RE: SUO: Re: World's largest individual organism
Bill,
C. S. Peirce used the notion of "sign" as a generalization
of all the things you mentioned, ranging from symbols on paper
or a computer screen to electrochemical signals in the brain.
That generalization can support a formal theory of meaning
defined in terms of relationships of signs to signs, independent
of how they may be represented in hardware, software, or even
"wetware", as the brain is sometimes called. I agree with you
that the human mind has to be considered, but the details of
its implementation are not essential for a theory of meaning.
>Our goal with the SUO should be to create a symbol
>set that: (a) on the perception side, maximizes the similarity not of
>the electrochemical responses, but of their effects on the mind in
>which they occur; and (b) on the production side, minimizes the >probability
of choosing the wrong symbol to manifest/externalize a
>particular electrochemical phenomena. (BTW: These >eletrochemical behaviors
and their effects constitute the only
>useful definition "semantics" and "meaning", IMHO.)
The problem with those electrochemical phenomena is that the
only thing we know about them is that they light up the screen
of a brain scan with pretty colors when people are solving
different kinds of problems. That is not sufficiently precise
to serve as a definition of anything else.
Furthermore, archaeologists and philologists have been able
to decipher the meaning or semantics of many signs that were
produced by brains that have long since crumbled into dust.
That is evidence that the relationships between symbols can
be decoded independently of any wetware that produced them.
Those relationships are what we are trying to capture and
formalize in the SUO, and we can do that without waiting for
neurophysiologists to tell us how the brain works. (I don't
deny that they're giving us lots of fascinating tidbits of
information, but we can study and codify the abstract patterns
by a "clean room" analysis, independent of the wetware.)
John Sowa