The Semantics of Consciousness

by Swinton Roof

Sept 3, 2001

INTRODUCTION TO THE 'C' WORD

With the Thought Police hot on my heels and the Inquisitors not far behind, I decided to offer this last incantation as a plea to rationality. Recent discussions in our group have heated to boiling in oil over certain words and concepts. I will not even use the dreaded 'S' word in this essay. Other terms that have been troublesome are the 'G' word, metaphysics, Platonism, hylomorphism, spiritualism, quantum physics etc. Now, I am not out to attack anyone's world view head on, but if we continue in this fashion, we will end up with an entire vocabulary of revered but unspoken words. I merely wish to profer some observations about the rocks underneath this Scylla and Charybdis of opinion.

I mentioned in a previous paper that I thought an important philosophical problem with the 'S' word had to do with qualia. After thinking about this some more, I came to the conclusion that a broader treatment was perhaps needed. I shall thus begin my discussion with the 'C' word - consciousness. If you look this word up in the dictionary, you will notice that it is circularly defined in terms of a few other words like awake, aware, knowing etc. which are likewise circularly defined. Ultimately all words will eventually succumb to analysis-by-definiton because, let's face it - all words and symbols are arbitrary (in principle) and to have any meaning at all, must ultimately point to some real phenomenon or experience, outer or inner, which is in itself beyond words. The more troublesome words are the ones that simply point to other words and inherit some of their meaning by kinship. Some words have by useage simply evolved into generalized masterpieces of abstraction that enjoy enormous prestige, but are somewhat short on delivering the goods.

The word 'consciousness' holds a supreme position in any philosocopeia. Even the 'G' word cannot compete. The Russian mystic Gurdjief noted this phenomenon. One can dredge up any number of arguments about angels on the head of a pin, evolution, theology, politics etc. But who out there is willing to proclaim that he doesn't believe in consciousness. Gurdjief said one can ask any dolt on the street if he is conscious, and he will always reply yes. Why, just the thought of asking oneself this silly question, leads to an immediate confirmation that the answer is true. How so? At the risk of a solid stoning, I shall step forward and pose the question. Gurdjief believed that very few people even had an inkling of what it was to be conscious, and that thinking about it only dredges up the bare minimum of self awareness to answer the question, at which point the average Joe Blow immediately returns to his blissful slumber of ignorance. Years ago I used to tell people that I didn't really see any evidence that consciousness existed. Everyone I told this to, without exception, laughed and said I should stop being so silly. I eventually stopped making a fool of myself. Now after many years of not making a fool of myself, I have decided to try another approach - beat'em into submission with bad humor.

Now, if you still don't get what I'm talking about, ask yourself this - are you certain you have a soul? spirit? mind? I'm willing to bet that there was room for debate on any of those words with soul coming in first, spirit next, and mind last in terms of how many people would question the exisitence of those entities. Mind is indeed last because in fact, it is closest in meaning to the word consciousness. A lot of the difference is due to semantic drift over the years, but the point is that all are words denoting something incorporeal, intangible, un-observable etc. Yet everyone seems to have either an idea of what they mean or are prepared to debate that they have no meaning at all, but everyone will agree that those types of words refer to no physical thing in the everyday sense of the word.

Strangely, mankind has been plagued for thousands of years by words and philosophies of the immaterial to the point of engaging in generations of hostility, war, and genocide. We have been willing to slaughter each other mercilessly over the details of numinous disputes but again I'd wager that if the question was over the validity of the word 'consciousness', both sides would sit down and have a party, being quite content to profess their own awareness and to acknowledge the possession of awareness by others. When applied to other animals on this planet, though, the absurdity of the question is fawfowed. Perhaps it is because we eat the animals and to admit that they possess awareness is just too darn disconcerting.

If the reader is with me so far, he might be just a little curious as to why the 'C' word can have such a central role in abstract thinking yet nontheless be so immune from disparinging attack. Part of the reason appears to be that since it is something we all proclaim to have and cherish, it just wouldn't be sensible to undermine our own inner proprietorship. Now gods, demons, angels etc., well, if they exist they can defend themselves, and I don't really have to, but they still make for a hellova debate topic. There is another reason the 'C' word is somewhat immune. It is so darn specious, you just can't even get a good description going. Shucks, even the 'G' word can be given attributes and a full analysis of triune being. God in fact is said to be all powerfull, all knowing, and omnipresent. Can we say the same about consciousness? Nope. Ok, so what gives?

