SEMIOTICS AND IFP RELATIONS

How Semiotics Relates to Proximal Recurrence

and the

Causal Veil

by Swinton Roof

Aug, 2001

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols.

A sign in it's most primitive sense is a stimulus which ellicits a semantic response. Semantic response is a meaning embued response to some stimulus. The stimulus has meaning because it tends to ellicit a full range of cognitive response - physical, emotional, and/or mental. A sign can be as potent as the charge of an angry bear or as subtle as the hint of a fresh breeze. A semantic response forms a connection between some sign and it's portent, consequences, or meaning. The response is charged with some sort of 'value' that is an innate reaction to the thing that the sign signifies. As in all stimulus-response connections, repeated reinforcement establishes a bond so strong, that presence of the stimulus alone will produce the response even in the absence of the reward/punishment event which triggers the response to begin with. Signs thus 'stand in' for something else. This is the essence of signification.

Consider a healthy individual who experiences an electric shock. He will experience mental confusion, emotional fear, and physical pain all of which produce a withdrawal reaction. Now, if every time he experiences the shock, a buzzer sounds, then eventually just the sound of the buzzer will produce a strong withdrawal reaction with all the feelings and aprehension a real shock would have produced. The intensity, frequency, and proximity (IFP) of the relation between buzzer and shock have produced a more or less permanent association. Buzzer and shock have become entangled with each other in the individual's world of experience. This is standard stimulus-response conditioning and apparently applies to all sentient beings, even those as primitive as amoeba.

We may say that, as far as the conditioned individual is concerned, 'buzzer' signifies 'shock'. In fact it not only signifies, it even mimics or masquerades as shock because the two phenomena have become cognitively entangled. As we move on to more abstract topics, we enlarge our concept of sign to include any thing that elicits a semantic response even if it is merely a cognitive mental state or idea. This highlights the real power of words. Most people live at such a sensitive and high level of cognitive abstraction that they may actually be unaware that their thoughts, words, feelings, and ideas are fundamentally rooted in primitive physical reactions to stimuli within the environment. Cognitive events at higher levels can cascade into energetic semantic responses to internal states even in the absence of outside stimuli. We shall look at this situation later and it's philosophical implications along with the concept of mental health.

Now to rehash. Events can be cognitively connected across space and time. An event which triggers some or all of the semantic response that another event elicited may be regarded as a 'sign'. The semantic response that a sign ellicits tends to be cognized as a prognostication of some event to follow. Inherent in this cognitive response is aprehension of causality, even if no real causal connection exists! Inherent also is a descriptive element wherein the real-world event actually causing the original physical reaction becomes perceptually colored by the significator or sign, even to the point that the sign masquerades as the event itself. See Fig.1 for a diagram of this relationship. The successive levels in the diagram below represent repeated occurences over time from the top down until a 'significant' association has been established and we have a 'semantic response' or SR. The response is labeled semantic because the sign now means something (turns a lot of cognitive gears, so to speak), even in the absence of the object that it refers to or significates. The question mark over 'event' in the final stage indicates that the original event may not even be present, but it is still cognitively present as the referent of the sign.

Fig. 1
Anatomy of Semantic Response -
the IFP Association of Sign with Event
Repeated occurence of proximal events with high intensity, conditions response!

...

Signs are Arbitrary

Having established what we mean by sign and semantic response, let us now proceed on to what is the single most astounding key discovery of semiotics. The above example of conditioning could just as easily have used the taste of chocolate pudding or even the letter 'z' drawn on a card to associate with the shock. There does not have to be any causal connection at all between a sign and the event it signifies. The only requirement for conditioning is that IFP relations exist during the conditioning phase. Strangely, once made, a cognitive association tends to function as a causal agent internally. This capacity to have a prescience of possible forthcoming events gives great survival advantage to a being involved in the game of survival. It enables adaptive behaviour to occur before the consequences are too late!

