process that may be understood as the framework of both inductive and deductive reasoning, and the 'insight' that guides life.

Inductive reasoning uses related observations to arrive at a general conclusion. This type of reasoning is common in descriptive science. 

The four perspectives reason the paradigm inductively. Perspective B provides the premise that leads to the argument of perspective C; perspectives B and C then provide the premises that lead to the arguments of perspectives D and E.

Descriptive (or discovery) science, which is usually inductive, aims to observe, explore, and discover, while hypothesis-based science, which is usually deductive, begins with a specific question or problem and a potential answer or solution that can be tested. The boundary between these two forms of study is often blurred and most scientific endeavors combine both approaches. 

Inductive reasoning may be said to address the probabilistic complexity of animate behaviour, and to be the foundation of science. Deductive reasoning, on the other hand, is the foundation of mathematics, and may be said to address the absolutes of virtual and theoretical realities.

Looking out my window this lovely spring morning, I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I don't see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. That is a Proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image, which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete. I perform an abduction when I so much as express in a sentence anything I see. The truth is that the whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by induction. Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step.

"Philosophers as well as psychologists tend to agree that abduction is frequently employed in everyday reasoning."  The difference between the definitions used by Pierce and those used by modernists appears to be that Pierce was referring to abstraction whereas modernists refer to cognition; the former relating to life generally the latter referring generally only to humans.

reasoning

The three forms of reasoning may perhaps be seen in relationship to one another, as different focii on the cycle of scientific method; OBSERVE, THEORIZE, TEST, repeat. Elementary abductive 'reasoning' converts sense data into abstractions that guide action (OBSERVE, MODEL, ACT, repeat). Inductive reasoning uses observation to arrive at conclusions that can then inform testing (OBSERVE, THEORIZE, TEST, repeat). Deductive reasoning takes theories and predicts their results (THEORIZE, TEST, OBSERVE), repeat).

Quotation extracts taken from The Process of Science, and Scientific Reasoning, 1.2: The Science of Biology - Scientific Reasoning, by LibreTexts Biology. 

Quotation from Inductive Logic, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 

science

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.    Albert Einstein.

Science can essentially be represented as a learning loop comprised of three elementary stages that rely on reasoning to make sense:

A similar learning process⁠ partners selection to drive the evolution of life:

Science is an elementary practice; scientism is a belief. Eugenics, and the Holocaust it drove, are stark reminders of the dangers of not recognizing the distinction.

biophysicality

If we accept as unavoidabe that all descriptions of the ineffable are metaphorical;  and if creationist and anthropocentric teleologies and their concepts of the soul are set aside;  then, BEINGS can be defined as 'vehicles' of life and LIFE inferred recursively.

Rather than merely 'wet' physical entities, BEINGS are BIOPHYSICAL EXPRESSIONS, organized and animated by the interpretations their BIOSEMIOTIC systems make of their external and internal environments.

Any psychological construct requires a BIOPHYSICAL correlate in order to exist; every BIOPHYSICAL construct requires a psychological correlate in order to survive. In actuality then, psychology refers to the METABIOLOGICAL expression of a BEING.

PERCEPTIONS, attributes of BIOSEMIOTIC systems that in humans are considered as awareness, consciousness, EGO and mind, are generated from information that the SENSES of a BEING recognize in the NOUMENA which it encounters — in the same way as PERCEPTIONS of colour are.

wellness

In an individual, the development of wellness and illness is a function of the interaction between their BIOPHYSICAL actuality and their environment.  It is this system as a whole that is impacted by any medical or psychological interventions, and any social support and care, that the individual receives or is privated of.

Research into cancer and other diseases has long since identified the existence and primacy of METABIOPHYSICAL systems, and the need to address these as a whole; however, despite the work of the WHO modern societies and their BROADCASTING systems appear obdurate, discounting 'holism' and instead promoting increasingly reductionist models.