What gives, is that we all know and believe in our hearts that we can't even talk, write, or think about anything at all if we aren't conscious. The best we can hope for is to have a few dreams which quickly fade when we do become conscious! How mysterious is that? Therefore we don't even waste our time thinking about whether or not we are conscious. The very dictionary definiton of the word hints at this fact. The hint is in the definitions that refer to having knowledge or knowing. Now hang on folks, because eventually I'm going to pull the rug out from under you and ask you to defend your personal grub steak on that 'C' word.

The single most distinguishing characteristic of consciousness is that it appears to have something to do with signification. Certain philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Heidigger and Sartre have pointed out the transcendent and representative aspects of consciousness. There are probably many others I haven't read since I quit spending time pulling hairs off the backside of my forearm, but in general I think it is a given that consciousness is at the root of all knowledge representation issues in philosophy at least. I do not wish to engage in philosophical analysis, so I plan to instead just give a list of some general aspects of consciousness that I think are worth noting. Just to lull the reader into a less defensive posture, however, I shall discuss a few pre-conditioning ideas first. A sort of soak cycle, if you will, before I pour in the heavy duty Tide.

SEMANTICS

There seems to be an inexhaustible supply of semantic issues facing any attemt at communication between thinking human beings. Part of the problem is that no one knows exactly how we learn a language to begin with. We do know it is sort of built in and has to develop early in a child's development or the ability for speech is severely crippled. In my opinion, the central crux of semantics is that all signing or use of symbols (i.e. the process of signification) is based on arbitrary connections between signs and the things they 'stand for' or represent. The crucial idea is that any thing can be made to, or evolve into, having a symbolic or representational function. All language, math, etc. is based on this fact. The existence of thousands of spoken languages which are on the whole totally gibberish to someone who doesn't know the language, attests to this fact. Amazingly, to the person using a particular language, it's use is like falling off a log and the meanings it embraces are as transparent and available to the user as a toothbrush - at least for most of the words he uses.

Since the very hinge-pin of semantics or meaning within a language is arbitrary, how to heck do we ever know if we actually agree on some subject. Words can have so many common use meanings to begin with. To make things worse, we don't really know if they actually do mean the same thing when we do nod our heads in agreement over a specific useage. Of course, it is all about context and 'being there', but context is always a shifting target. In the end, all that really matters is that everyone is happy and the feedback they get concerning their own semantic world view is not discordant. So long as everything is running smoothly, we discover as we mature mentally, that we can rise to higher and higher levels of abstraction with the words we use. We do this by learning new words and applying the words we have to novel situations. The very thing that enables us to have a language to begin with also enables an infinite ability to abstract. Another way of saying this is that language is extensible. It is extensible one because the symbols themselves are arbitrary and don't have to abide by natural laws or descriptions to fit, and two because words or symbols may be used to refer to anthing, anything at all, even temselves. In fact, this very paper uses words to talk about how we use words when we talk about using words to talk with! Amazing! Need I go on? Perhaps we would care to discuss Unicorns. We can talk for as long as we like about something that we all know doesn't really exist.

The talk really heats up when we talk about things that we can't even agree upon whether exist or not. A recurrent problem, at least with our group of friends, is that we all like to philosophize and use high falootin words and we all enjoy a rousing argument, but it becomes all too easy to slip into total confusion about what we mean. We have such an ability to abstract that sometimes we discover we dont even understand our own self at times. This is a natural benefit and drawback of signification. Korzybsky in his book, "General Semantics" points out that people can become so abstract that their words loose their referrent, but the semantic response is still there. Even worse the words themselves can come to have a semantic repsonse of their own. When this happens, one literally has lost touch with reality. Insanity is an extreme case of such malfunction. When thought looses its connection with getting appropriate feedback from the enviroment, a person can quite literally go insane as his signs and referents spin out of control into pure speculation. When the semantic responses (feelings) associated with these derailled thought trains take on a fearful or other extreme nature , then behaviour can become chaotic or even destructive. All because the connections between those arbitrary silly words got screwed up somehow. In childhood we learned that sticks and stones can break our bones but words and faces cannot hurt us. Well, guess what? We forgot. Just ask any politician.

Korzybsky says that the first prescription to avoiding such errors is to develop an abiding awareness of abstraction and the level one is operating on. One must always maintain the ability to separate symbols from the things they represent. Over identification is as bad as empty references. Another prescription is to obsessively document the context of all your ideas and writings with space and time markers so that you know specifically what you are referring to. This is cumbersome in the extreme but forces one to be aware of how much the meaning of things depends on a very delicate shifting context in which they originate. And originate they do. Thoughts seems to mysteriously pop into our minds and they are devilishly difficult to pin down. If they stood still and scrolled down our minds like the text on this page, perhaps our meanings would be a bit less obscure, but I suspect not!

