Part Three: The Semantic Circuit
60309 postsposted 8th Jan '09
Human beings (domesticated primates) are symbol-using creatures; which means, as the pioneer semanticist, Korzybski, noted, that those who rule symbols, rule us.
If Moses, Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus and St. Paul can be considered living influences -- and they are, look around the world -- this is only because their Signal has been carried to us by human symbol systems. These systems include words, artworks, music, rituals and unrecognized rituals ("games") through which culture is transmitted. Marx and Hitler, Newton and Socrates, Shakespeare and Jefferson, etc. continue to "rule" parts of humanity in the same way -- through the semantic circuit.
We are ruled even more, and even less consciously, by the inventors of the wheel, the plow, the alphabet, even the Roman roads.
Since words contain both denotations (referents in the sensory-existential world) and connotations (emotional tones and poetic or rhetorical hooks), humans can be moved to action even by words which have no real meaning or reference in actuality. This is the mechanism of demagoguery, advertising and much of organized religion.
The bio-survival circuit only divides experience into two sets: that which is good for me or nourishing, and that which is bad for me or threatening. The emotional-territorial circuit also divides the world into two halves: that which is more powerful than me (higher in the pecking order) and that which is less powerful than me (lower in the pecking order). On this basis socio-biological systems evolve and animal "societies" of truly human complexity have been studied.
The semantic circuit allows us to sub-divide things, and reconnec things, at pleasure. There is no end to its busy-busy-busy labeling and packaging of experience. On the personal level, this is the "internal monologue" discovered by Joyce in Ulysses. On the historical level, this is the time-bending function described by Korzybski, which allows each generation to add new categories to our mental library -- connecting new things, separating new things, reclassifying and reshuffling forever. In this time-binding dimension. Einstein replaced Newton before most of the world had heard of Newton; simple arithemetic gave birth to algebra, which brought forth calculus, which produced tensor calculus, etc. Haydn and Mozart prepared the way for Beethoven, who broke into the realms that the Romantics and Wagnerians took over, which gave birth to what is called music today.
So-called "future shock" has always been with us, since the semantic circuit began functioning somewhere in pre-history. In a symbolizing, calculating, abstracting species, al times are "times of change." This process is however accelerating faster as time passes, because the symbolizing faculty is inherently self-augmenting.
In ordinary language, the semantic circuit is usually called "the mind." (As psychologist Robert Ornstein said in a recent radio show, when we say someone "has a good mind" we generally mean they have a good mouth, i.e., they use the semantic circuit well.)
In terms of Transactional Analysis, the first (oral) circuit is called the Natural Child, the second (emotional) circuit is called the Adapted Child, and the semantic circuit is called the Adult or Computer. In Jungian terms, the first circuit mediates sensation, the second circuit feeling, and the third circuit reason.
The neurological components of the first circuit go back to the oldest parts of the brain; Carl Sagan called these functions "the reptile brain." These neural structures are at least billions of years old. The second circuit structures appeared with the first amphibians and mammals, somewhere around 1000 million or 500 million years ago; Sagan called them "the mammalian brain." The semantic circuit appeared perhaps 100 thousand years ago; Sagan called it "the human brain." It should be no surprise that most people, most of the time, are controlled more by the older reptilian-mammalian circuits than by the human semantic (rational) circuit, or that the semantic circuit is so easily perverted into false logics (bigotries, intolerant ideologies, fanaticism of all sorts) when the bio-survival circuit signals threat to life or the emotional circuit flashes threat to status.
Cynics, satirists, and "mystic s" (circuit V-VII types) have told us over adn over that "reason is a whore," i.e. that the semantic circuit is notoriously vulnerable to manipulation by the older, more primitive circuits. However much the Rationalist may resent this, it is always true in the short run -- that is, to use one of the Rationalists favorite words, it is always pragmatically true. Whoever can scare people enough (produce bio-survival anxiety) can sell them quickly on any verbal map that seems to give them relief, i.e., cure the anxiety. By frightening people with Hell and then offering them Salvation, the most ignorant or crooked individuals can "sell" a whole system of thought that cannot bear two minutes of rational analysis. And any domesticated primate alpha male, however cruel or crooked, can rally the primate tribe behind him by howling that a rival alpha male is about to lead his gange in an attack on this habitat. These two mammalian reflexes are known, respectively, as Religion and Patriotism. They work for domesticated primates, as for the wild primates, because they are Evolutionary Relative Successes. (So far.)