MEANING, refers to that which a BEING PERCEIVES from the EXPRESSION of a NOUMENON. This then is inherited, encoded and developed through the FRAME of the individual's ONTOGENY. It is inevitable then that different FRAMES arise.

Those BEINGS that are less able to recognize and reconcile these different FRAMES are then at greater risk in social groups of being misinformed or deceived.

Ultimately, short term success is an insufficient guide for future action. Locusts are successful but find themselves unable to escape developing from peaceful co-existance, as individuals into cannibalistic war, as a swarm. 

virtuality refers to abstractions of actuality that then pre-process EXPERIENCE.

Inherited and learnt by EXPERIENCE, our PERCEPTION is the recognition of what we can see; seeing what we expect to see, we then construct and integrate the data our eyes and other senses are capable of registering. 

The term BEING, applies here to all forms of LIFE, whether multicellular (humans, ants, plants, etc.); unicellular (bacteria, archaea, algae, etc.); or the MODULAR societies of slime molds, jellyfish, ants, humans, deer, etc.

BIOSEMIOSIS is a recursive process, enabling BEINGS to generate MEANING by aligning their PERCEPTION of their current EXPERIENCE with what they can RECOGNIZE from the EXPERIENCES previously EMBODIED in themselves, or externally, by themselves or through inheritance. ENDOSEMIOSIS and EXOSEMIOSIS then refer, respectively, to the RECOGNITION of internal and external NOUMENA..

BIOSEMIOSIS is a recursive process, enabling BEINGS to generate MEANING by aligning their PERCEPTION of their current EXPERIENCE with what they can RECOGNIZE from the EXPERIENCES previously EMBODIED in themselves, or externally, by themselves or through inheritance. ENDOSEMIOSIS and EXOSEMIOSIS then refer, respectively, to the RECOGNITION of internal and external NOUMENA..

A metatransition is a metasystem transition to EITHER a more complex OR a simpler structure, ultimately leading to a transitory OR a permanent evolutionary transition in individuality.

Here, metasystem refers to a general, rather than to a restricted, controlling or organizational system which maintains the homeostasis necessary for the functioning of a system and its subsystems.

functioning, disability and health

First drafted by the WHO in 1980,  the International Classification of Functioning (the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health), is an holistic overview of wellness and illness. Despite its publication, and the fact that today biopsychosocial models are taught in medical schools, the significance and impact on social organization and its institutions of these models might appear to citizens to have been relatively minimal — perhaps because of the powerful lobbies that work to promote a fundamentalist belief in scientific reductionism.

After nine years of international revision efforts coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Health Assembly on May 22, 2001, approved the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health and its abbreviation of "ICF." This classification was first created in 1980 ... by WHO to provide a unifying framework for classifying the consequences of disease. ... Functioning and disability are viewed as a complex interaction between the health condition of the individual and the contextual factors of the environment as well as personal factors. The picture produced by this combination of factors and dimensions is of "the person in his or her world." The classification treats these dimensions as interactive and dynamic rather than linear or static. It allows for an assessment of the degree of disability, although it is not a measurement instrument. It is applicable to all people, whatever their health condition. The language of the ICF is neutral as to etiology, placing the emphasis on function rather than condition or disease. It also is carefully designed to be relevant across cultures as well as age groups and genders, making it highly appropriate for heterogeneous populations. 

I'd like people to reconceptualize cancer as a biological event that triggers stress responses affecting how the disease progresses... Managing those stress responses by adopting healthy eating and exercise habits, getting a good night's sleep, and finding good emotional and social support, should be regarded as much a part of cancer treatment as chemotherapy or radiation.

The article, from which the quote was taken, although apparently accessible in 2024, has now been taken down by Stanford Medicine. The new article (at Stanford research builds link between sleep, cancer progression) still refers to Spiegal's work, but the expurgated quote there now, intentionally or otherwise, seems to downplay the research and to distance Stanford from Spiegal and the view he expressed.

life

Life is the state of being.

Being is the condition of BEINGS.

A BEING is descended from a BEING.

I am a BEING.