There is another whole stoupe to this dilema too. Mankind has a long history of deliberately engaging in abstractions to get at the truth. Strangely the very thing that leads us astray as mentioned above is our tool for acquiring knowledge. How strange indeed. The obvious provision here is that a sharp axe can be used to build a house, but you better be careful not to cut your leg off! The solution is to let a little rigor mortis set in. The careful use of rigor enables one to get a grip on contextual slippage by defining the rules very precisely. Unfortunately as in all things, this too comes at a price. The price is the effort or tedium required to achieve rigor and the price is also a reduced relevance, at least in the immediate sense. We call such systems of knowledge acquisition symbolic systems. To be logical and consistent they actually end up as tautologies. Amazingly one can take these magnificant tautologies and surreptitiously grind up chunks of reality with them. In the end one can even build entire infrastructures of technology based on symbolic systems along with the appropriate sized bombs to clear them back down to rubble again! All because of our ability to abstract ourselves right out of contact with reality. What a bunch of clever beings we are.

Another issue concerns the multiplication of unnecessary entities. Very frequently when deliberately using abstraction to uncover new ideas or knowledge, one runs into a stumbling block or gap in ones ability to analyze or describe a particular semantic postion. This often happens with philosophy, math, computer programming, and the sciences. It is tempting at those times to simply invent or define a new entity with the desired characteristics or function to do what is needed to patch things up. Mechanically inclined inventors are very good at building Rube Goldberg contraptions because of this propensity. Philosophers are no exception. My favorite example is the pre Copernican view of the Earth at the center of multiple interacting shells with lots of epicycle gears to keep the planets on time and on course. Occam's Razor is the philosophical admonition to avoid such pitfalls. Korzybski would be proud of anyone who overcomes his tendency to engage in this sort of flimflam.

Actually it doesn't turn out to be flim flam until the correct paradigm shift enables a reorganization of concept into a simpler whole and the nefarious empty abstractions simply drop out of the mix. One should always seek the simpler paradigm in his thinking, though, as it can have enormous implications. When one defaults on his semantic repsonsibilites as a free thinking being, the consequences can be enormous. There is a serious moral imperative inherent in all semantic issues, because the very nature (as hinted at in the start of this paper) of signification is open to confusion, error, illusion, deception, cruelty, and even insanity. Signification is the both the source of all value and the lack thereof. What can be wealth to one is a burden to another. Deception and trickery enable manipulation, control, and every sort and manner of ultimate atrocity of man against man. Signs and signals can mean the difference between life and death, cooperation and discord, happiness and despair. Occam's razor is one sword in this battle for truth, democracy, and the American way. Did I say that? Well, there you go. See how easy it is to drift into adding those little semantic tags that can cascade into starting a world war.

ABSTRACTION

This next section takes a wooly ride into the world of abstraction.

At the very heart of abstraction lies the ability to make distinctions. If you cant make distinctions you slumber in a world of gray goo but probably aren't aware of it! Helen Keller was aware but she didn't have any words at first to hang on the distinctions she made, so the world for her up until that moment when she first mouthed the word 'water' was chaos. The second aspect of abstraction is the ability to notice similarites and merge them under one significator. If one wants to give abstract names for the different types of abstraction he could say there is disjunctive and conjunctive abstraction, along with superduction, subduction, and abduction, not to mention abstraction by indirection.

One could say that disjunctive abstraction distinguishes differences and tags them with labels. Conjunctive abstraction merges distinctions and tags them as a group. Superductive abstraction distinguishes similarites between separate conjunctive abstractions and tags them as a class. Subductive abstraction distinguishes portions of a superduction and tags them as subsets. Abduction forceably tags unrelated subsets of a superduction. Indirection is simply the linkage distance between the sign and the thing it ultimately represents.

Consider a nice red apple in an apple orchard of "Red Delicious" apples. This is not any apple. It is not 'a' apple or 'any' apple. It is the 'the' apple you are holding in your imaginary hands as we talk in this imaginary orchard. For the moment, let us pretend all this is real. Notice the nice red color. Science tells us that the apple is red because it absorbs the green and blue wavelengths of light and only reflects the red frequencies. Now, if red is the only light that isn't absorbed, aren't we commiting a bit of descriptive error when we say the apple is 'red'? Absorption of blue-green is actually more descriptive of 'apple' than red is. In fact, if the light illuminating it has no red frequency, then the apple simply will not appear red! Red thus has nothing to do with the apple at all, yet we say it's color is red. Red is an abstract label we pin on something real though, so where is the actual red color?