The emotional-territorial or "patriotic" circuit also contains the pack's status programs or pecking order. Working in tandem with the first-circuit bio-survival anxieties, it is always able to pervert the functioning of the semantic-rational circuit. Whatever threatens loss of status, and whatever invades one's "space" (including one's ideological "head space"), is a threat to the average domesticated primate. Thus, if a poor man has one status prop in his life -- "I'm a white man, not a goddam nigger" or "I'm normal, not a goddamn faggot" or whatever -- any attempt to preach1 tolerance, common humanity, relativism, etc. is not processed through the semantic circuit but through the emotional circuit, and is rejected as an attack on status (ego, social role).
1 Of course, preaching itself is bad second circuit politics, since it puts you one-up on the person preached-at. You are not one-up unless imprinted as such by being an alpha male in the same gene-pool or conditioned as such by being a "boss" or authority-figure. The counter-culture of the 1960s, like many other idealistic movements, failed because it did so much preaching from a morally one-up position when nobody had been imprinted or conditioned to accept it as one-up.
Those extreme cases who take their heaviest imprint on the third circuit tend to grow up cerebrotonic. They are tall and skinny, because energy is perpetually drawn upward from the body into the head. The caricatured evil genius, Dr. Sylvanus in Superman, who was virtually all head, represents the extreme toward which this type seems to be evolving. Popular speech calls them "eggheads."
Almost always, these cerebrotonic Third-Circuit types ignore or are hostile to their first and second circuit functions. Playfulness puzzles them (appears silly or eccentric) and emotions both baffle and frighten them.
Sicne we all contain this circuit, we all need to exercize it regularly. Make up a schematic diagram of your business or home and try to streamline it for more efficiency. Design a chart that explains the whole universe. Every few years, study a science you know nothing about, at an Adult Education center.
And don't neglect to play with this circuit: write poems, jingles, fables, proverbs or jokes.
As with the earlier circuits, the semantic circuit builds all of its conditioning and learning onto a bedrock of hard-wired imprinting. Thus, many existentially thinkable thoughts are socially unthinkable, since a) everybody in a given society has roughly the same semantic imprint and b) this is reinforced daily by assumptions that are mechanically taken for granted.
Thus, a genius is one who, by some internal process, breaks through to Circuit VII -- a minor neurological miracle loosely called "intuition" -- and comes back down to the third circuit with the capacity to paint a new semantic map, build a new model of experience. Needless to say, this is always a profound shock to those still trapped in the old robot-imprints, and is generally considered a threat to territory (ideological head space). The long list of martyrs to free enquiry, from Socrates onward, shows how mechanical this neophobia (fear of new semantic signals) is.
As Thomas Kuhn showed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science itself -- the apotheosis of third-circuit semantic rationality -- is not free of this neophobia. Kuhn demonstrated, at length, that each scientific revolution took one full generation to turn over the old world view. And Kuhn further showed that the older scientists never are converted to thew new semantic paradigm. They are, in our terminology, mechanically hooked to their original imprints. The revolution is complete, as Kuhn shows, only when a second generation, not hooked to the old imprint, is able to compare the two models and decides rationally that the newer one really does make more sense.
But if science, the most self-correcting of all information processing third-circuit functions, has this one-generation time lag, what can be said of politics, religion, economics? Time-lags of centuries, or even milleniums, are common there.2
2 This only refers to other people's politics, religions and economics, needless to say. The reader's own opinions on these subjects are the only reasonable and objective ones. Of course.
We commented earlier that in bio-survival neurology, there is no time. "I just found msyelf doing it," we say after passing through an automatic reflex on the bio-survival circuit.
Emotional-territorial circuit actions begin to include time as a factor. Dominance signals may not "work": the seemingly weaker mammal may offer a counter- challenge. Two dogs will walk around each other for several minutes growling and sniffing (the chemical secretions of each reveals its actual degree of fear to the other) before Top Dog and Bottom Dog becomes clear.
On the human level, we often agonize over emotional decisions, becoming acutely conscious of time as we hesitate. As every suspense writer knows, the principle way to increase emotional tension is to set a time limit on a difficult or dangerous decision.
On the third-circuit, time becomes conceptualized as well as experienced. We know ourselves as creatures of time; the "tale of the tribe," the totem pole, the Odyssey of Homer, the Old Testament, the Vedas, etc. tell us what came before and often contains prophecies of what will come later. Science expands the third circuit into contemplation of time-spans that stagger our imaginations. The very use of written languages and other symbols like mathematics creates the time-bending sense of Korzybski: we know ourselves as receivers of messages sent by sages "of olde" and as potential transmitters of messages that may be scanned ages in the future.
