SYNOPTICS TO SEMIOSIS
Human history has been the history of paradigms; the
major breakthroughs and upheavals have been the result (or root)
of paradigm shifts. Without belaboring the point, I'd like to
note that in cultural and technological developments, it has been
shifts such as nomad herders to farmers, bronze to iron, and the
like, which illustrate this pattern. Hence we now speak of the
Industrial Revolution, Space Age, Information Age, and so
on as examples of the stages of our advancement.
The important point here is that such epochal changes
as are credited to Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Hubble,
and Einstein have famously involved changes in consensus reality;
that is, the real revolution was the beginning of a whole new
worldview. The knowledge base in each case was already in place;
bits and pieces of the puzzle had to come together over time,
until somebody came along and was able to recognize the image as
a whole, as the puzzle not just the pieces, the forest, not just
the trees.
When Newton said. "If I have seen farther than
others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giantsē
it was not only false modesty on his part but also literal truth.
As well as an apt metaphor indeed. The behavior of bodies in
motion had been understood for centuries; the word ballistics
comes from ballista, after all. But it was Newton who quantified
not just the mode but the model; a new paradigm based on old data.
Likewise Einstein drew on the work of others going
back through time in developing his own groundbreaking ideas. His
greatest gift lay in his insight into the nature of phenomenality
leaving Newton's clockworks behind. He himself said that his most
powerful tool was imagination; where rigorous science was
concerned, he referred to himself as a 'fraud'. Yet by the impact
of Einstein's work we are still engaged in a paradigm which in
some ways has taken us farther than any other before it.
Again, I've got to emphasize that what we're dealing
with here is not a new world, but a new worldview; reframing of
consensus reality from a fresh perspective. Standing on the
shoulders of giants indeed. The most remarkable occurrence is
that the emergent collective vision results in a profound and
robust change in shared reality. To put it another way, precept
elicits percept.
Looked at in this context, metaphor is in reality our
most effective means of connecting up the dots: sign to symbol to
referent to meaning; what we think we see is what we feel we get.
Or not.
Change your metaphor and you change your world.
Isn't that what all the shouting's always been about?
DWEEDLETUM
AND DEEDLETWEE
I've long found it useful to conceptualize models for
the notions I'm trying to work through. Several models have been
proved robust enough to be worth keeping, elaborating, and
sharing. The fun part's when they're flexible enough to adapt to
a number of applications as the need may arise. At any rate I'd
like to discuss a few of the most useful models here; they are (in
order of appearance) - the Dandelion, the Surfer, the Glove, and
my latest and favorite, the GUI Model.
The Dandelion, Surfer, and Glove have all been
detailed elsewhere; so I'll just give a brief sketch of them here.
My earliest epistemological musings taught me some of
the pitfalls of visualizing the complex branchings ideas can lead
into; particularly the danger of confusing number and entity. It
helped me to imagine the form of the Dandelion, where many
filaments radiate from a common center. I found the model to be
useful in examining science, philosophy, culture, the arts: in
fact any conceptual set of relationships defined through the
assignment of meanings. An interesting case in point is that the
word *dandelion* comes from the french dents de lion -
lion's teeth - from the serrated shape of its leaves.
Decades passed until I encountered chaos theory; and
I needed a simple way to model the interactions of emergent
order, self-organiized criticality, the Butterfly Effect, and, of
course, autopoiesis, to name a few. Borrowing a phrase from a
scifi book by Rudy Rucker, I came up with the Surfer. By the
dynamic equilibrium of balance, force, chaos and order, the
shoreward race atop a wave can become a thrilling ride. But the
rider has to be waiting in position before the right wave arrives.
This is accomplished by knowing the signs and how they
relate to the Surfer. It turns out that life processes at the
nano and molecular scale function by similar means.
The Glove model was conceptualized more recently, as
an analogy for the binary coding/decoding process of DNA and its
metalevels of recursion. I think it may work for other forms of
biological functions as well; the neural net and distributive
information processing of our neural systems comes to mind. It's
this area in which the ordering of signs as information has pre-eminence.
The GUI which I mentioned before refers to Graphical
User Interface, of course; the familiar desktop we take for
granted but which is, after all, a metaphor. That is, the
instructions we give, the operations and solutions which ensue,
and the data in which we recognize the results are graphically
displayed on our screens in a more or less intuitive
representation. I've got to say it's a huge improvement from the
days of trying to make sense of screens filled with seemingly
endless rows of hard-to-read low-res green text!
Now, let's imagine the desktop as being, like
Flatland, a reality unto itself; there are modes of operation,
forms, and systems specific to this milieu, if you will. Call it
TubeWorld. The states of being experienced in TubeWorld are
defined by their own unique Laws. Scientists in TubeWorld have
thus developed their own cosmology, physics, and so on. Therefore
they are quite confident in the Laws they have formulated; limits
of space, time, mass, inertia, etc. They've found, for instance,
that space (the empty desktop) isn't empty, but seething with
pixels that inexplicably appear and vanish, that largescale
structure is built up from ordered pixels, that bigger clumps of
pixels use up more space and time, and so forth. Knowing the Laws
of form and function in TubeWorld has taken them a long way. But
those Laws are all they know.
TubeWorld scientists aren't able to see that their
world is just a part of the Pixelverse. They can't imagine that
their familiar deskscape reality of icons, windows, menus,
dialogs, and the like is actually composed of signs representing
and identifying data to make it more easily accessed and used. To
the inhabitants of TubeWorld the screen is all there is. Their
entire reality is our convenient metaphor.
Back in our own familiar world, I've got to ask:
whose metaphor is our reality? Is it all in our paradigm?
That's why I think it's all about semiosis...
B.
DERIC MORRIS
09.10.01
"...good or bad but thinking..."
-Hamlet