Science goes on to tell us that light impinging on the sensory cells of our retina produces electrical nerve signals which travel to the occipital cortex where they are processed and ultimately converted into a representation of color. Any interruption along the pathways of this process destroys the experience of seeing the red apple and it's color. So far, however, science has not been able to say exactly how 'red' manages to pop into existence as an object of your consciousness. The color red must somehow exist in your own personal self somehow. Science has discovered that the cognitive or semantic apparatus we have somehow manages to literally paint color onto a sensory map generated by the signals it receives. This has been proven with clever experiments. Where the paint comes from, though, is a mystery.

Now we must be even more sure that the apple is not really red! At this stage in man's knowledge one must at some point accept that we live in a phenomenal world. The phenomenal elements are generated within and provide the existential cloth that covers and colors the world of sensory input. It is just as much a mistake to say there is no reality other than the phenomenal elements as it is to say that reality is pure physical input. To view either half of the equation as illusory is to miss the mark. One way of looking at the situation is to say that consciousness creates an internal representation of what those sensory signals mean. The phenomenal representation signifies the raw data. Our world view is built from the ground up by signification. We normally call this first stage of signification 'concrete reality'. It is the reality that can cause you a world of hurt if you don't pay attention and respond appropriately. When we talk about abstraction and levels of abstraction we are talking about further signing that builds layers between consciousness and that primary concrete layer of significance. The more abstract a semantic response is, the further away from any raw sensory data it's reference is. What do I mean by semantic response?

Semantic response is the physical, emotional, or mental response to some sign that represents something. The most concrete semantic response is actual physical sensations mapped onto raw sensory data. This is the 'concrete level' mentioned above. Emotional responses form the next layer of signification and represent valued assessments of how the semantic being (you) feels about what is happening to it. Mental responses are the most subtle and represent a sort of resonance which delineates the contours of a semantic. What is a semantic or a sign?

Let us suppose that as living organisms interact with the world around them, they are changed internally by those interactions such that pathways of interactive behavior are deposited - memory traces if you will - ruts in the cognitive landscape worn by repeated passing of 'concrete phenomenalities'. We know from studies of stimulus-response conditioning that one event can by conditioning come to 'stand in for' or replace another event and still reproduce the same response. This is what signification is all about, and it is built in at the very roots of consciousness as indicated above. A 'semantic' is just a word for this set of neural pathways that create a particular response, behaviour, of feeling when activated. Experiments have been done which demonstrate that these pathways can be activated by touching specific areas of the brain or nerves with electrical probes. The sign itself is what triggers a particular semantic or semantic response and can quite literally be anything from outside sensory data to electrical probes to internal states themselves. An organism (at least at our level of organization) can respond to it's own internal states. Signs can be constructed from other signs and refer to other signs. Signs can even refer partially to themselves. Why partially and not totally is an interesting issue which will not be covered in this paper, but is extremely important. Signs always have a representation i.e. to exist, they must have some real corporeal body. At the concrete level, signs are made up of phenomenal cloth mentioned above. When speaking abstractly, though, it is conventient to say that signs must be composed of or represented by paper and ink, metal and paint, neural states, sounds, or some other physical phenomenon or event.

So far we have discussed what the semantic is and what the sign is. Now there is always a third aspect of semantic response. It is called the referent. The referent is the thing a sign 'points to'. At the concrete level the referent is physical reality itself. At more abstract levels the referent can be other signs and semantics. Language and words give us the ability to compose elaborate scaffoldings of sign-semantic-referent relations. The higher up on this scaffold one climbs, the more abstract and internally originating the semantic is. The whole process is energetic, recursive and full of resonance and flow. The process of signification is open ended and infinitely extensible. It is important to notice that referents are really never encountered directly but only referred to. It is the semantic response that colors the act of de-referencing. That is the only direct encounter with a referent you can have because the 'concrete level' itself is signatory as explained above! The best one can hope for in normal consciousness as far as encountering a referent directly (we leave this door slightly ajar here) is to focus one's attention on the immediate concrete level semantics. That is what is meant by the saying "BE HERE NOW!". When dealing with higher level abstractions, the best one can do for a direct encounter is pay attention to the signs themselves or the semantic response they provoke in you.

The preceeding discussion puts referents in a rather obscure postion, and that's what makes the world so darn difficult to fathom. It is important to recall that the formation of a sign to begin with is a substitution process. The sign replaces the referent. The referent is no longer necessary to generate a response. All that is required is the sign. Referents at the concrete level are enormously complex events, but when replaced by a compact representation ala sign, a most useful compression or efficiency has been realized. A single word, smell, or melody can bring back to memory years of torture abuse etc. or loving experiences etc. The ephimeral nature of the world, however, puts us in an even more ticklish situation. Most often, the original referents that our signs pointed to are long gone! All that is left are the signs and semantics. One can chase referents in an attempt to grasp this fleeting reality, but ultimately the attempt is doomed to failure. Referents aren't really the real thing either. One can also engage in endless abstractions in an attempt to encompass the reality with wrapping paper hoping that the referents wont escape. This project is also doomed to fail. The best solution is to flow with the process and be aware of the dynamics. Then one can eventually come to understand and appreciate the beauty of it.