The fourth circuit causes us to be even more involved in, and pressured by, time.
The first and second circuits are Evolutionary Stable Strategies. They have worked, in more or less the same form, not just for primates but for other mammals, and for many other species, over vast aeons of time.
The third, semantic circuit is an Evolutionary Unstable Strategy. It could very accurately be called revolutionary rather than evolutionary.
The first two circuits are based on negative feedback, in the biological sense. They maintain homeostasis -- that is, they return, over and over, to the same ecological-ethological balances. The function of negative feedback is to return to such a steady state.
The time-bending semantic circuit is not based on such steady-state negative feedback. It is a mechanism of what cyberneticists and biologists called positive feedback. It does not return to a steady state, but constantly seeks a new equilibrium at a higher energy level. (Negative feedback returns to a fixed point, like a thermostat. Positive feedback seeks a moving goal, like a guided missile.)
The first two circuits maintain that which is (more or less) constant in human affairs. They are totally cyclical, and relate directly to the cycles found in history by Vico, Hegel and similar philosophers.
The third circuit has always been hemmed-in and heavily sanctioned with rules, laws, prohibition, taboos, etc. because it breaks up such cycles. It leads, if unleashed, to an upward-hurtling spiral.
In societies where the third, semantic circuit has been partially unleashed -- it has never been totally freed in any society -- the upward spiral immediately appears. This used to be known as "progress," before that word became unfashionable.
The upward spiral (whether we call it "progress" or not) is characteristic of what Karl Popper calls Open Societies. These are secular, humanistic societies -- cultures relatively free of taboo and dogmatism.
Such freedom, up to and including the present, is only relative, because many taboos are unconscious and pass themselves off as "common sense" or "common decency," etc. Whoever challenges them is by definition a "heretic," by definition a "traitor," or by definition an "irresponsible nut."
The Greek myth of Prometheus Bound -- the Titan who brought Light to humanity and is eternally punished for it -- is the synecdoche, the perfect symbol, of how the third circuit has been handled in most human societies.
Introduction
Part One: The Bio-Survival Circuit
Part Two: The Emotional-Territorial Circuit
Part Four: The Socio-Sexual Circuit
Part Five: The Circuits and communication
C.
quoteIf Moses, Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus and St. Paul can be considered living influences -- and they are, look around the world -- this is only because their Signal has been carried to us by human symbol systems. These systems include words, artworks, music, rituals and unrecognized rituals ("games") through which culture is transmitted. Marx and Hitler, Newton and Socrates, Shakespeare and Jefferson, etc. continue to "rule" parts of humanity in the same way -- through the semantic circuit.
We are ruled even more, and even less consciously, by the inventors of the wheel, the plow, the alphabet, even the Roman roads.
Since words contain both denotations (referents in the sensory-existential world) and connotations (emotional tones and poetic or rhetorical hooks), humans can be moved to action even by words which have no real meaning or reference in actuality. This is the mechanism of demagoguery, advertising and much of organized religion.
The bio-survival circuit only divides experience into two sets: that which is good for me or nourishing, and that which is bad for me or threatening. The emotional-territorial circuit also divides the world into two halves: that which is more powerful than me (higher in the pecking order) and that which is less powerful than me (lower in the pecking order). On this basis socio-biological systems evolve and animal "societies" of truly human complexity have been studied.
The semantic circuit allows us to sub-divide things, and reconnec things, at pleasure. There is no end to its busy-busy-busy labeling and packaging of experience. On the personal level, this is the "internal monologue" discovered by Joyce in Ulysses. On the historical level, this is the time-bending function described by Korzybski, which allows each generation to add new categories to our mental library -- connecting new things, separating new things, reclassifying and reshuffling forever. In this time-binding dimension. Einstein replaced Newton before most of the world had heard of Newton; simple arithemetic gave birth to algebra, which brought forth calculus, which produced tensor calculus, etc. Haydn and Mozart prepared the way for Beethoven, who broke into the realms that the Romantics and Wagnerians took over, which gave birth to what is called music today.
So-called "future shock" has always been with us, since the semantic circuit began functioning somewhere in pre-history. In a symbolizing, calculating, abstracting species, al times are "times of change." This process is however accelerating faster as time passes, because the symbolizing faculty is inherently self-augmenting.
In ordinary language, the semantic circuit is usually called "the mind." (As psychologist Robert Ornstein said in a recent radio show, when we say someone "has a good mind" we generally mean they have a good mouth, i.e., they use the semantic circuit well.)
