SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS
A symbol is an object that refers to a
referent. A referent is an object that
is referred to by a symbol. We know from previous discussion that there are
qualities,
objects and classes.Objects
are collections of qualities, namely the qualities that
describe the object, and
classes are collections of objects, namely
all objects that have the
qualities that are both common and unique to
that class.
An object is defined by its qualities, by
the qualities that ithas. And its qualities
are gathered togetherinwhat we call an Object Quality Set.
An object quality set could also be called a
description quality
set, and is often just
called a quality set. Classes are also
defined by a quality set called the Pertinent
Quality set, its the
quality set that is pertinent to the concept of
the class. In other words objects in the class may have
many
different qualities, but
only some will be pertinent to why the object
is in the class.
Pertinent quality sets are subsets of the
qualities in an
object's quality set. In other words any dog has a lot more
qualities
than just being a dog, but
its those doggy qualities that make it a
dog! The pertinent quality
set contains all those qualities that are
both common and unique to
all the objects that are in that class.
Common means that every object in the class
has those qualities,
in other words every object
has the pertinent quality set as a subset
of its full object quality
set. In other words all dogs are dogs
Unique means every object in the universe which has thosequalities in
the pertinent quality set is a member of that class.
In other words only dogs
are dogs! Thus commonness means being in the class implies having the
pertinent quality set, and
uniqueness means having the pertinent
quality set implies being
in the class.
NOTHING AND SOMETHING
A nothing is an object with the empty
quality set.
A NOthing has NO qualities in its quality
set.
A something is an object with a non empty
quality set.
A SOMETHING has SOME qualities in its
quality set.
The empty quality set means the object has
no qualities, utterly
devoid of somethingness.A
something therefore always has SOME qualities, and a nothing
always has NO qualities at
all.
THE LAW OF ONE NOTHING.
Notice there can only be one nothing.If
there were two different nothings, then their two qualities
sets would have to be
different, and thus not empty. Two empty quality sets can never differ from
each other.
They must therefore always be one and the same
empty quality set. And therefore two identical quality sets must describe twoidentical
objects or events, namely one object or event.One might be tempted to ask if
there can be many such nothingsall of which are identical to each other, like
101 dalmations. But by
being two or more of them,
they are no longer identical, because one
is over here, and the other
is over there etc, or one is this one, and
the other is that one.
Even if they are all piled up on top of
each other on the same
point, if you can differentiate
between the objects in the pile in any
way, those differentiations
belong in each separate object's quality
set, and thus they are all
different quality sets and thus can not be
empty, and thus not
nothings. So we conclude that can be many sometings, but only one nothing.
THE NATURE OF SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS
1.) DEFINITION OF SYMBOL AND REFERENT
The first is, that a symbol is an object
that is being used by
someone or something to
refer to another object called the referent.
For example, in a book, you have the word cow,
and the word cow
is then used to refer to
some real cow out in the real world.
Or you have a picture of a cow in a book, and
its a picture of a
cow named Daisey, with
black and white spots, who lived on a
particular farm, at a
particular time, and here is this complete
picture of Daisey.
The picture is an object, and the ink on
the paper is an object,
and the picture is made of
paper which is an object, and this compound
object is being used to
refer to the actual cow that existed in the
real world. The referent also is an object, it too exists
in the real world,
just as the symbol does.
Obviously, that's where milk comes from.
Moooo!
2.) SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS ARE TWO
DIFFERENT OBJECTS
So the second most important thing to know
about symbols and
referents is that they are
two different objects. And because they are two different objects they have two
different quality sets,
each one describing the object that the
quality set belongs to.
For example the picture of the cow is made
of paper, made with
ink, made with a
photographic process, is basically two dimensional
and exists in a book.
That's a symbol, it has qualities and it
is an object which
exists.
The referent is a real cow, its made out
of skin and bones and
blood and teeth and eats
grass and goes moo!
So you can see that that the two different
objects have two
different quality sets.
3.) SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS HAVE DIFFERENT
QUALITY SETS
So the third thing to know about symbols
and referents is that
some of the qualities of
the symbol will not exist in the referent at
all. And some of the qualities of the referent
will not exist in the
symbol at all.
For example the picture of the cow is made
of paper and ink, and
yet there is no paper or
ink in the real cow.
The real cow is made out of blood and
bone. The picture of the
cow is not.
So each one of these objects has qualities
that are unrelated to
the other object.
Yet the picture of the cow looks very much
like the actual cow,
they have 'geometrical
congruence or simiarity'.
Technically congruence means identical in
shape and size, while
similar means same shape
but different size. We use the two terms
interchangably through out
this lecture. Also the paper that the picture is printed on has 'substance' and
so does the real cow. Both have mass and weight etc. Thus there
will often be qualities between symbol and referentthat belong to both symbol
and referent.
4.) SOME OF THE QUALITIES OF THE SYMBOL ARE
MAPPED TO QUALITIES
OF THE REFERENT.
The fourth thing to know about symbols and
referents is that some
of the qualities of the
symbol are mapped to some of the qualities of
the referent. In other words some of the qualities of the
symbol are
used to refer to some of
the qualities of the referent. The quality in the symbol that is mapped to the
quality in thereferent may be two very different qualities. It is not the
similarity in qualities
that matters but consistency of mapping and
use.