Abstraction enables time-binding. Signs connect events across space and time. Experience can be communicated and transported by way of signs. Signs are the source of all knowledge and all confusion. Reality is both illusion and knowledge. Knowledge enables control and power - power to understand reality, power to manipulate responses in others, power to experience that which can never even exist. Signs are powerful indeed.

One can unfortunately take the above discussion and formulate decostructivist philosophies, nihilism, and general anti-intellectualism. That is missing the boat. Let me give an example. A guy takes a really nice bicycle and notices that it is amazing. How wonderful it is to speed along, feel the breeze, and get where you're going really fast and easy. Then while philosophizing (abstracting), he notices that this marvelous invention is put together in pieces. He begins disassembling the bicycle trying to ascertain the source of the wonderful functionality. Ultimately he ends up with a pile of nuts and bolts, and chunks of metal, plastic, and rubber. These pieces in turn were smelted out of raw dirt basicly. The deeper he digs, the less he finds any essence of bicycle.

Then along comes a nihilist who watches and decides that bicycles are utterly worthless because they decompose into nothingness. He invents a philosophy of the futility of relying on such empty vehicles. He becomes so involved that he almost exceeds the beauty of the bicycle itself in terms of the sheer complexity and scope of his philosophy.

Then along comes a pragmatist who looks at all the pieces in disarray. He speculates that all the pieces have a certain syncopation just right for making something, so he proceeds to build a beautiful bicycle from the pieces, gets on it and rides away. Such is life. Semantically, it is what you make of it. It is a mistake to say there is no ultimate reality and it is a mistake to say there is. What's really there is a moving target which always exceeds your grasp and additionally the grasp always transcends the target.

LEVELS OF ABSTRACTION

The pixels of light coming from the computer monitor I am using while composing this paper exist at the concrete level of representation. They are phenomenal colors painted and projected into space by my cognitive apparatus. The word 'pixel' is a descriptive label and is a conjunctive abstraction of two concepts - 'pix' for picture and 'el' for element. The semantic pathways implied by pixel are rich and suggestive. The word in it's context, though, points to a concrete level entity. The real world being such that it is, ensures that most people observing said pixel can easily agree on what the word means. The semantic is concrete enough and definitive. Further examination reveals that the 'pixel' referred to is a particular example of a class composed of semantics involving pictures and the concept of elements or smallest parts of a picture. These concepts are a bit more abstract.

Implicit also is the computer monitor. A person discovering the word for the first time might immediately know the referent but still be a bit vague about the full semantic of the word. Someone teaching you about pixels would perhaps talk about monitor resolutions, refresh rates, image formats, system settings, software etc. This conversation would be at a much more abstract level and possibly downright confusing.

The reader in turn might notice that this whole subject is very abstract as he is reading this document from a paper printout and has to imagine said pixels. If never having actually seen a computer monitor things would even be worse. Then he notices that the word 'abstraction' is talking about something you never can see directly. That is really abstract! When talk turns to intangibles, the world looses it's sharp edges and becomes vague and confusing. Rigorous definitions help in such cases, but also can lead to argument since the referents are open to question to begin with!

Now back to our Red Delicious apple. Or perhaps I should say, the Red Delicious apple you were holding in your imaginary hands before we got lost in other abstractions! This apple is but one concrete specific example of a whole orchard of similar apples. When we add up all the similarities of apples in this and other orchards of Red Delicious apples we can make a conjuctive abstraction. The features which all these apples hold in common but different from other apples forms the basis for a class or abstract group named "Red Delicious". Continuing in this vein we may regard 'apple' as a conjunctive abstraction of all classes or specie of specific apple types. We may then form a superductive conjunction of different classes like apples, pears, bannas etc. This class is named 'fruit'. Higher up we have plants, vegetable kingdom etc. We are most comfortable with abstractions that have some physical referent like say an apple. The specific real apple itself will conjure up a whole host of semantic responses involving perhaps past experiences of taste, color, shape, growing, picking, buying, cooking, reading about, etc. The immediate semantics can connect to other semantics across space and time because higher level semantics often are generalizations of specific things. Even low level labels of specific physical things is a generalization.

Abstraction is the basis for distinctions and classification. The groupings can be entirely arbitrary but usually an attempt is made to mirror reality in some way. Abductive abstraction violates this principle but provides a starting point for future feedback from the concrete levels to clarify the relations. How does feedback clarify relations?