In terms of Transactional Analysis, the first (oral) circuit is called the Natural Child, the second (emotional) circuit is called the Adapted Child, and the semantic circuit is called the Adult or Computer. In Jungian terms, the first circuit mediates sensation, the second circuit feeling, and the third circuit reason.
The neurological components of the first circuit go back to the oldest parts of the brain; Carl Sagan called these functions "the reptile brain." These neural structures are at least billions of years old. The second circuit structures appeared with the first amphibians and mammals, somewhere around 1000 million or 500 million years ago; Sagan called them "the mammalian brain." The semantic circuit appeared perhaps 100 thousand years ago; Sagan called it "the human brain." It should be no surprise that most people, most of the time, are controlled more by the older reptilian-mammalian circuits than by the human semantic (rational) circuit, or that the semantic circuit is so easily perverted into false logics (bigotries, intolerant ideologies, fanaticism of all sorts) when the bio-survival circuit signals threat to life or the emotional circuit flashes threat to status.
Cynics, satirists, and "mystic s" (circuit V-VII types) have told us over adn over that "reason is a whore," i.e. that the semantic circuit is notoriously vulnerable to manipulation by the older, more primitive circuits. However much the Rationalist may resent this, it is always true in the short run -- that is, to use one of the Rationalists favorite words, it is always pragmatically true. Whoever can scare people enough (produce bio-survival anxiety) can sell them quickly on any verbal map that seems to give them relief, i.e., cure the anxiety. By frightening people with Hell and then offering them Salvation, the most ignorant or crooked individuals can "sell" a whole system of thought that cannot bear two minutes of rational analysis. And any domesticated primate alpha male, however cruel or crooked, can rally the primate tribe behind him by howling that a rival alpha male is about to lead his gange in an attack on this habitat. These two mammalian reflexes are known, respectively, as Religion and Patriotism. They work for domesticated primates, as for the wild primates, because they are Evolutionary Relative Successes. (So far.)
The emotional-territorial or "patriotic" circuit also contains the pack's status programs or pecking order. Working in tandem with the first-circuit bio-survival anxieties, it is always able to pervert the functioning of the semantic-rational circuit. Whatever threatens loss of status, and whatever invades one's "space" (including one's ideological "head space"), is a threat to the average domesticated primate. Thus, if a poor man has one status prop in his life -- "I'm a white man, not a goddam nigger" or "I'm normal, not a goddamn faggot" or whatever -- any attempt to preach1 tolerance, common humanity, relativism, etc. is not processed through the semantic circuit but through the emotional circuit, and is rejected as an attack on status (ego, social role).
1 Of course, preaching itself is bad second circuit politics, since it puts you one-up on the person preached-at. You are not one-up unless imprinted as such by being an alpha male in the same gene-pool or conditioned as such by being a "boss" or authority-figure. The counter-culture of the 1960s, like many other idealistic movements, failed because it did so much preaching from a morally one-up position when nobody had been imprinted or conditioned to accept it as one-up.
Those extreme cases who take their heaviest imprint on the third circuit tend to grow up cerebrotonic. They are tall and skinny, because energy is perpetually drawn upward from the body into the head. The caricatured evil genius, Dr. Sylvanus in Superman, who was virtually all head, represents the extreme toward which this type seems to be evolving. Popular speech calls them "eggheads."
Almost always, these cerebrotonic Third-Circuit types ignore or are hostile to their first and second circuit functions. Playfulness puzzles them (appears silly or eccentric) and emotions both baffle and frighten them.
Sicne we all contain this circuit, we all need to exercize it regularly. Make up a schematic diagram of your business or home and try to streamline it for more efficiency. Design a chart that explains the whole universe. Every few years, study a science you know nothing about, at an Adult Education center.
And don't neglect to play with this circuit: write poems, jingles, fables, proverbs or jokes.
As with the earlier circuits, the semantic circuit builds all of its conditioning and learning onto a bedrock of hard-wired imprinting. Thus, many existentially thinkable thoughts are socially unthinkable, since a) everybody in a given society has roughly the same semantic imprint and b) this is reinforced daily by assumptions that are mechanically taken for granted.
Thus, a genius is one who, by some internal process, breaks through to Circuit VII -- a minor neurological miracle loosely called "intuition" -- and comes back down to the third circuit with the capacity to paint a new semantic map, build a new model of experience. Needless to say, this is always a profound shock to those still trapped in the old robot-imprints, and is generally considered a threat to territory (ideological head space). The long list of martyrs to free enquiry, from Socrates onward, shows how mechanical this neophobia (fear of new semantic signals) is.