It is as correct or incorrect to say that hormones create love as it is to say that love creates hormones. Love is not definable in the way that hormones are; they are terms in different reference frames.

Noumenon, is a Greek word meaning "that which is perceived".  It is the word Kant used to identify the thing-in-itself, the underlying reality that is then recognized by an observer as a SIGN. 

Kant referred to recognition of the thing-in-itself as perception. Here however, PERCEPTION is used to label one of the four stages in the process of BIOSEMIOSIS that is bootstrapped by RECOGNITION.

Hydrozoa show great diversity of lifestyle; some species maintain the polyp form for their entire life and do not form medusae at all.  Polyps of some species propagate vegetatively, forming colonies.. polymorphism occurs in colonies of some species of hydrozoans and anthozoans, the polyps being specialized for functions such as feeding, defense, and sexual reproduction. 

Ruppert, Edward E.; Fox, Richard, S.; Barnes, Robert D. (2004). Invertebrate Zoology, 7th edition. Cengage Learning. pp. 148-174; cited in Jellyfish, Taxonomy (list item: Staurozoa), Wikipedia..

Fautin, Daphne G. and Sandra L. Romano. 1997. Cnidaria. Sea anemones, corals, jellyfish, sea pens, hydra. Version 24 April 1997. http://tolweb.org/Cnidaria/2461/1997.04.24 in The Tree of Life Web Project, http://tolweb.org/.

Anthropic, etc, refer here to anthropocentrism,  a narcissistic belief that the human species is the central fact and final aim of a universe that must therefore be understood in terms of human experience, needs, and values. 

Human beings are spatially and temporally limited parts of the whole that we call "universe"; yet we experience ourselves and our feelings as separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. 

close

delusions and illusions

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Einstein spoke the refined German of the Bildungsbürgertum, a language characterized by its precision. It might the be reasonable to assume, as an inspection of Einstein's note also suggests, that his use of the word Täuschung (delusion) twice and Illusion once, was considered not careless.

 The German word Täuschung in the original note, meaning 'delusion' (JPG opens in a new tab).

Etymologically the word delusion implies an action, a deceiving, referring here to that suffered by human beings through our consciousness, through which we perceive a deceptive appearance, the illusion of being "separated from the rest".

Technically, delusion is a belief that, though false, has been surrendered to and accepted by the whole mind as a truth; illusion is an impression that, though false, is entertained on the recommendation of the senses or the imagination. Illusion (n.), developed in Church Latin from the late 14c. onwards to mean: a "deceptive appearance".

On delusion, and illusion; from the Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved: 4 October 2022.

science

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.    Albert Einstein. 

Science is an elementary practice. Scientism is a belief. Eugenics and the Holocaust it drove are among the brutal consequences and stark reminders of not recognizing this distinction.

Hormone, from the Greek, hormon, meaning 'that which sets in motion'. 

from the Greek, akrasia, meaning 'loss of free will'.

frames

A FRAME refers here to a reference-frame; the perspective that a context gives to data that it describes or contextualizes.  Any kind of LANGUAGE then is a FRAME for the data it refers to.

A CULTURE is a broader, environmental FRAME. It is a meta-LANGUAGE that enables meaning to be inferred from verbal and other languages that evolved with it, and which interprets the languages of other CULTURES that are used within it. 

The following, for frames of reference, from the Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, aligns with that used here for FRAMES.

..a structure of concepts, values, customs, or views by means of which an individual or group perceives or evaluates data, communicates ideas, and regulates behavior.

false friends

Chinese consists of a single monosyllable for each word and often does not mark such grammatical features as tense or number. 

The accuracy of a translation is central to those who depend upon it, but although it is possible to translate, for instance, the complex procedures described by mathematical calculus into the elementary language of addition and subtraction, additional procedures of division and multiplication are required for accuracy. And the accurate translation of the infinitely more complex communications of human affairs, consistently proves to be an ever receding goal — one that effectively develops and reinforces interpersonal engagement.