Suppose a clever horticulturist decided to invent the class of oblong yellow fruit named 'yellobs'. Then he went around gathering all the yellow and oblong things and put them in his 'yellobs' box. He even throws in some interesting yellow rocks and pieces of plastic. Then along comes the critic and says "you got some screwy semantics son!" Fruits have a sweet taste so check em out. Well, some of the things like banannas did indeed taste sweet, but some like peppers were downright disturbing as fruits. The rocks and plastic didn't even come close. The two eventually put together a respectable class of 'yellobs' but eventually they decided the different things in the box were not really related unless they broadened their description of 'yellobs'. Finally they decided that 'yellow' and 'oblong' were not necessarily good abstractions to base a class on. The reality of concrete phenomenology produced a discordant conditioning that signified the invalidity of the semantic connections indicated by 'yellobs'. Sometimes we are not so fortunate.

Sometimes we have such strong semantic resonances that false abductive significations take place and recursive feedback reinforces the false impressions. Then perchance our over-reactive behaviour triggers similar responses in others. The whole cycle can be infectious and deadly. Consider racism. A single isolated interaction can inspire general hated for an entire class of individuals. Abuse from a parent figure or other person can reinforce false semantics even more. False semantics (abstractions whose referent is abducted) lead to false impressions and the cycle repeats with magnified vigor. What was once seen as lazy, stupid, or ignorant can be generalized into a false representation of general qualities. Then an energetic friendly individual can come across as uppity and sarcastic. The semantic response of hostility to an implied threat then adds an additional semantic element of fear to the original false abstraction. The original feedback mechanisms of semantic response have been accidentaly subverted and only a huge amount of counter feedback or intentional re-association can hope to restore the sane functioning of the semantic apparatus.

Differing levels of abstraction can cause problems. By not making the distinction between 'acting lazy' and 'being lazy' we allow abduction to create higher levels of abstraction which have a faulty premis. The further removed one is from concrete level semantics, the more apt one is to make such errors. As said, before, abduction is useful, but only if the discrepancies and fake identities are cleaned up later. Also the whole structure may have to be abandoned as either worthless or down right damaging. High level abductive errors can take years to clarify if ever. Low level abductive errors are usually cleared up if sufficient exposure to feedback is present. Unfortunately the world is in constant change and all sort of accidental associations can be made which never get a chance to be corrected. This is what makes each individual unique and imperfect but also gifted and creative. It is important to remember that the cognitive semantic engine (brain or mind) operates by signification. Referents are clothed in signs. The resulting structures can be significant models of reality, significant creations of fantasy, significant delusions, or insignificant excesses of disassociation. The higher up the ladder one is, the less permanent and more malleable the connections are. Repitition reinforces whatever semantics are there for better or worse. Intentionality is worthy of serious study in light of these understandings.

REPRESENTATION

Signs always have some form of representation either external or internal. Internal signs are clothed in the qualia of consciousness. External representations while available to scientific experiment are made of the said same cloth. That's why the word 'representation' is so informative in this context. The phenomenal elements 'represent' the sign i.e. the elements are a 'sign' for the sign itself! Signs may have more than one representation and may have different representations based upon different sensory channels or media of physical expression such as paper, wood, tv, radio etc.

Signs may have more that one referent i.e. multiple meanings. It is important to realize that only one semantic can be valid at a time though or confusion is the result. Context of situation or useage is the only way at times to discern which meaning is the appropriate one in such cases. This is another example of semantic issues that cloud discourse and communication. Such misunderstandings are often at the basis of humor in benign cases but can be damaging in others.

Consider the word 'WORD'. Word in general, means a sign composed of a string of 'letters'. Such words when placed together in a valid construct (syntax,logic,and semantics - i.e. a sentence) express an idea or concept. This type of 'word' is the 'lexical' word. It is the general conceptual conjunctive sign that happens to be the main symbolic element of language. It must have a representation in order to be available to the senses. There are several representations familiar to everyone. One is the spoken form. We hear a person say the word 'word' and it brings forth a semantic association with the internal lexical version. The obvious other form is the typographic representation. That is the visual form of text as demonstrated here and now on this computer screen or paper if the this document has been printed out. Typographic representations are physically encoded in different fonts. This paper was written using the font named 'Verdana'.

Typographic (actually any physical representation) forms illustrate another aspect of signs. The individual specific representations for a specific sign can come in many styles, classes, variations etc. but the central semantic of that sign remains the same. The same semantic can even be represented in different languages with totally different representations that don't even have some sort of similarity between each other, but within a given language the representations should have a structural similarity to avoid confusion. There is also the handwritten variety of representations which have a great deal of differing style of representation. It is the generalizing ability of abstraction that enables us to impute the lexical form intended and thence experience the appropriate semantic. This especially applies to spoken or auditory representations where individual differences and dialects come into play.

