anodyne. anything that alleviates mental distress and pain.

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.

John Locke, from: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1689, I.ii.2: 405.

Niels Bohr, in 'Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists', (1963), physicist, and founder of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen.

Rudyard Kipling, in a speech given to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, 1923. 

While, nonlocal, means not of, affecting, or confined to a limited area or part, here, the term, NONLOCAL, is informed by its use in computing; referring to something in a nest of spaces that it depends upon but can only influence through something in its nearest neighbouring space. 

nonlocal societies

At first, the technological ecosystems of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others, overlapped, excluded, or consumed one another in a lawful if unhelpful manner; however, as they have developed, and evolved, the impact of their COLONIALIZATION has deepened. Governments, as well as large commercial organizations have all now moved online, divesting themselves of their real connection to citizens and customers seemingly for the most part unnoticed. 

The COLONIALIZATION offered the opportunity for 'fact-washing' and enforced 'balance', that has factionalized and neutralized debate. Driven by the echoing marketing algorithms of their new non-geographic mega-societies, flash-mobs and unmoored forms of extremism have brought back ancient and violent forms of political engagement. Corporate AI is leading society back in time, to when it was ruled remotely from palaces and courts, a society of ethics without morals, revenge without justice, where 'militia' of every form thrived.

colonial adj, colony n, having a way of life as part of a community. after: Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary colonialize (1864), to make colonial in character. Online Etymology Dictionary colonialization, the act of bringing into subjection or subjugation by colonializing. Collins Dictionary

At the time of writing Microsoft owned the software leased by, amongst others, the European Commission and its delegate states, the British government, and the Finnish government. This software is crafted by Microsoft  to deliver the 'back-office' functionality that is now the central part of the only 'realities' of these organizations that citizens have to engage with.

Microsoft's decision to block access to the email account of International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor due to sanctions imposed by the US government shows us that the EU cannot trust US operating system providers. The US applied sanctions in February to ICC staff in response to their investigations into Israeli politicians. This challenges the trust of all users of Microsoft's cloud technologies in Europe. ...Naturally, US companies must comply with US law. For Europeans, this means we cannot trust the reliability and security of US companies' operating systems. A large part of our public sectors' services rely on Microsoft's products. This is a major cause of uncertainty.     Aura Salla, Finnish MEP.

Welcome to the EU Policy Blog, Microsoft's platform for sharing insights on the issues impacting Europe in the digital age. This is a forum to discuss the latest trends and research, as well as regulatory and policy developments that are shaping how European citizens, businesses, governments and societies use technology to achieve more every day.

Microsoft will escape largely unscathed from a major antitrust investigation by the European Commission that could have resulted in billion-dollar fines

gene culture

The following quotes, taken from the text of Gene-culture coevolution and the nature of human sociality,  by Herbert Gintis, illustrate the evolutionary transformation driven by the relationship between CULTURES and genes.

A. Biology and culture are intertwined. Both are transmitted vertically, from parents to offspring, and also horizontally, to unrelated individuals, as in the transfer of genes between lineages, of microbes and of many plant species, or by beaver dams, bee hives, and social structures like mating and hunting.

B. The construction of environmental and cultural niches are widespread examples of non-genetic (epigenetic) inheritance. The more dependable environmental interactions that they lead to are a basis for the genetic selection of those that construct them, if through constructing them their fitness is enhanced.

C. The origin of the eusociality of honeybees probably lay in their high degree of genetic relatedness but it persists in modern species despite the fact that relatedness in the hive is generally quite low, due to multiple queen matings, multiple queens, queen deaths and the like. The social structure of the hive is transmitted epigenetically across generations, and the honeybee genome is an adaptation to that social structure which was laid down in the distant past.

broadcasting

The development and behaviour of multicellular BEINGS — humans, plants, etc., is driven and co-ordinated by ENDOSEMIOSIS; internal signaling, such as that delivered through endocrine (hormone) and neural systems.  This is impacted by that of social groups, which are formed, maintained, and coordinated through external signaling, EXOSEMIOSIS, the BROADCASTING of sounds, GESTURES, light, SCENTS, and SYMBOLS.

BEINGS with lifecycles that include both individual (unicellular) and social (multicellular) forms, transform, coordinate and develop these through, for instance, acrasins, chemical messengers similar to hormones. These function both as EXOSEMIOTIC and ENDOSEMIOTIC systems, BROADCASTING the signals which bring individuals together and then coordinate their social forms.