This paper use the acronym SRC to mean Semantic Response Conditioning. SRC being arbitrary is both the source of greatness and despair. It enables symbolic language and all the wonderfull advances of learning and knowledge therein, but it comes at a price. We stated before that the sign causes a semantic response even when the original true causal event is not present. This feature is at the root of what we call 'abstraction'. Unfortunately, a particular semantic response may be entirely inappropriate is some situations. It may even be have an anti-survival value at certain times. The arbitrary nature of SRC means that there is potential for error, illusion, deception, confusion, and even insanity. All of these can occur when the SRC is inappropriate. But what is appropriate?

In general we may assume that signs which get positive feedback from the enviroment will remain semanticly charged and appropriate. Negative feedback will tend to simply reassociate the sign with something else, while signs with no feedback at all, tend to simply wither. These principles determine the survival advantage of signs and are at the very foundations of learning. Complexes of signs which survive long-term SRC tend to evolve into hard-wired instinct and eventually emerge cognitively as general principles or understandings. Once SRC has achieved this level, it seems to converge with and mirror what may be real causality in the world apart from temporaneous enviromental changes.

The word 'atom' has absolutely no direct causal relation with the atom inside a nuclear bomb, but the very invention and use of the word have enabled mankind to achieve a potency rivaled by none but nature herself. In fact, signs and SRC is the key which makes it possible to initiate causes and effects which nature alone could never achieve. At the very root of this ability is the arbitrary nature of SRC. This fact cannot be overstated. The arbitrary nature of SRC is at the heart of survival, instinct, abstraction, learning, and perhaps most important of all creativity - the introduction of novelty into the world.

We shall climb the ladder of abstraction toward a deeper understanding of symbols and language, but first it will be appropriate to explore in a little more detail what IFP relations are all about.

...

IFP Relations

We said above that the intensity, frequency, and proximity (IFP) of the relation between buzzer and shock have produced a more or less permanent association. These terms are placed in their order of importance for forming SRC. There is a very interesting aspect of SRC and IFP that needs immediate attention in our discourse. This is a phenomenon known as imprinting.

When an organism is in it's developmental or growth phases, the normal SRC structures (i.e. neural networks etc.) necessary for cognitive association are still in the process of being formed. SRC in this context actually directs the growth process itself! The resultant cognitive structure becomes hard-wired and particular specific semantic response pathways have become imprinted and permanent. It is almost impossible for an organism to change it's imprinting. To do so is tantamount to surgical intervention. This explains why deep rooted cognitive malfunction is extremely hard to correct.

The arbitrary nature of SRC and IFP can be potentially disastrous during imprinting. This feature does however, in the long term, provide survival advantages to a species because of the inherent variability and novel approaches to adaptation that it inspires. If there is any goal to evolution at all, it seems to be adaptation to a novel and ever changing enviroment.

Why IFP, and why in that order?

Intensity of the stimulus event and the pre-sign event are a necessary precursor to conditioning. Events which have very little effect on the physical-emotional-mental being of an organsim do not cause SRC. Even events which are very frequent and spatially close to the organism will not induce SRC unless they reach a certain threshold of intensity - enough to cause pain, enjoyment, or some other reaction. During the imprinting phase of development, however, everything has a low threshold for semantic response. After core SRC structures have developed, they form a template for inhibition and reinforcement.

Frequency of occurence is the second most important aspect of IFP. Every collusion of event and 'pre-sign' event produces a measureable and limited degree of SR. There is a clipping level or maximum response inherent in any organism's functioning so you can only get so much SR from a stimulus. The cognitive pathways or associations may not be thus limited however. Repeated SR events tend to deepen and broaden the SRC. Spatial proximity in contrast only determines the relative intensity of the stimulus at each occurence at least in the initial phases of conditioning.

After cognitive development has proceeded to a high enough level of complexity, spatial mapping can become very important indeed, but till then, the proximity part of the relationships involved in SRC is less important. Imprinting may be an exception to this general description and further study might be done along those lines. In fact, during imprinting, spatial mapping might be a dominant factor.