While it may be possible to say anything in any LANGUAGE, doing so is not easy. Exact translations are generally only possible for the simplest of statements, and the more dissimilar the CULTURES of the languages involved, the more numerous, significant, and masked, false-friends of chance and semantics will be — as the meanings being referred to are first and foremost assumptions of belief.

CULTURES are at least as varied, as challenging to unravel, and perhaps as intransigent, as individual psychologies are. Their differences reflect the different histories of their peoples, families, and groups. Their languages have evolved to convey the meaning of those histories, of their trauma and privilege; to convey the wisdom, fears, and strategies their individuals have learned by experience; down across generations. Translations, because of this, above all are an an art more than a science. 

from the Translators' Preface, of Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu. Translated by Stephen Addis and Stanley Lombardo, Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.

False-friends can emerge, or arise by chance. Chance false-friends are words whose appearance is the same or similar in two or more languages but which have different meanings. Semantic false-friends are those whose meaning have diverged over time and distance. Semantic false-friends can be can be either full or partial.

partial [semantic] false friends, .. are those words that have several senses, some of which coincide in both languages while others do not. 

Partial semantic false-friends then, are fostered CULTURALLY rather than linguistically. They represent conscious divergences of belief, rather than accidents. These perhaps, carry the greatest risk of miscomprehension; and of this then snowballing. 

An example of the miscomprehensions that readily arise from partial semantic false-friends, is provided by The Withdrawal Agreement that governed the procedures to be followed by European Union Member States and the United Kingdom in the implementation of the UK's withdrawal from the EU.

A key provision of this Agreement was the process to be followed for notifying affected residents of the Agreement's impact on them personally and of any steps they needed to follow to confirm the rights it had safeguarded for them in the country of their residence. The most significant element of this provision then, was that it required its signatories to take all reasonable steps to inform affected residents of changes to their status, and of the country specific procedures that these residents would then need to follow. This provision, in Finnish however, allowed the Finnish government to understand they were required simply to announce the changes through commonly used channels; e.g. by posts on the Government's Facebook page and in Finnish newspapers; and that they were not required, for instance, to notify affected residents by post, or to CC them the information it sent to their agencies notifying them of the changes it had made to their status.

...

The impact of this particular partial semantic false-friend may remind some of the Vogons, in the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and of their communications with the people of Earth to notify them of the imminent demolition of their planet. .

from False friends: their origin and semantics in some selected languages. Pedro J. Chamizo Dominguez, Brigitte Nerlich, 2002, Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 1833-1849. 

People of Earth, your attention, please. This is Prostetnic Vogon, Jeltz, of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system. And regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you. ...There's no point in acting surprised about it! All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now. ... What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven's sake, mankind, it's only four light years away. You know, I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.

Meta-language — a language used to describe or contextualize another language.

The prefix "meta-" is used here as it is used in the term meta-language — a language used to describe or contextualize another language.

Language: a system of arbitrary signals, symbols or signs, used to communicate information. 

Meaning: the sense or reference of an expression.

Semantic: of or relating to meaning. 

to communicate: to convey information through a system of arbitrary signals. 

to recognize: to know something as the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something known before. 

from the poem The Stare's Nest by My Window, published in Meditations In Time Of Civil War (1922-23), by William Butler Yeats — on the Irish Civil War.

definition

corporatism

the organization of a state on a corporative basis. — Collins English Dictionary.

the principles, doctrine, or system of corporative organization of a political unit, as a city or state. [1885-90] corporatist. — Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary.

the control of a state or organization by large interest groups; "individualism is in danger of being swamped by a kind of corporatism" — TFD Thesaurus, Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection.

corporative

of a state organized into and governed by corporations of individuals involved in any given profession, industry, etc. — Collins English Dictionary.

of or relating to a government or political system in which the principal economic functions, such as banking, industry, labor, and government, are organized as corporate entities. — American Heritage Dictionary.

of or pertaining to a political system under which the principal economic functions, as banking, industry, and labor, are organized as corporate entities. — Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary.