Semiotics Proved the Cat

MikeL

In my previous OP, I argued that because we use symbols to understand our world, it is easy to mistakenly believe we have achieved a complete understanding of the world when the symbols are understood. When we believe we understand our world completely we can dispense with other explanations, such as God. Thus I claimed that Semiotics Killed the Cat.

Life is a series of emergent phenomenon. From the cycles to the cells, tissues, and systems of the body, each emergent layer has a new set of symbols to go with it. Thus, it no longer becomes necessary to understand the semiotics of covalent bonding interactions when trying to understand the circulatory system. It is highly feasible that an exercise physiologist and a chemist may have a hard time understanding each other. Even though they both deal in the body, they speak a different language using different semiotics.

The previous OP argued that by only knowing something at one level it is impossible to truly claim to know something properly, as there are all the levels beneath that level down into the quantum level and beyond. We are strung out partway along the continuum of infinite regress and egress using symbols to make sense of our world.

This was an important point because not being able to know anything properly opened the door again on the idea of a God. It is only when we claim to know precisely all the pieces and how they work does the idea of a God become superfluous rubbish.

It was therefore my contention that semiotics killed the cat. That a semiotic understanding of the ‘local level’ caused people to discard the notion of God because it seemed unnecessary. I suggested that in fact because we cannot truly know anything at all, we cannot rule out a God.

It has since occurred to me though, that God himself is a semiotic.

To use Pierce, because of his great popularity amongst philosophers on the forum and his usefulness in this description: A semiotic has a signifying element (the pointer), the object (what is being pointed to), and the interpretant (the thing that sees and understands the sign).

With God, obviously, we are the interpretant.
The object being pointed to is a creator.
The pointer (signifying element) is where all the trouble is. We like to use God to explain the holes. We see a gap in understanding and identify that as a signifying element – aha! There is God!

Is God just some spac filler for our ideas? Maybe, but let’s give him a firm place as the creator of the universe. Once we have satisfied the signifying element part, that God exists can be argued on the basis of semiotics because he is just as ‘real’ as any other semiotic entity, having met all three conditions. How do you get around that? Do you argue false flag? After all, our world is just symbols being interpreted.

Following this logic, does semiotics pull down the wall between the real and the…unreal?

Or have I got it completely wrong?

apokrisis

Following this logic, does semiotics pull down the wall between the real and the…unreal? — MikeL

One thing that looks missing is that semiosis stresses the purposefulness or usefulness of "having knowledge". So it is about having a functional relationship with the world - a physical or embodied engagement and not just a passive intellectual one.

So semiosis always keeps us in the world, even as it does that by separating us from that world. It is a way of stepping back that then means we can become "a self" that has "a purpose". And "knowledge" or "truth" doesn't claim to go beyond that.

That is why instead of knowledge being all about how many facts you can amass, it is about how many you can functionally afford to ignore. Attention is an information filter. Perception is a reduction of the world to simple "arrangements of objects". Wisdom is about knowing what to do without even having to think it out.

So God - as your chosen example here - is either a functional belief in your life, or not. There is no real need to tear down the Kantian wall between mind and world, between belief and truth. At the core of Peircean semiosis is simply the pragmatism of belief that demonstrably works.

Perhaps your prayers and faith will cure your cancer. It's a hypothesis. Try it and see.

Or perhaps, in seeking to exist successfully in the world, following the optimum path of the inductive method, God just drops out of your mental picture as an explanatory irrelevancy. It becomes an idea serving no real function.

Everywhere science looks, it doesn't seem to find Him. So belief just falls away. No need to "disprove" His existence as truth is an illusory goal. A purpose false to the nature of the semiotic process itself.

MikeL

There is no real need to tear down the Kantian wall between mind and world — apokrisis

Hmmm, I think their might be, although I find the mind a little boring.

Firstly and most obviously the perception and assignment of meaning occurs in the mind - a kind of deductive reasoning. We often have to show other people the signs before they also can see it with their mind.

Secondly though is inductive reasoning - aposteriori reasoning. When we create a hypothesis about the world we assign different variables in it semiotic values. We then ping the ball off them to see if the hypothesis holds. Does Pierce say anything about pinging the ball, testing the system?

Getting off the mind though, I know that butterflies have UV colorations on their wings that we cannot see with our naked eyes. By turning UV lights on the world we know, we see a whole different bunch of semiotics light up that before had no relationship to our reality. As we keep shining different lights on different things or on the same things we see different semiotic relationships and the familiar ones become obscure.

Mathematics is semiotic. One again we are back in the realm of mind and perception as well as the nature of nature. I don't know how to keep them apart using semiotics.

MikeL

↪apokrisis

I think what you have with Pierce is a mind model of the universe. The need for an interpretant makes its so.

When we look at the bacteria you mentioned in the previous OP which had a chemoreceptor and flagella, I can't see that as a semiotic definition, at least not one that would satisfy Pierce's definition. It's a straight cause and effect relationship. Rather than interpretation you have signal transduction, which is just a fancy see-saw.

If the inference of semiotics as a mind model is correct, the implication would be that there is no distinction between reality and non-reality so long as the three conditions of object, signifying element, and interpretant can be met.

I don't think that saying that Pierce stresses this or that is a strong position. It is a bit like saying he said don't use it when it doesn't work. It is either one thing or it isn't. I don't have access to his original definitions of signifying element, object and interpretant, but maybe you do and can shed some light on it.

apokrisis

Rather than interpretation you have signal transduction, — MikeL

You could say that about the brain too.

Or maybe a count of food fragments is a sign that points meaningfully towards a food source? There is a reason for the whole chemoreceptor set-up?

MikeL

Rather than interpretation you have signal transduction,
— MikeL

You could say that about the brain too. — apokrisis

You could, but you would be then annihilating the whole premise of signalling and interpretation and replacing it with cause and effect.

Or maybe a count of food fragments is a sign that points meaningfully towards a food source? — apokrisis

But where is the interpretation? What interprets the count?

Just off the top of my head, it is more likely that an array of chemoreceptors all connected mechanically to the flagella cause an angular change in the propulsive tail relative to the greatest concentration of activation. The angular change would have to happen either way to give directionality right?

There is a reason for the whole chemoreceptor set-up? — apokrisis

The reason is to get food. Are you suggesting the interpretant is a sentient entity that decided to make one, or that evolution is sentient?

Forgottenticket

There are various pragmatic arguments for God's existence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Will_to_Believe James' will to believe essay is probably the best example of them so in that sense God would fulfill the criteria of your example.

I think what you have with Pierce is a mind model of the universe. The need for an interpretant makes its so. — MikeL

It does look like that. The interpretant part appears suspicious and wishy-washy. Let's use the example of a dictionary: you have the ink and the form of the word for the representamen. The semiotic object would be the description/definition of the word. And the interpretant would be the (literate) person who reads it.
It appears pansemiosis would have to also be panpsychism of some sort.

fdrake

↪MikeL

Also @apokrisis and @StreetlightX for interest.

As was pointed out in the previous thread you made on semiosis, one advantage of the Piercian view of it is that we can consider subject-object semiosis as a particular case of the more general object-object semiosis. IE, the triadic nature of sign, interpretant and object does not necessarily occur solely between humans or in a derived virtual plane from the activity of humans (such as the imaginary in Zizek's Lacanianism). This levelling of the playing field facilitates a flat ontology, in the sense that there are no privileged stratum of interpretant required for semiogenesis; there is no subject held monopoly on meaning; we objects can be said to play amongst ourselves. Apokrisis takes this a step further, inscribing the sign (NB: including its interpretants and objects) into the general concepts of information and entropy.

However, such a levelling can be interpreted as a reification of signs as objects and relations in the world, rather than representations of object-object relations; confusing map for the territory because the concept of representation has been discarded, elided and subsumed within the concept of function. Ray Brassier makes a similar point against so called flat (object oriented) ontologies:

The epistemic insistence on the explanatory indispensability of representation does not necessarily entail these* nefarious ontological consequences. Since thoughts of things are not the things that are thought, it is necessary to explain how thoughts are related to things while distinguishing their causal connection from their justificatory relation. This is the Kantian problem. It cannot be dismissed by simply levelling the distinction between thoughts and things, which is what flat ontology seems to require. — Ray Brassier, Delevelling, Against Flat Ontologies

*the world being made of facts, not things

Despite this passage being aimed at ontological accounts centred around propositions and facts, the criticism applies just as well to theories that similarly quantise sense and thusly subordinates objects and flows to their senseful interactions. This inscription of signs into the real in a fundamental way elides that signs are precisely representational packets of phenomena - equating ideas of epistemological access with ontological relation. Ray Brassier continues:

epistemic subjectivity is ineliminable, but it is neither supernatural nor
immutable. It embodies a mutable conceptual structure embedded in the natural order. Concepts change over time because the way in which we know the world is conditioned by the way in which the world changes. Time conditions knowing, even if it is possible to say true things about the way
the world is at any particular moment or slice of the cognitive process. — Ray Brassier

The conflation between epistemological (informing-relational) access and ontological relation (determining/dynamical-relational) through their mutual subsumption to the sign does not account for the processes which give rise to individuated elements of the sign, nor how they mutually constitute in the immanent plane of signs and sign relations. We still require virtual and informational categories beyond the sign in order to account for a reality unconditioned (except as potential) by them which allows sign systems to emerge and integrate.

Perhaps this can be phrased as 'what are the conditions that allowed the dyadic structure of the real to form?', then the irreducible constituents of the sign take on a transcendental image; haunting the immanent plane of this flat ontology with a law it could not generate, only be subsumed under.

MikeL

Hi fdrake, I have to admit I find this kind of language tough going so a lot of this response will be clarification and assumed meaning.

IE, the triadic nature of sign, interpretant and object does not necessarily occur solely between humans or in a derived virtual plane from the activity of humans — fdrake

While I think that it's a true statement to say that it does not necessarily occur solely with humans, it does require a sentience rather than a cause and effect mechanism. I can think of no instance where sentience would not be involved as interpretation is a cognitive process.

This levelling of the playing field facilitates a flat ontology, in the sense that there are no privileged stratum of interpretant required for semiogenesis; there is no subject held monopoly on meaning; we objects can be said to play amongst ourselves. — fdrake

Is the assertion that the interpretant is being removed so we are left with a cause and effect relationship? Is that what you mean when you say us objects can play amongst ourselves? 'Meaning' by definition would seem to possess a subject held monopoly. It is the subject that ascribes meaning to the world through the semiotic pattern interactions they observe. Different subjects may observe different patterns or the same pattern, but the meaning is theirs alone.

Since thoughts of things are not the things that are thought, it is necessary to explain how thoughts are related to things while distinguishing their causal connection from their justificatory relation. This is the Kantian problem. It cannot be dismissed by simply levelling the distinction between thoughts and things, which is what flat ontology seems to require. — Ray Brassier, Delevelling, Against Flat Ontologies

I think this is the point I'm arguing. The Piercian model, by invoking an interpretant becomes a mind model of the universe. For it not to be this would require the definitions of object, interpretant and object signifier to specifically state such a thing.

I think somewhere that Apokrisis described an object becoming semiotic when its material properties were not what was causal. This definition really struck a cord with me. It makes a lot of sense.

It is in the abstract that signs become representational packets without physical substance, however I find such representations as a heuristic for understanding complex patterns much more useful. This idea though is completely different to the description of an interaction between an object and a subject.

Thus personally I prefer to diverge from Piercean semiotics and adopt the method of looking at objects in terms of their contributions to a system and having established that relationship, assigning it a semiotic value (eg this is a pipe) to it. Some confusion amongst readers has arisen over this approach.