In addition to neural and endocrine systems, BEINGS have evolved complex immune systems, fully integrated with their other ENDOSEMIOTIC systems, to survive the cellular level attacks of rapidly evolving pathogens. Generally, individuals and their environments have adapted and evolved together slowly; however, virtual organizations, evolving ungoverned in virtual reality, defend themselves deliberately against adaptations that do not actively serve the objectives of their owners.

social environments

The LANGUAGE of SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS is BIOSEMIOSIS, a SIGNALING that is ubiquitous, universal and inescapable. All BEINGS, including ourselves, and all CULTURES, including our own, are SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS, the elementary consequence of an EXPRESSION and PERCEPTION that is bootstrapped by RECOGNITION. 

The roots of plants create a narrow region, known as the rhizosphere, that supports many microorganisms, known as the root microbiome.... microorganisms in the root microbiome are able to interact with each other and surrounding plants through signals and cues. For example, through chemical signals, mycorrhizal fungi are able to communicate with the root systems of many plants... This results in a mutualistic symbiosis between the two. However, these signals can be eavesdropped by other microorganisms, such as the soil bacteria, Myxococcus xanthus, which preys on other bacteria... Eavesdropping can lead to large-scale, evolutionary consequences. For example, in adapting to avoid local eavesdroppers signal divergence can occur and lead to populations becoming isolated by being unable to communicate with each other. 

from Microorganism, Plants and soil., retrieved from Wikipedia and edited 20/12'2025.

python

The definition used here for the term, NONLOCAL — something in a nest of spaces that it depends upon but can only influence through something in its nearest neighbouring space — is a generalized version of its definition in Python (a computer programing language) — the word, 'scope' in that being replaced by the word, 'space':

The term "nonlocal" in Python refers to a keyword used within nested functions to indicate that a variable should refer to......a previously bound variable in the nearest enclosing but non-global scope. 

...as sales assistants seem to regularly say to customers...

Such a response — referring customers to their website or to someone with higher access rights to the website than they have — seems the only one available to both front-line and other staff when interactions in NONLOCAL societies go off-script.

Valid values for the 'variable', "sales assistant", now regularly include, "manager", "supervisor", "doctor", "teacher", "lawyer", "accountant", "MP", "ambassador",....

The quote combines that given by DuckDuckGo's SearchAssist and the one that it seems largely to be based on, a post at Geeks For Geeks:

What fueled the resistance to the first Gilded Age.. whether in America or back in Europe, was the fact that many .. had a recent memory of a different kind of economic system. 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.

Information and communication technologies have enabled a coup the impact of which has been fundamental. Not only have the means of production, distribution, and ownership in societies, been substituted and eliminated, but the means of the social relations within them.

The younger the person the more formative this transformation of inter-personal and intra-personal SEMIOSIS has been, and the less visible for the individual to identify — "a change from what?" — But although the change is of something that has never been known and can no longer exist, the stress of adapting to it has been deep and palpable;  and as with privation it will endure, like the nagging of an itch in a phantom limb.

CULTURAL MEMORY, the embodied cognition of earlier states,  becomes redundant when disused, and is then erased in the normal manner simply by overwriting. We no longer have, for instance, the CULTURAL MEMORY of the avarice and cupidity of the colonial era and the Industrial Revolution that led to the 'first' Gilded Age;  And the CULTURAL MEMORY of that has in turn been destroyed by the patricidal extermination of the Great European War (1914 - 1945).

Perhaps the multi-scalar nature of the continuing technological transformation of information and communications, and the simplistic modern forms of its social intercourse, have made it difficult for researchers to assess and commentators to highlight. Or perhaps it is an absence of the CULTURAL MEMORY that's required to do so.

The first Gilded Age, from the 1870s to 1890s, was named after Mark Twain's novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which satirized the excesses and societal problems which had arisen from laissez-faire capitalism, political corruption, and wealth inequality. Named then for its resemblance to the first, a second Gilded Age is considered to have begun between the 1980s and 2010s, and to continue to the present day.

The narrative of a second Gilded Age erroneously suggests that the current dynamics are repeating those of the late nineteenth century. (But) these are profoundly different historical moments. ... 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.

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.