In this way the symbol can be used to
refer to the referent, not
just in a dumb way where
symbol refers to referent, but in a more
meaningful way in which the
symbol's qualities point directly to the
referent's qualities.For
example in the picture of the cow there is a pictogram of a
cow, of Daisey in
particular. Its a space time drawing,
with color,
black and white spots,
outlines, projected in two dimensions, that has
a one to one general
spatial correspondance to what Daisey actually
looks like. We call this geometrical congruence between
symbol and
referent. In this case it is pretty easy to look at the
symbol and tell
what it symbolizes because
a certain subset of the symbol's qualities
are very related to a
subset of the referent's qualities.
5.) SYMBOLS CAN HAVE PICTURE FORM AND DATA
CONTENT
The fifth thing to know about symbols and
referents, is that
symbols can have
pictogramness or picture form, and they can also have
data content. For example
the word 'cow' certainly doesn't look like a cow, and
certainly doesn't have a
lot of data in it that would tell you what a
cow might be.It's an
arbitrary symbol. However a picture of a cow has both picture form and data
content.
Picture form means there is a one to one
correspondance between
some part of the symbol,
the picture of the cow, and the actual
referent. Picture form means the same thing as
geometrical
congruency. Data content means that contained in the
symbol either in its
picture form or in some
other form is encoded data that will tell you
something specific and true
about that referent.
For example a hologram film plate of a cow
has very low picture
form but very high data
content about the cow. The data content
can
be extracted from the
hologram film plate and in fact turned back into
picture form with lasers
shining through it at just the right angle.
A digital photograph of the cow, that is
turned into one's and
zero's and then encrypted
has zero picture form, but again the data
content remains very high
and can be recovered from the data form.
A scientific tome without pictures or diagrams
about the cow is
also a symbol for the cow.
Such a book, being all printed words, has
a very high density of
symbols which in themselves
have very little picture form or data
content. The word 'cow' tells you nothing about the
referent, but
once connected to a memory
bank that understands what cow refers to,
the data content can again
be extracted that properly decribes the
referent.
So the word 'cow' is low picture form and
low data content.A book about the cow is low picture form and high data
content. A photographic picture of a cow is high picture form and high
data content. So in summary
symbols can have very high picture form, very high
data content, or both or
neither.
In general however high picture form implies
high data content
as long as the picture form
is geometrically congruent to the
referent.
6.) SYMBOLS AND REFERENTS ALWAYS HAVE A
CAUSAL PATHWAY BETWEEN
THEM.
The sixth thing to know about symbols and
referents is that there
is always a causal pathway
between them. For example if you take a
photograph of a cow,
clearly light bounces off the cow, comes into the
camera lens, affects the
silver crystals on the film, and it gets
developed, and the film is
a direct causal result of physical
interactions in the
physical universe that can be traced back from the
film surface to the cow and
the photons bouncing off the cow from the
sun.
Even if someone a million years ago
invents the word 'cow' to
refer to the general class
of cows, there still had to be at some
point a causal pathway
between the actual cow and the fact the person
one way or another,
directly or indirectly, came up with a word 'cow'
to represent it. If there were no causal connections between
the cow
and the person, the person
would never have had a need or cause to
invent a word to refer to
it.
And so that symbol 'cow' invented by the
caveman still has a
causal heritage, a causal
pathway, back to an actual cow or mental
imagine of a cow in the
mind of the person using the symbol.
Thus where ever there is a symbol that refers
to a referent,
there must have been some
causal pathway, either direct or indirect
between the original
referent and the symbol.
From this we conclude that if there is no
causal pathway between
two objects, they can not
be symbol and referent to each other.
And if they are symbol and referent to
each other, there
must be a casual pathway
between them.So there we have said something very odd, and the astute reader
will notice that the
following definition of symbol and referent is a
superset of the normal
language usage.
We are going to assert by definition that
any two objects which
are causally related to
each other are symbol and referent to each
other. The referent is the earlier event and the
symbol is the later
event. Notice that when two objects (events) are
causally related to
each other, the symbol
always contains some data in its final state
about that causal
relationship between the symbol and the referent.
Some data content is
transfered between referent and symbol everytime
there is a causal event.
This is called a data transfer via causal
imprint.In any two objects that are causally related to each other tht after
object is the symbol for the before object which is the
referent, and the after
object contains a data 'imprint' on its state
that contains data content
about the nature of before object.The symbol is imprinted with data content
about the referent.
In the case of arbitrarily chosen symbols
chosen by man to refer
to objects, such as the
word cow, the data imprint is not so obvious.
It isn't obvious that we
can learn about what a cow really is by
looking at the word 'cow'.
The data transfer has either been interrupted between referent
and symbol, lost to
antiquity, or dropped below the noise floor.
But in the case of symbols that are
directly and intimately
causally connected to an
immediately prior referent event, the data
imprint on the symbol is
embodied in the very nature and state of the
symbol after the event
occurs.
OBJECT AND EVENT
The definition of an object as a
collection of qualities can be broadened to mean any event in space time.That
is, a single moment of space and a single moment of time,ora single small
conglomeration of such,form an event, and thereforeform an object. So
not only is the alarm clock on your bedroom bureau an objectbut so is the fact
that it is ringing at 8 o'clock in the morning onJan 1st, 2001. That event of it ringing at that moment is
part of thequality set of the spacetime plus clock at that moment and thus
forms
the complete object which
exists at that moment. Thus an object is comprised of ALL the qualities that
are in itsquality set at any given moment of space and time.
Now another example of an object is a
light switch on the wall.
and the wires that connect
it to a light bulb via a battery, the power
source, that powers the
whole system. The whole thing can be considered an object, or it can be broken
down into sub objects of
light switch, wires, battery and light bulb.
http://www.lightlink.com
http://www.clearing.org/cgi/archive.cgi?/homer/adore308.memo