MikeL

↪JupiterJess

Hi Jupiter Jess, I agree that invoking even a pre-sentient awareness is panpsychic. It would be the only concievable workaround for the Piercean interpretant that I can think of.

apokrisis

You could, but you would be then annihilating the whole premise of signalling and interpretation and replacing it with cause and effect. — MikeL

Which is then what you did in saying chemoreception is "just signal transduction".

In material terms, that might be true. In informational terms, it is missing the point.

Just off the top of my head, it is more likely that an array of chemoreceptors all connected mechanically to the flagella cause an angular change in the propulsive tail relative to the greatest concentration of activation. The angular change would have to happen either way to give directionality right? — MikeL

Remember that the story is in fact more elegantly simple. If the flagella turn one way, they entangle and propel in a straight line. If they spin the other, they untangle and the bacterium tumbles randomly ... until it picks up the right sign to change its mind again.

So there is a strong dichotomy of action built in. Either the bacterium goes purposefully in a single direction or tumbles confusedly in all possible directions. The choice is reduced to a simple decision - either I know what I'm doing, or I absolutely don't. Either I am definite, or I am vague.

As the simplest life form, the humble bacterium is right down there at the base of semiotics in terms of how it understands its reality. It doesn't have the luxury of chosing path A over path B. It just switches in binary fashion between blind determinism and absolute randomness.

There is as little thought or interpretance going on as possible ... yet also the first definite evidence of thought or interpretance.

The reason is to get food. Are you suggesting the interpretant is a sentient entity that decided to make one, or that evolution is sentient? — MikeL

An interpretant is an established habit. Sentience implies free choices (as well as adaptive or intelligent habits).

So is a "hardwired" evolutionary habit evidence of a choice having been made, but there then being also only the one choice? Is it an example of sentience manifest, or instead an example of the ground state in which sentience is first beginning to arise?

Evolution could conceivably permit the bacterium - at least at the long-run species level - to choose a different behaviour. For the sake of argument, it could tumble whenever it found itself on the right track towards food, and swim blindly straight ahead when it isn't. It could reverse its habitual choice (maybe because it exists in a culture run by a mad scientist that feeds it for doing the "wrong thing").

So it might be ambiguous or vague as to whether a creature with a single hardwired habit, a single choice, is properly sentient. But then that same definition does seem to permit sentience at the level of the species over multiple generations. The species can change its mind and make other choices over time.

Once you stop thinking about "mind" as some kind of dualistic soul-stuff, and instead frame it in semiotic terms, all sorts of useful new metaphysics results. You can start to make concrete proposals about the actual world out there.

apokrisis

However, such a levelling can be interpreted as a reification of signs as objects and relations in the world, rather than representations of object-object relations; confusing map for the territory because the concept of representation has been discarded, elided and subsumed within the concept of function. — fdrake

It is to avoid that confusion that I keep reminding folk that epistemology and ontology are separate things.

So subject-object describes an epistemic relation (one that arises ontically due to what Howard Pattee calls the "epistemic cut" of a modelling relation). We are spinning our own world of sign - a lived umwelt - from inside our heads.

And object-object describes ontology itself in terms of a generalised semiosis. Now it is the world making its own meaning via sign relations.

I hope that this is the point you were appearing to agree with.

That leads to a more general definition of sign (within a sign relation). I have been stressing - a point MikeL did more than just mention :) - that a sign involves a reduction of information. It is not a reification - a Saussurian signifier or representation - but an active ignoring of material facticity. A filtering out of the dynamical environment, the thing in itself, so as to respond only to some "useful aspect" of the world. Reality is the totality of all that there is. A sign is a reduction of that to some token to which we feel justifies or secures an appropriate habitual response.

Now that describes semiosis of the ordinary subject-object kind - semiosis as life and mind acting in the world. But an information theoretic physics - an object-object semiosis - sees the same information reduction principle applying in the hierarchical organisation of nature in general. Just because of event horizons, every particle or material object is responding to a reduced view of the total environment.

And that is basic to probability theory (your strong interest?) as the principle of indifference. The ability to filter out micro-causes is how macro-states come to be real. An ideal gas has an actual pressure and temperature because all the detailed kinetics of the constituent particles can be justifiably averaged over, or ignored.

