Pages

Monday, May 18, 2020

Both necessity and arbitrariness of the sign: information

Introduction:
There exists a fundamental problem about the relation of information and the sign as it is defined in Saussure. A creative contradiction to the sign penetrated his main work therefore generating in turn the duality of information in any sign:
The sign meant internally or actually is both necessary and isomorphic to a single bit of information. Indeed, any sign is interpretable either as a signifier or the signified just as in an empty cell of information can be recorded either “0” or “1”. Seen in thus, i.e. inside, the sign is a totality, in which the link between the signifier and signified is necessary.
On the contrary, the sign considered outside, is uncertainly arbitrary. It is the potential for the sign meant actually only as some signified to assign (a-sign) any signifier therefore completing the structure of the sign as actual, described above. Then the sign needs the non-sign outside of it, in which only it might find a corresponding signifier. The choice of a signifier is often restricted to a finite set of elements such as an alphabet or a vocabulary. The quantity of information depends on the number of elements of that set being arbitrary and more than a bit in general.
The problem:
Information in a sign is unambiguous: it is necessarily a single bit inside, but quite uncertain outside (depending on the utilized alphabet or vocabulary or even on all texts written by that alphabet or vocabulary).
Saussure’s implicit creative intuition penetrating his Course:
The concept of sign needs and therefore generates a space between the necessity and unity of the sign and its arbitrariness and uncertainness among the elements of alphabet or vocabulary depending furthermore on all their uses (all words or texts recorded by means of them). The sign being always and moving in that space can be only partial, motivated by the unrealizable aspiration to complete ultimately the infinite process of signifying. Even much more: Saussure’s semiology is an implicit ontology as the being of all is what appears in that infinite process of signifying.
The resolving of the above problem in quantum mechanics and information in relation to semiology:
Quantum mechanics had to resolve the problem of how to describe uniformly both quantum leaps and smooth motion, namely by the Schrödinger equation. It was reformulated thoroughly in terms of quantum information in the end of the 20th century. Though involved differently in quantum mechanics, quantum information can be equated unambiguously to the generalization of information to infinite sets and series. The Schrödinger equation itself can be also exhaustedly interpreted in terms of quantum information.
That latter interpretation links it to Saussure’s tension of the sign generating an implicit ontology as semiology. Then the Schrödinger equation can be seen as a solution of the problem above about the relation of information and Saussure’s sign: both “arbitrary sign” outside and corresponding quantum information are equated to both “necessary sign” inside and corresponding information.



The presentation also as a PDF, a video, or as slides @ EasyChair

No comments:

Post a Comment