Surely there is at least some thing that’s real, even if only myself. Descartes – please tell me, which is more real, the thought that proves I exist or the thinking “I” thing that thinks it? If thinking proves sapient self-existence, do thoughts prove the existence of things thought of? Does the red apple in my mind’s eye prove its existence – or more to the point, its redness, sweetness, and all the rest of its fruity being?
Rationalism vs. empiricism notwithstanding, could I even think “apple” if there were no mental process and construct whereby correlation is established between some thing (in a mind), someone (having that mind with that thing in it), and the thing for which that (other) thing in my mind stands? In what sense are all those things (more or less) real? What semiotic process(es) may explain?
One philosophical perspective is proposed and elaborated in the work of James H. Fetzer. Fetzer describes the human mind as an essentially semiotic system: i.e., a sign-processor with the astonishing capacity to synchronously integrate indexical sensory input with iconic and symbolic mental states as a fundamentally causal process. Through this process, objects, events, and phenomena occurring in the objective, external world indexically affect the brain, thus iconically and symbolically affecting the mind to produce impressions, sensations, thoughts, concepts, and all the rest of the internal, subjective, psychic cosmos – somehow even consciousness itself.
Conversely, the internal, subjective mind’s semiotic thought processes iconically and symbolically stimulate the brain to generate indexical interaction with the external, objective world. This causal initiative manifests itself in every action, word, and deed from such unconscious processes as circulation and digestion to deliberate focus, movement, speech, and all the rest - yielding all humanity has wrought in and wreaked upon the world, from the sublime genius and beauty of our arts and sciences to the sheer horror of savage warfare and ruthless exploitation on a global scale, from our most noble ethics and moral behavior to our most shameless greed, corruption, and perversity.
At one level, semiosis is merely the electrochemical binding process linking minds and worlds both possible and actual at virtually the speed of light, operating under (what Fetzer calls) “perceptual rules of inference”, or in other words, the indexical constraints genetically imposed by the sensory apparatus and neurological framework of homo sapiens. At another level, semiosis is bound by all the relativistic and quantum causal laws that its own rules of abductive, inductive, and deductive logic and rules of scientific evidence and inference have created or discovered.
Almost ineffably, however, the nature of semiosis is itself striking proof of relativity and uncertainty: the perspective and act of observation and analysis will inevitably interfere and influence what is revealed, observed, or discovered. The ‘levels’, dimensions, or scope and range of semiosis as a causal process are therefore enormously complex, numerous, and diverse – perhaps even infinitely so. Semiosis by nature thus manifests an infinite cardinality, mathematically speaking, whose functional domain and range are simultaneously and axiomatically abstract and metaphysical, on one hand, yet nonetheless ontologically fundamental to the dispositional fiber of our very being, on the other.
Of the innumerable facts of life and plain truths established by semiosis per se, one is simply this: each of us does in fact exist as someone semiotically alive in a real world of actual things, where something else – namely, semiosis as sign-processing – bridges the gap between the two, and among us. As bland and dry as that fact may be, the truth of it is nonetheless illuminating and inspiring as its implications are ever more fully explored.