The Piercian model, by invoking an interpretant becomes a mind model of the universe. For it not to be this would require the definitions of object, interpretant and object signifier to specifically state such a thing. — MikeL

With the proviso that the ontology is not ordinary idealism. Instead, it starts with a science of meaning - it starts with where we know that "the mind" hasn't already been left out of the realist picture - and then follows that trail back to where what we mean by "mind" has pretty much vanished, when it has become the least mindful thing we can imagine.

So consciousness is not found at the end of the semiotic trail. Only its rawest form remains - the bare semiotic relation that is the ultimate cause of "mindfulness" of any kind.

MikeL

↪apokrisis

the bare semiotic relation that is the ultimate cause of "mindfulness" of any kind. — apokrisis

Semiotics it seems is becoming an explanation for the mind as well as our understanding of the world.

I really don't have any problem with the assertions if we relegate the interpretant to a backseat in the mind and work forward with subject and object. It all seems very causal and easy to follow, but I will clarify some things with you and point a couple out.

An interpretant is an established habit. — apokrisis

Is the interpretant in your definition now describing the response of the subject to the object or signifying element?

There is as little thought or interpretance going on as possible ... yet also the first definite evidence of thought or interpretance. — apokrisis

So is a "hardwired" evolutionary habit evidence of a choice having been made, but there then being also only the one choice? Is it an example of sentience manifest, or instead an example of the ground state in which sentience is first beginning to arise? — apokrisis

So you're arguing that thought becomes the selection of a single response from many choices? This position seems justified enough at a base level - assigning different weightings to choices so that one will always trump the other in a totally mechanistic way seems ok.

Higher order thinking becomes more of a problem. Analysis, planning, tricking, understanding and reflecting would all involve deliberately invoking imaginary semiotic relationship pathways in the mind to determine the most likely response in reality. In this case the signifiers are being generated by the interpretant and then interpreted by him. Despite an enormous evolutionary selection that must exist for the property of prediction, I think that imagination has great difficulty arising through cause and effect coupling or any other mechanical definition.

Semiotics also has the problem of resolving dual conflicts. Lets give our bacterium some more flagella. What happens when the left and right chemoreceptor light up at the same time? The only reasonable argument I can see would be the claim that there is never simultaneity in effector-response nor ever an exact equal weighting of two things, as simultaneous as they may appear. A see-saw with a 100kg weight placed on both sides at the same time will not move.

Which is then what you did in saying chemoreception is "just signal transduction".

In material terms, that might be true. In informational terms, it is missing the point. — apokrisis

I'm not sure what you're driving at, so can you explain or give an explanation of a semiotic relationship in terms of information?

fdrake

A reply to @MikeL and @apokrisis

↪MikeL

No worries. I wrote that post mostly to clear my own head and explore the ideas in the paper. I'm grateful to any responses to my poorly formulated metaphysical nonsense.

Brief glossary of how I use the terms:

Reveal

virtual = stuff that exists but isn't actual, rocks = actual, ideas, signs etc = virtual. Ambiguities in it: are constraints like laws of nature or statistical tendencies virtual or actual?
flat ontology = an account of being in which there's no privileged entity or process (IE not substance + modifications, not discourse + its constituents)
immanent plane = all stuff conceived under the aspect of a flat ontology, plane because it connotes flatness, immanent because there's no 'entity above others'.
epistemic access = x has epistemic access to y if x can be informed about the status of y in some way - more reference to the concept those words suggests rather than a specific account thereof
ontological relation = a real relation between stuff in an ontology, stuff doing stuff to stuff or stuff being affected by stuff (stuff being a placeholder for the entities in an ontology, doing and affecting being placeholders for fleshed out particular relations in an ontology

While I think that it's a true statement to say that it does not necessarily occur solely with humans, it does require a sentience rather than a cause and effect mechanism. I can think of no instance where sentience would not be involved as interpretation is a cognitive process. — @MikeL

Is the assertion that the interpretant is being removed so we are left with a cause and effect relationship? Is that what you mean when you say us objects can play amongst ourselves? 'Meaning' by definition would seem to possess a subject held monopoly. It is the subject that ascribes meaning to the world through the semiotic pattern interactions they observe. Different subjects may observe different patterns or the same pattern, but the meaning is theirs alone.

