Friday, October 11, 2013

The Glory of Semiotics

       
     Signs are everywhere. Everything, even nothing, signifies something else. This is not because everything in and of itself suggests something else, but because the human brain is astoundingly brilliant at making associations. We love signs and symbols; we love uncovering them in literature, art, movies, other people, and the world in general. The words I'm using now are signs. The chair you are sitting in, or the bed upon which you are lying carry meanings beyond their mere functions: where they came from, what you have done upon them, their design, and history. Further, they suggest: repose, reflection, meals, sex, sleep, death, or authority--the seat of power, thrones. Our brains make dozens, maybe hundreds, of associations, many of them not quite conscious to us, as soon as we encounter anything and everything. If we were fully conscious of all these associations, we'd have runaway cases of ADD--focus would be impossible. It seems most of us also have an unconscious ability to sort out and filter these associations.
     Yesterday morning at breakfast, out of nowhere I could determine, my very elderly uncle, Mr. Top, who normally sleeps through most of breakfast now, looked up and said,
I think that I shall never see
A billboard as lovely as a tree,
Indeed, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.
Then he said, "Ogden Nash wrote that."  Maybe that's what got me to thinking about this subject. There are too many of some kinds of signs, which is a sign in itself, and raises another complicated set of signs. A few weeks ago, also at breakfast, without warning, he perked up and sang:

I am the monarch of the sea,
The ruler of the Queen's Navee,
Whose praise Great Britain loudly chants.
And we are his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!
And we are his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!
When at anchor here I ride,
My bosom swells with pride,
And I snap my fingers at a foeman's taunts;
And so do his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!
And so do his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!
      I laughed and sang along, recognizing this snippet from Gilbert and Sullivan that arose in his brain for some unknown reason; but clearly, as he sat at breakfast only half-awake, something cued Gilbert and Sullivan; perhaps a conga line of associations led him to recite and sing for us, or maybe a random, passing feeling of joy. For there is joy inside of this man whose life has been limited profoundly by his body's betrayal and his mind's impairment. And this brain, even in decline, instantly produced these recollections. His father was famous among his many friends for the phrase "That reminds me . . ." after which he'd relate an invariably funny story or a song, which he had in endless supply. "That reminds me"  means that we have been pointed to a sign by another sign, or a long highway of billboards. When our brains cease reading signs, permanently lose the ability to make associations of any kind, they will have ceased functioning in any meaningful way. To be human is to be a reader and interpreter of signs, and have quite an adventure doing it.
     When Einstein's brain was rediscovered in 1978, inside of a couple of jars, it wasn't making any associations of any kind; but that brain had once, through "mere" thought experiments, made associations that uncovered general relativity and helped lay the foundation for quantum physics. He "knew," or at least suspected very strongly, what he and others later established through experimentation and observation. Our brains are capable of great leaps and astounding associations that we are sometimes not even aware they are making until they've been made. How is this possible? Probably because the brain is the most complex and highly organized thing in the known universe. 
       And why, how, is the universe known? How was/is it discovered? By means of the human brain, which is itself part of the universe. The universe therefore perceives itself by means of the human brain. And the brain operates primarily by making associations, through signs pointing this way and that, further and further, deeper and deeper, higher and higher, binding everything together in a pattern of meaning. Without our consciousness, the universe wouldn't exist; and without the universe, our consciousness wouldn't exist.
      "The heavens declare the glory of God," said the writer of Psalm 19. Whether you believe that or not, the heavens certainly exhibit some kind of glory; but if no conscious being existed to notice the heavens, to read them as a sign pointing to something else, something like the idea of God, there wouldn't be anything glorious about the heavens at all. Significance exists only to conscious, intelligent beings that perceive things outside of themselves and connect these things into systems of meaning. Intelligent, conscious beings are the measure of all things. We may not be the only such beings in the universe, but assuming for a moment that we are, maybe it should rather be said that "Man alone sees the heavens and declares them wondrous, and because he is a sign reader by nature, he assumes that they manifest the glory of another being that he calls 'God.'"
        It could be that we are the conscious component of the heavens, observing itself and declaring itself glorious. Or perhaps consciousness inheres everything, and we are mere participants in that consciousness. Whatever you believe, the universe is redolent with possibilities. Spinoza saw the universe as God and God as the universe, the necessary unfolding of all possibilities. String theory, and the consequent notion of infinite alternate universes, may turn out to be a proof of Spinoza's intuitions.
        Or maybe not. Maybe all possibilities and associations exist only in God's mind and are not actual in infinite alternate universes. Maybe all possible associations exist only in the one mind that can appropriately filter and sort literally everything that is or could be, and manifest only what is best in this mind. This would be something akin to Leibniz's assertion that this world is the "best of all possible worlds." In other words, God isn't going to randomly burst forth in gibberish, or even Gilbert and Sullivan tune. No matter how random things appear, they simply are not random; they were filtered by an unlimited mind that followed every possible sign, every possible association of all things that could have been, and then selected the best of what was reasonably possible to actually be. But we don't know this; we're just reading a sign: that our own intelligence and consciousness point to a greater or an ultimate intelligence and consciousness. But some signs point nowhere, which is itself a sign, suggesting that no signs point nowhere.
        Life for us involves following signs, signs that connect everything to everything in a chain that leads us invariably to posit some ultimate reality, something that we have called by many names. We can't resist it; whether it be Plato's forms, Laozi's Tao, the Hebrew's God, or the string theorist's multiverse. It's an amazing journey, a mystery, and we are the travelers, the detectives. The journey only ends when we lose all ability to read and interpret signs. Until then, we'll never run out of wonder, for there are signs everywhere.
     

     


1 comment:

Elizabeth Rubin said...

Amazing really. This post showed up right after I watched an old Salma Hayek movie called "Fools Rush In". In it, Matthew Perry who has lost his way, in a manner of speaking, sees an old priest on the street who says into the crowd, but addressing Perry "There are signs everywhere". After which Perry sees many signs and hints of where it is he needs to be, which ultimately, of course, is with Salma Hayek. (Which is a no-brainer) But the timing was the delicious treat. That movie and then finding your blog just after was quite a treat, or was it a sign? Either way, great blog.