Semiotics

There's been some discussion of this topic recently. I have taken the liberty of drawing several of these threads together.

Zenomax
tcM - after reading your review of Eco, I wonder what the relationship is between semiotics and phenomenology?

And with Jungian thought?

And with synesthesia - which I always wanted to have - colour and symbols can have a deep meaning for me - to have them combined in this strange way would be a fine thing indeed.

I should like to go into all this further at some stage. What literature is there on semiotics for a beginner?

TomcatMurr
I would say that semiotics is phenomenology with labels attached. Semiotics seeks to study the labels we give to the things we perceive, either at the level of communication: talking about the things we perceive; or at the level of cognition: thinking about the things we perceive. No?

Here is a quick list of references on Semiotics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEgxTKUP_...
Semiotics: The Basics Daniel Chandler
This Means This, This Means That: A User's Guide to Semiotics Sean Hall
Elements of Semiology Roland Barthes (this is a classic, but you might want to try the other two first as more general introductions.)
The wikipedia entry on Semiotics is also rather useful.

Any other intros on semiotics anyone?

Actually, now that I think of it, The Name of the Rose is as good an introduction to it as any!

As someone who does have synesthesia - I hear colors - I can't imagine living any other way. To me it would be rather like being blind and deaf at the same time. I shudder even thinking about it.

>3 urania1: I ditto you with all my heart. I never connected it with semiotics, but I did connect it with phonetics (oh, the deep cherry redness of the Scottish trilled "r" . . . .), and now I wonder if by connecting semiotics to both things I could close some sort of triangle.

>4 MeditationesMartini:, Oh, ditto in reverse I guess. sounds have colours to me, not colours sounds.

I am vaguely envious of people who have synesthesia - it always seems like it would be quite pleasant. Not to derail the topic (I am interested in learning more about semiotics too!), but would you say that's a fair assessment - that it's pleasant? Is it ever overwhelming?

Semiotics seems such a rich field (having looked at the Wikipedia entry).

In fact I have purloined the urban semiotics concept as I am planning to do some reading around cityscapes and spaces in 2010. I'll cross-post anything of interest.

I can also see a link between semiotics and systems theory/cybernetics.

Question: having just re watched Blade Runner - if we are trying to create ever more human like artificial intelligences, would we need to create some from of inbuilt semiotic system inside them? Without this would robots/computers/AI have any ability to approach humanity in their ability to interpret and respond?

Does synethesia require its own thread? It seems important enough to warrant discussion. And it obviously holds a fascination for us non afflictees.

I would like to know what sounds particular colours have for Urania, and what colours particular sounds have for Martin.

We definitely need a thread for Synesthesia. Go start one, Zeno or Urania, please, I beg you, while I roll out another barrel of herring.

And Zeno, in 7, i implore you to post your thoughts on the language of cityscapes in le salon des amateurs: I can see fabulous connections with Barthes and Eco and Walter Matthau here, perfect for semiotics.

Walter Benjamin, I mean, not Walter Matthau. Christ I'm really loosing it.

Do we need a thread for artificial languages and AI?

That is a bloody good question in >8 zenomax:. Is semiotics - the ability to metaphorise- integral to the human mind? Are we metaphorical animals, in the way that we are political animals (Aristotle) and linguistic animals (Murr)?

>10 tomcatMurr: Absolutely we are metaphorical animals. I don't see how abstract thought is possible without metaphor and metonymy. Also, I just did a final on language and the brain where one of the only answers I'm sure I didn't arse up was on where metaphorical capacity lives in the brain--a charming little lobe called the angular gyrus.

Oh, and >9 zenomax:, I think there's a certain logic to it, and one that has been hopelessly colonized by my studies in phonetics in that I now conceive of my sound-colour palette in ways that approximate the articulatory-phonetics breakdown of speech sounds by place (labial, dental, etc.) and type (stop, fricative, etc.) of articulation. Voiced sounds are warmer (red, orange, pink), unvoiced sounds are cool (blue,purple, grey); laterals (l's) are yellow, green, and bright; r's are deep red; stops (p, t) are bright, clear, almost pastel but too vivid--light blue and orange in the case of the two mentioned. Voiced stops are darker, muddier--b is a red-brown. Fricatives (f, th) are more matte, textured. vowels have an exquisite tactile quality like you'd find in a pretentious catalogue or Wallpaper magazine--grainy wood, burnished metal, and the like--but it's hard to put my finger on. The sound in German ich and English Hugh is the most lovely periwinkle.

Words take their colour from their initial letters, and then develop it, so there is a lot of stuff going on in e.g. my name, Martin, but fundamentally it is green, as deep a green as a capital M.

Thanks Martin, a wonderfully evocative explanation. I can see all those sounds associated with those colours in my mind now.

I will always associate a Hugh with periwinkle now.

Further to #8, a search brings me to the site of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Vrije University in Belgium.

This team have been looking at language origins for several years, using AI.

The main reason an AI unit is looking at language development appears to be related to the point I raised about the need for an inbuilt understanding of semiotics for AI to develop and function like humans:

On the one hand, autonomous artificial agents which need to coordinate their activity in open-ended environments could make use of these mechanisms to develop and continuously adapt their communication systems. On the other hand, understanding how language develops and evolves is probably our only hope to ever get to technological artefacts that exhibit human-level language understanding and production. Human languages are constantly changing and differ significantly from one speaker to the next and from one context to the next. So, we need language technologies which exhibit the same adaptivity as humans.

One of the experiments is in Lexicon creation:

In order to talk about the world, agents need to have a shared lexicon. The lexicon formation experiments investigate how a shared lexicon can emerge in a population of agents that initially have no lexicon at all.

The simplest game that is played by the agents is the naming game. Two agents are chosen from the population. One agent points to an object and says a name for this object. The other agent looks in its lexicon and checks whether it has the same name for the same object. If so, the game was successful. If not the game is a failure, but the listening agent remembers the name that was given to the object.

Agents prefer to use the most successful names, and discard the unsuccessful ones. After a while a coherent and successful lexicon emerges.

Link:

http://arti.vub.ac.be/origin/origins.html

</i>back to synesthesia for a moment, I found this in Nabakov's commentary on Eugene Onegin (p.479):

This ey, pronounced somewhat like 'ey' in 'Bey', or 'ay' in 'Bay' but with a longer, hollower, yellower sound to it.....

BTW, where is Urania?

>11 MeditationesMartini: so Martin does the angular gyrus appear in other species?

Your description of colours and sounds is indeed lovely.

Zeno, your report from the latest in AI is very interesting. I can see parallels emerging here with a discussion going on in the Language philosophy thread, about words in isolation. FYI http://www.librarything.com/topic/79177 message 39 et al.

in re synesthesia - there's a fair bit of anecdotal, case study info in Oliver Sacks Musicophilia.

Is there any indication that in, some cases at least, synesthesia attenuates or disappears as one gets older?

This IS OT..but up through my early 20s I could "orchestrate" in my head - that is hear a whole piece, either w/ original or "modified" instrumental "scores" - a quirk that disappeared by the time i was ~30.