Abstraction

SRC leads to the cognitive encoding of signs which are semi-permanent. Signs can change and evolve as the cognitive development and the exterior environment change. As SRC strengthens the SR of a sign, a point may be reached where even the hint of or subset of the sign event triggers a SR. In fact it may be said that signs are recursive in the sense that precursors to or subsets of the sign event come to signify the sign itself. Signs over time tend toward signs of themselves. They tend to boil themselves down to their essential qualities. This occurs because events causing SRC vary and the variations tend to cancel out until only the essential features of the signatory event are embedded in the sign. This process is called 'abstraction'. Signs thus abstracted are embedded cognitively as memory traces. In fact, one might argue that a sign is indeed an abstraction and does not exist in the exterior enviroment as event. The signatory event only elicits the sign as a cognate or cognitive perception, but that is a depth of analysis which we don't need to explore in this paper.

Signs by their nature are one step removed from the reality or real causal event that they signify. Philosophically speaking they are at a different ontological level. Physically speaking, they are also removed from the event. In fact, the internal representation or SR pathways within an organism are where the sign actually resides, but in general it is more convenient to simply project and identify the exterior stimulus as the sign. This is indeed what an organism undergoing a semantic response will actually do anyway. Thus signs elicit behaviour and reality becomes an abstract representation of reality. The whole process is recursive as external events modify the internal representations, and the internal representations modify the perception of external events.

Reality itself is a shifting target, and many philosophical debates rage over the ultimate questions about what is really real, but a pragmatist takes the view that it is better to simply accept signatory relations at face value on some level and see what understandings may accrue. It is extremely important to keep in mind at all times, however, an awareness of abstraction so that one does not make the ultimate mistake of confusing the symbol with the reality. This is true even if there is no ultimate reality! The recursive nature of signs, symbols, abstraction, and hence knowledge itself demands a strong, supple, and adaptable stance when it comes to their appropriate use.

An overriding obsession with analysis and narrow definitions can lead to brittle understandings and behaviours which loose their causal relevance. Similarly an overriding tendency to synthesize new semantic pathways at the drop of the hat leads to shallow, inappropriate and ill- defined semantic responses.

Symbols and Things

Once a sign has become embedded as an abstract representation then we may say that it has become a 'symbol'. A symbol welds a representation and its semantic response together as a relationship which points to some referent or object. Structurally a sign is the representational end of the relationship and the semantic response is the referential end. Since the recursive abstraction process means that signs tend to end up referring to more abstract and essential versions of themselves, we have a transmutation process whereby signs become embedded as symbols which exist at a higher cognitive level with increased breadth(generality), depth(specificity), and potency for eliciting behaviour. Fig.2 below gives a crude diagram of a sign transformed into a symbol. The cones of smaller circles represents the recursive reduction or abstraction of sign into symbol always at higher levels more removed from the original physical events. This is all relative, however, and once the recursive process is initiated the cognitive functions are self-referential to some degree and signs can end up referring to other signs if the appropriate semantic pathways overlap.

Fig. 2. Transformation of sign into Symbol

Note that the original representation and referent exist on a lower level. The referent may be physically external as is the original signatory event, but ultimately as abstraction and cognitive development proceeds, either or both may exist internally as cognitive states. It is important to remember, however, that all such cognitive development is built from the ground up on physical processes and in no way implies any metaphysical influences. Conversely, this does not exclude the possibility of metaphysical influences. Until this possibility is somehow overtly manifest, though, it is best to avoid speculation without keeping a strong grasp on the fact that one is speculating. In the meantime, so much is easily understood without invoking the metaphysique so why bother. There actually is a strong philosophical problem which does enter into the equation and it concerns 'qualia', but this paper will not discuss that.

Chunking

Earlier we stated that SRC entangles the stimulus event with the pre-sign event to the extent that the pre-sign event becomes a sign and the sign comes to signify the stimulus event. The sign becomes the stimulus. Cognitive entanglement leads to perceptual triggering wherein a portion of the whole tends to reproduce the whole semantic response to some degree. When cognitive development reaches a level of complexity wherein signs become abstract symbols, we have a new more abstract level of entanglement.