I think stuff can have meaning for stuff in a broader sense than 'meaningful language items'. A water drop falls on a flat floor, it expands to a circle - the determinative elements for the dynamics of something can be taken as the thing 'thinking' how to act in its environs. I don't mean literally thinking, I mean something which is actual being conditioned through something which is virtual. Humans as consumers and bearers of signs aren't unique in this respect - when the sign is the 'flattening' concept for a flat ontology based on information/signs.

The water drop as an interpretant is translating a general dynamical pattern in terms of surface tension minimisation and surface area maximisation into the specific context of the composite object/system (floor,drop) - this could be termed a 'habit' in Apokrisis' sense, or the drop 'thinking' in the way I've put it. The signifying element, what links interpretant to object would be the frontier of expansion of the drop, or the frontier of expansion extended in time.

That leads to a more general definition of sign (within a sign relation). I have been stressing - a point MikeL did more than just mention :) - that a sign involves a reduction of information. It is not a reification - a Saussurian signifier or representation - but an active ignoring of material facticity. A filtering out of the dynamical environment, the thing in itself, so as to respond only to some "useful aspect" of the world. Reality is the totality of all that there is. A sign is a reduction of that to some token to which we feel justifies or secures an appropriate habitual response.

Now that describes semiosis of the ordinary subject-object kind - semiosis as life and mind acting in the world. But an information theoretic physics - an object-object semiosis - sees the same information reduction principle applying in the hierarchical organisation of nature in general. Just because of event horizons, every particle or material object is responding to a reduced view of the total environment.

And that is basic to probability theory (your strong interest?) as the principle of indifference. The ability to filter out micro-causes is how macro-states come to be real. An ideal gas has an actual pressure and temperature because all the detailed kinetics of the constituent particles can be justifiably averaged over, or ignored. — Apokrisis

I don't think it would manifest as the principle of indifference, it would manifest as the conditional entropy of X given Y and irrelevants U being equal to the conditional entropy of X given Y - a statement of conditional independence of X given Y from the irrelevant variables U.

Regardless, my point is that the general object-object semiosis conditions subject-object semiosis as a special case, so the idea of representation - aspects of the virtual we have captured conditioning the actual in a summary/pictorial form - which general semiosis is derived from is instead 'let to play among the objects', collapsing the distinction between what's virtual and what's actual by eliminating epistemic subjectivity.

Isn't a sign a composite of facts - predicables of different orders and types - not things?

apokrisis

. Despite an enormous evolutionary selection that must exist for the property of prediction, I think that imagination has great difficulty arising through cause and effect coupling or any other mechanical definition. — MikeL

Not really as the way the brain "computes" is based on generating a forward model of the world. It attempts to predict its inputs, imagine the world as it is just about to be in the next instant.

Google Bayesian brain theory to get the up to date neuro picture.

So imagination is the basis for awareness, not a difficult to explain bolt-on. We are always expecting something, and so that is how we are capable of being surprised. There is a forward projection to be contradicted.

Semiotics also has the problem of resolving dual conflicts. Lets give our bacterium some more flagella. What happens when the left and right chemoreceptor light up at the same time? The only reasonable argument I can see would be the claim that there is never simultaneity in effector-response nor ever an exact equal weighting of two things, as simultaneous as they may appear. A see-saw with a 100kg weight placed on both sides at the same time will not move. — MikeL

Why would you invent difficulties just to make the argument difficult? It seems an odd habit of thought you have here. Would evolution favour a set up that doesnt work?

But anyway, your left and right chemoreceptors would seem to be on the front end, not the back end, so there would still be a hardwired asymmetry. You haven't yet managed to imagine Buridan's Ass.

Semiotics Proved the Cat

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