As Thomas Kuhn showed in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science itself -- the apotheosis of third-circuit semantic rationality -- is not free of this neophobia. Kuhn demonstrated, at length, that each scientific revolution took one full generation to turn over the old world view. And Kuhn further showed that the older scientists never are converted to thew new semantic paradigm. They are, in our terminology, mechanically hooked to their original imprints. The revolution is complete, as Kuhn shows, only when a second generation, not hooked to the old imprint, is able to compare the two models and decides rationally that the newer one really does make more sense.
But if science, the most self-correcting of all information processing third-circuit functions, has this one-generation time lag, what can be said of politics, religion, economics? Time-lags of centuries, or even milleniums, are common there.2
2 This only refers to other people's politics, religions and economics, needless to say. The reader's own opinions on these subjects are the only reasonable and objective ones. Of course.
We commented earlier that in bio-survival neurology, there is no time. "I just found msyelf doing it," we say after passing through an automatic reflex on the bio-survival circuit.
Emotional-territorial circuit actions begin to include time as a factor. Dominance signals may not "work": the seemingly weaker mammal may offer a counter- challenge. Two dogs will walk around each other for several minutes growling and sniffing (the chemical secretions of each reveals its actual degree of fear to the other) before Top Dog and Bottom Dog becomes clear.
On the human level, we often agonize over emotional decisions, becoming acutely conscious of time as we hesitate. As every suspense writer knows, the principle way to increase emotional tension is to set a time limit on a difficult or dangerous decision.
On the third-circuit, time becomes conceptualized as well as experienced. We know ourselves as creatures of time; the "tale of the tribe," the totem pole, the Odyssey of Homer, the Old Testament, the Vedas, etc. tell us what came before and often contains prophecies of what will come later. Science expands the third circuit into contemplation of time-spans that stagger our imaginations. The very use of written languages and other symbols like mathematics creates the time-bending sense of Korzybski: we know ourselves as receivers of messages sent by sages "of olde" and as potential transmitters of messages that may be scanned ages in the future.
The fourth circuit causes us to be even more involved in, and pressured by, time.
The first and second circuits are Evolutionary Stable Strategies. They have worked, in more or less the same form, not just for primates but for other mammals, and for many other species, over vast aeons of time.
The third, semantic circuit is an Evolutionary Unstable Strategy. It could very accurately be called revolutionary rather than evolutionary.
The first two circuits are based on negative feedback, in the biological sense. They maintain homeostasis -- that is, they return, over and over, to the same ecological-ethological balances. The function of negative feedback is to return to such a steady state.
The time-bending semantic circuit is not based on such steady-state negative feedback. It is a mechanism of what cyberneticists and biologists called positive feedback. It does not return to a steady state, but constantly seeks a new equilibrium at a higher energy level. (Negative feedback returns to a fixed point, like a thermostat. Positive feedback seeks a moving goal, like a guided missile.)
The first two circuits maintain that which is (more or less) constant in human affairs. They are totally cyclical, and relate directly to the cycles found in history by Vico, Hegel and similar philosophers.
The third circuit has always been hemmed-in and heavily sanctioned with rules, laws, prohibition, taboos, etc. because it breaks up such cycles. It leads, if unleashed, to an upward-hurtling spiral.
In societies where the third, semantic circuit has been partially unleashed -- it has never been totally freed in any society -- the upward spiral immediately appears. This used to be known as "progress," before that word became unfashionable.
The upward spiral (whether we call it "progress" or not) is characteristic of what Karl Popper calls Open Societies. These are secular, humanistic societies -- cultures relatively free of taboo and dogmatism.
Such freedom, up to and including the present, is only relative, because many taboos are unconscious and pass themselves off as "common sense" or "common decency," etc. Whoever challenges them is by definition a "heretic," by definition a "traitor," or by definition an "irresponsible nut."
The Greek myth of Prometheus Bound -- the Titan who brought Light to humanity and is eternally punished for it -- is the synecdoche, the perfect symbol, of how the third circuit has been handled in most human societies.
Introduction
Part One: The Bio-Survival Circuit
Part Two: The Emotional-Territorial Circuit
Part Four: The Socio-Sexual Circuit
Part Five: The Circuits and communication
C.
I have 2 kids & live in St. Catharines, Ontario
18054 postsposted 8th Jan '09
Your intellegence surpasses us.
quoteI have 3 kids & 2 angel babies & live in Middelfart, Denmark
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