Entanglement at this level is called 'chunking'. A group of signs or symbols can be linked by a semantic response that triggers a cascade of similar cognitive pathways. This can occur when a SRC situation develops that activates individual signs or symbols synchronously. The same IFP relations apply to this situation and the entire group of SR relations come to be associated with this particular SRC stimulus. This process enables speech and written language as chunking of arbitrary symbols whose individual SRs become entangled and together represent a more abstract entity - namely a word and eventually entire sentences or thoughts.

Chunking of symbols gives rise to what is called 'meaning'. Signs and primitive symbols have a semantic response and this is the origin of meaning. But meaning in the usual sense denotes a higher level of abstraction wherein chunked symbols become organized into higher groupings that have their own causal relations independent of external realities. These independent causal relations evolve as language syntax which mirrors the operative aspects of causality in the external world to some degree but they are also arbitrary and free to reassociate.

The unified semantic response of a group of symbols organized into a word or phrase within a particular language is called meaning. The phrase means something if its organization is valid enough to trigger a unified SR. A meaningless phrase might conjure up lots of associative SRs but without the resonance that a causally valid phrase does. If the syntactic resonance doesn't occur, the meaning is fragmentary or reduced to the lower level semantic response carried by signs and simple symbols. Syntactic resonance is the abstract higher level equivalent or analog of IFP relations which determine the SRC of low level signs.

Semantics as a discipline studies how these meanings of words and phrases develop and change over time. Linguistics studies particular languages, grammar and syntax and how they relate to each other. Semiotics is a more general but lower level endeavor which attempts to study the process of signification itself. A homologue of these three disciplines might perhaps be illustrated by physics, engineering, and chemistry. Physics (semiotics) studies the fundamental principles. Engineering (semantics) studies the design, function, and uses of structures. Chemistry (linguistics) studies how the pieces fit together.

Semiotics, IFP, and the Causal Veil

The single most astounding fact of semantic response conditioning is that the association is arbitrary. In the world at large, SRC occurs with all organisms to some extent and is subject to the enviromental whims of the particular situation. It is amazing that amidst all this, nature herself operates with an invariant adherence to physical laws and principles which govern everything on all levels from the top down without exception, at least as far as we know. How simple laws or principles can lead to chaos and staggering complexity is another subject, but the importance to SRC should not go un-noticed. It is the author's belief that IFP relations are significators of causality in the long-haul but can be totally arbitrary and indeterminate in their effect when they apply to any particular SRC situation. IFP relations are the underlying causal foundation of semantic response and signification, but the resulting signification does not itself necessarily reflect causality.

The above situation has plagued man for eons. His cognitive apparatus has enabled him to adapt with staggering success. He has begun to comprehend the universe in an almost god-like fashion and has the ability to control nature in fundamental ways. In the process, he has abstracted himself from his primal connections with the world. Some individuals are unfortunate enough to have been inprinted with mal-adapted SRs and have an insane view of reality which is far enough away from the group mentality that his behavior is destructive. Others inherit or develop a biochemical imbalance which warps the semiotic process. Others still, wander into a realm of abstraction which becomes self-energizing and feeds back on itself independent of outside influence. The possibilites for appropriate or inappropriate SRs are as infinite as the number of possible abstractions.

Much of what we normally call causality is but a SRC illusion born of arbitrary IFP relations. It takes growth and cognitive maturity before the more faithful and hopefully true relations emerge. The study of semiotics can tell us much about why appearances can deceive and why things can go so awfully awry when man relates to his fellow humans. As we develop might we not learn to recognize that every individual's entire cognitive word view is entirely unique and may not have the same signatory resonances. That we are able to relate with language at all is a monumental achievement.

Remember always that we have the ability to reassociate semantic responses. We are free to associate and free to free-associate. Most of all, however, remember to remember that it is important to be aware of the level of abstraction you are operating at. Your physical being is your safety net should you stray too far into the abstract and your emotions both guide and energize your cognitive flights.

Causality may be an illusive veil but ultimately nature sheds her raimanent and the significant truths shine forth.

Rasputin11,

Aug 25, 2001