Where Shall We Look for the Meaning Hologram? 


Jim sketches out a research program by asking a couple of questions. 

I'm really glad that I forced myself to write that last Far Out Post entry We Are All Connected. In that blog entry, I tackled the difficult problem of sketching a world view where meaningful coincidence plays an important role in the construction of personal reality. However, from the thinking that went into the entry emerged a couple of important questions, and here they are.

Given that perception and understanding may be quantum-like phenomena, where will these phenomena contact the world of perception? More specifically, I have reasoned in other places that perception is a hologram-like phenomenon, as have others. The fact is that when I wake up and look out at the world, I seem to see a matrix of objects in specific 4-dimensional relationships to each other, yet the possibilities for acting on these apparent relationships are also in my mind. What is the relationship between the perceived world I experience and the physiological structures and processes of my body? To quote a line from the WikiBook on consciousness studies, "Given that there is no widely accepted theory of phenomenal consciousness Crick (1994) and Crick and Koch (1998) approached the problem of the location of the substrate of consciousness by proposing that scientists search for the Neural Correlates of Consciousness." The definitive answers to this question are not yet in.

Understanding understanding (this is not a typo) may be an even more difficult challenge. I'm convinced meaning is a quantum-like phenomenon, but not so sure that it is a hologram-like phenomenon. This despite the fact that meaning is embedded somehow in the objects of perception. It is a linguistic system, however, which generates meaning. Perhaps we shall have to look not only for neural correlates, but also for linguistic correlates. Language is, after all, a process through which people are trained to structure the world in a certain linguistic way. Part of the substrate of meaning may obtain as much in these extra-corporal structures, which are essentially social, as in the neural structures of the individual language users. Of course, the thorough-going reductionists won't be happy with the direction this argument is tending, namely, that a quantum-like process attends language communities, and accounts for the experience of meaning, or understanding, in the members of these communities. But what if something like that were true? We aren't going to find it through standard experimental design.

Though I am almost clueless as to where to begin with understanding understanding, I remain undaunted, and ask the second question as clearly as I can. Modeling this question on the one that I asked about the neural correlates of consciousness, What is the relationship between the meaningfulness that I experience and a) the physiological structures and processes of my body directly or indirectly responsible for my linguistic capability and b) social and cultural arrangements that make language possible?

A quick look at Wikipedia shows that I have my work cut out for me. Remembering my study of Pierce in graduate school days, I looked up semiotic. Clearly this is relevant, but nary a trace of the word "quantum" in the article. Also, I began to encounter theories that seemed to resonate with my concerns. For example, I read that "the Semiosphere is the sphere of semiosis in which the sign processes operate in the set of all interconnected Umwelts. I'm also seeing the unfamiliar names Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, Juri Lotman and Kalevi Kull, as well as the familiar names de Chardin and Vernadsky. I think I have some reading to do. But still nary a mention of quantum theory.

I wish some semiotician would read this blog and have mercy on me (or put me out of my misery, as the case may be.) 

Posted: Sun - June 25, 2006 at 10:18 AM          

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