Representation of signs is necessary for signs to be real. Unless it is represented in some form, a sign is imaginary and cannot have a semantic. The representation might be ephemeral indeed but it nonetheless has to have some minimal phenomenal form. This feature is what enables signs to refer to each other, otherwise the referent (other sign) would be null. Representation is itself signification. The form represents the semantic. Thus when I write the word 'WORD', the visual sign represents the typographic sign represents the lexical sign represents the conceptual sign for the compositional elements of a sentence. This is a chain of indirection deferencing the signs as we go until the core semantic is instantiated. Such a chain of deferencing is what I mean by a semantic pathway. Frequently traveled pathways become so efficient that the initial representation serves as a direct sign for the core semantic and the intermediary semantics drop from view. Much of our inner world is structured like this. We often forget how we arrived at these chains to begin with and discriminating the steps along the way can be difficult.

A special note here: I said that the representation or form represents the semantic. Initially however, the form represented the conditioning event that caused the representation or sign to be associated and substituted in place of. Once the inital referent is replaced by the sign itself, true abstraction has been achieved and the the sign now represents the semantic instead. The sound of the buzzer replaces the shock in a conditioning experiment so that the buzzer represents shock. Buzzer has replaced shock and elicits the same semantic response. Eventually when the shock is no longer present, buzzer represents the response to shock itself. At the level of words, this situation consists of words refering to their meaning as one would find in a dictionary. The original semantic conditioning pathways have dropped off and no longer exist as relevant. This can be good or bad, but the point is that the level of abstraction is higher than concrete level and the referent (i.e. and it's representation) must live ontologically at that level. This is important to remember when attempting ontological or philosophical arguments. The initial conditioning referent might have existed but no longer be valid. It is only the semantic pathway itself that now stands in relationship to the sign. This is a process of transmogrification. The referent pointer has flipped from the original referent to the semantic itself.

AGGREGATES

This paper has been using the word 'sign' in a very broad context on pupose. Signs can be simple road signs, commands, symbols, complex aggregates of symbols etc. but there should always be only one semantic pathway associated with a sign in a given context. We shall see that this is not quite exactly true, but in principle it establishes the one to one relation necessary for clear semantics at least in initially understanding the process of signification itself. Things are a bit more murky when one takes into account different individuals (and their semantic world) or complex aggregates of signs. The pathways can be broad indeed and they also branch out into incredibly complex webs of meaning. Therefore defining a core semantic is really not a meaningful endeavor in some cases. Anyway it is still convenient to simply use the word 'sign' to refer to the representational end of a sign-semantic-referent relation. In some cases the semantic is the referent itself as talked about in the preceeding section.

Aggregates of signs forms the basic modulus of language and communication. Words by themselves have referents, but usually as one's master of a language develops, these referents become the semantic itself and the original conditioning referent has dropped away. At this stage the words now have merely a lexical meaning. This in itself doesn't communicate a whole lot or even apply to the experential world. It is only when the words are strung together that they begin to relate to the world via new semantic pathways. The semantic referents virtually on the fly get tagged to real phenomenal events. The intervening pathways drop out and the exterior phenomenon resonates internally. It has a valence or value and means something to the semantic individual. There are language rules for validating this process. These rules are called syntax.

"log jump fox" doesn't make for much of a semantic response because it has no syntax or structure to confine and define the relations. By using syntactic modifiers and associating sequence with meaning, we end up with something like "The fox jumped over the log." Now we have a valid semantic stucture that resonates with possible outside realities and internally with other semantic pathways. Such modification of root semantics allows them to coalesce into meaningful pathways. Implicit is the idea of flow. The attention flows through a particular set of associated sematic elements. This structure is usually linear in normal conversation or writing, but I believe that in deep thought, it really is a branching affair that spreads out into a network of semantic connections some of which are circular. This explains why conversation can drift or even bounce all over the place. The core semantic pathways may be a huge fuzzy network of related concepts.

Core semantic pathways are not closed. Flow is not necessarily linear. The inner cognitive world of a person is not just one sentence at a time. Our consciousness is composed of multiple events transpiring in real time with semanitc pathways going off in all directions. That is why this discussion has been using the term 'resonance'. It appears that semantic pathways are themselves organized into regions or areas that might at any time be activated and have a certain valence of response. Different areas resonate if they mutually energize each other, either by opposition or by reinforcement. This is a natural consequence of the fact that words abstract, classify, generalize, make distinctions etc. Signs point to other signs via their lexical connotations which likewise do the same. A strong initial semantic response triggered by an outside stimulus feeds into the semantic networks and the ensuing resonances with associative feedbacks forms a shifting global semantic response fuzzy and vague in places, intense and specific others, and possibly not subsiding for hours after the initial trigger. The ability to act appropriately in real world situations with decisive behaviour and no lingering resonances is the mark of a lean and clean semantic system.

