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'The menu is not the meal . – Alan Watts. The Map Is Not The Territory - Alfred Korzybski. La trahison des images - René Magritte. Steven Pinker The Stuff of Thought. He asserts that language must do two things: convey a message to an audience, and
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'The menu is not the meal. – Alan Watts The Map Is Not The Territory- Alfred Korzybski La trahison des images - René Magritte
Steven Pinker The Stuff of Thought He asserts that language must do two things: • convey a message to an audience, and • negotiate the social relationship between the speaker and the audience.
Baudrillard’s Simulacra "Simulacra and Simulation" breaks the sign-order into 4 stages: • The first stage is a faithful image/copy, a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality”. • The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance - it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating. • The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth. • The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.
Language is a Virus? • My general theory since 1971 has been that the Word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself. (Burroughs, 1986)
Linguistic Relativity • Popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined as having two versions: (i) the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories and (ii) the weak version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behaviour.
PeirceanTrichotomies • An icon (also called likeness and semblance) is a sign that denotes its object by virtue • of a quality which is shared by them but which the icon has irrespectively of the object. • The icon (for instance, a portrait or a diagram) resembles or imitates its object. • the image, which depends on a simple quality; • the diagram, whose internal relations, mainly dyadic or so taken, represent by • analogy the relations in something; and • (c) the metaphor, which represents the representative character of a sign by • representing a parallelism in something else. • An index is a sign that denotes its object by virtue of an actual connection involving them (for example smoke coming from a building is a reagent index of fire). • A symbol is a sign that denotes its object solely by virtue of the fact that it will be • interpreted to do so.
Universality of Color Terms • Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969) (ISBN 1-57586-162-3) is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. Berlin and Kay's work proposed that the kinds of basic color terms a culture has, such as black, brown or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has. • Berlin and Kay posit seven levels in which cultures fall, with Stage I languages having only the colors black (dark–cool) and white (light–warm). Languages in Stage VII have eight or more basic color terms. This includes English, which has eleven basic color terms. The authors theorize that as languages evolve, they acquire new basic color terms in a strict chronological sequence; if a basic color term is found in a language, then the colors of all earlier stages should also be present. The sequence is as follows: Stage I: Dark-cool and light-warm (this covers a larger set of colors than English "black" and "white".) Stage II: Red Stage III: Either green or yellow Stage IV: Both green and yellow Stage V: Blue Stage VI: Brown Stage VII: Purple, pink, orange, or grey
Berkeleyan Idealism • George Berkeley never actually wrote the words "If a tree falls in a forest and • nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?", but it is likely that passages • from his "A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge“ (1710) • served as the inspiration for this kind of questioning, which countered Locke’s view • of perception as having primary (objective) and secondary (subjective) qualities. • By 1884, Scientific American echoed Berkeley’s idealism, stating • “Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism • of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling • of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. • If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound.”
Gilles DeleuzeThe Logic of Sense The two tables or series are like the sky and the earth, propositions and things, expressions and consumptions. Carroll would say they are the multiplication table and the dinner table.
He thought he saw an ElephantThat practiced on a fife:He looked again, and found it wasA letter from his wife.“At length I realize,” he said,“The bitterness of Life!” He thought he saw a BuffaloUpon the chimney-piece:He looked again, and found it wasHis Sister’s Husband’s Niece.“Unless you leave this house,” he said,“I’ll send for the Police!” He thought he saw a KangarooThat worked a coffee-mill:He looked again, and found it wasA Vegetable-Pill.“Were I to swallow this,” he said,“I should be very ill!” He thought he saw a Coach-and-FourThat stood beside his bed:He looked again, and found it wasA Bear without a Head.“Poor thing,” he said, “poor silly thing!It’s waiting to be fed!” He thought he saw a Garden-DoorThat opened with a key:He looked again, and found it wasA Double Rule of Three:“And all its mystery,” he said,“Is clear as day to me!” He thought he saw an ArgumentThat proved he was the Pope:He looked again, and found it wasA Bar of Mottled Soap.“A fact so dread,” he faintly said,“Extinguishes all hope!” - Lewis Carroll, The Mad Gardener’s Song
Gregory Bateson Information – Bateson defined information as "a difference which makes a difference." For Bateson, information in fact mediated Alfred Korzybski's map–territory relation, and thereby resolved, according to Bateson, the mind-body problem. Double Bind: Full double bind requires several conditions to be met: • The victim of double bind receives contradictory injunctions or emotional messages on different levels of communication (for example, love is expressed by words, and hate or detachment by nonverbal behaviour; or a child is encouraged to speak freely, but criticised or silenced whenever he or she actually does so). • No metacommunication is possible – for example, asking which of the two messages is valid or describing the communication as making no sense. • The victim cannot leave the communication field. • Failing to fulfill the contradictory injunctions is punished (for example, by withdrawal of love).
Mind As Information The rise of Artificial Intelligence theory in the last 30 years has been accompanied by a swing toward semiotic functionalism. Church-Turing Thesis - Every effectively calculable function (effectively decidable predicate) is general recursive. Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene, Proposed ‘memes’ to model the transmission of behaviors. Holographic Universe – David Bohm; “particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible. Daniel Dennett – Consciousness Explained, argues for neural Darwinism, points out optical illusions, cognitive bias, etc. Films such as The Matrix and Inception assert digital functionalism.
Problems With Infocentrism Infocentrism inverts idealism, retaining they syntactic and pragmatic forms but Truncating semantic dimension. Raymond Tallis – Aping Mankind, cites ‘Neuromania and Darwinitis’ as bad Science, failing to represent the full measure of humanity in consciousness. Multisense Realism – My attempt to recover both the humanity and realism of Pre-scientific idealism without sacrificing the relativism and universality of Contemporary physics. Information is seen to be an effect of awareness rather than a cause, so that The map is not the territory and neither is the territory only a map (information). Human consciousness is a multi-channel, multi-layer experience which is best Modeled as a continuum of sense, ranging from gross physical detection to Subtle psychological meaning. Map and territory are dual aspects of a single Neutral monism of meta-juxtaposition that is experienced as well as computed.