THOUGHT AND WILL

So far, we have treated the process of signification as if there we no such thing as real thought being involved. There is a great deal of dispute among thinkers as to whether it is possible to think without using words. Also thought implies intentionality and so far we have been talking about conditioning. The author's view is that it is probably best to confine the meaning of the word 'thought' to such other words as 'idea' or 'concept' and simply predicate that thought in the normal sense of the word uses signification at bare minimum and words typically. There is an important caveat here. We have not really said how it is possible for abstractions (disjunctive, conjunctive, superductive, subductive, and abductive ) to be made in the first place. It is the author's belief that sub- or preconscious cognitive processes perform these extractions. There seems to be a mathematical or logical resonance between the real world and the process of signification that enables this to be accomplished. The will or intentionality if it really exists seems to reside in this layer of cognition also. What seems clear is that for such process to be made explicit and available to consciousness it must be clothed in signs even if only the most primitive phenomenal ones. Remember?

This brings up another import issue having to do with semantics and reality. Carl Jung in one of his books (I forget which) makes the remark that one who makes 'consciousness' his god is in real trouble pschologically. The author for a long time was unsure what Jung meant but eventually understood when he fell into solipsim. There is no logical escape from the belief that the self is all that can be proven to exist. That's one thought you simply can't think your way out of. It's a sort of conceptual black hole. Most thinkers pooh pooh this so long as they skirt the edges of the semantic. Some semantic pathways obviously need to be avoided because they have implications for sanity and this is one of them. Once trapped there is only one way out - embrace the concept and see where it takes you. If you survive, your entire cognitve network will undergo an inversion. A deeper understanding of signification will ensue also, but the author really doesn't recommend the endeavor for all.

The point of the above paragraph is to assert that there is a fundamental reality even if it can't be apprehended with semantics and that there is an external reality even if all sensory data is clothed in false raiment. One has to trust in holomorphic resonance between internal semantics and real truths as being a partial description of reality. One has to trust in the concept of real being as opposed to the mere representation of being. Thus we have (in this author's view at least) added another fundamental aspect to signification - moral imperative and cognizance of being. These are the two key factors which center and keep mankind sane.

CONSCIOUSNESS

Now back to consciousness. Consciousness must always have an object. At least in the ordinary sense. Certain practices claim to produce a state of pure consciousness free of any referent but not a lot can be said about this for obvious reasons. Signs have referents too. Consciousness is equivalent to signs in the sense of being referential.

Signification is always in constant motion. It is a process. You can't hold down and fix a semantic response. You can only re-experience the semantic by intentionly activating it again. Consciousness is always in motion. You can only intentionally re focus the attention back on the original object. Consciousness is the same as signs here. Both are process. Focus can be achieved only by repeatedly circling about some referent.

Consciousness is transcendent. It is always separate from it's referent. Signs are transcendent because signs point to something else, namely their referent. Signs can be entirely arbitrary for any referent. Consciousness is thus the same as signs in this respect.

Consciousness unifies it's object. The object may be manifold and discrete but awareness glues it all into one observed whole. Signs unify their referent into one semantic whole. Consciousness is like signs.

Consciousness has a fundamental direction - outward or away from itself. Signs point away also. Consciousness is like signs.

Consciousness can be self-referential. Consciousness can have an act of consciouness as it's object. Signs can point to other signs, even themselves. Both cases are partially self referential. Consciousness is like signs.

Consciousness tends to identify with it's object and forget it is conscious. Signs tend to replace their referent and the signification is obscured. Consciousness is like signs.

Consciousness is connected with sensation, feeling, and thought. Signs have a semantic response - physical, emotional, and/or mental. Consciousness is like signs.

...

OK, here goes the rug!

Signs always have some representation. Consciousness has none!

None except the word itself!

Consciousness is a word.

Consciousness is an abstraction.

The word 'consciousness' has no physical referent.

The word signifies nothing real.

Signs form a pyramid of abstraction with consciousness sitting at the top but detached from the pyramid below. Is it really necessary?

Aren't the phenomenal elements and signification themselves enough to build a world on? Now, if you want to use consciousness as the abstract null indicator for any process of signification, then why not. Occam's razor will tolerate such a label. Perhaps your philosophy would prefer to equate consciousness with the substrate mentioned previously in this paper as being clothed in phenomenal cloth. Perhaps you prefer it to be a luminescent halo around phenomenal elements. Perhaps you wish to identify it with thought or intentionality. It's up to you. After all:

Its just words.