Photo by Ilkka Kärkkäinen on Unsplash
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning”…
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
“
What do all men with power want? More power"…
— The Matrix Reloaded
What is Real?
Caught in the Matrix
**** Note - two recent posts have been deleted - numerous questions remain as to which of these Semiotic Signs were part of the matrix and what semiotic signs represented an underlying Reality and Ground Truth?
The passage of time will ultimately reveal which semiotic signs represented an underlying reality.
In a digital world of more and more abstraction where context collapses, what is Real?
Who can you trust?
Can we trust the corporate mainstream media?
Can we trust alternative forms of social media (the new alternative mainstream social media)?
Or have we entered the matrix?
More and more Semiotic Signs bombard us everyday.
But unlike Charles Sanders Peirce’s Semiotic Triadic where the meaning of the signs can be derived from the Pragmatic Maxim [ LINK ] - these digital Semiotic Signs no longer need to have any nexus to an underlying Reality.
Hence we have hyperreality, virtual reality, the meta-verse, hypernormalisation, simulacra and the simulation.
The Semiotic Triadic and Pragmatic Maxim were increasingly being decoupled post the arrival of Modernity and Post Modernity.
The Semiotic Triadic and Pragmatic Maxim were increasingly being decoupled, together with the veracity of Truth Claims eroded via the widespread embracement of Nominalism and Marxist Ideology, coupled with Modernity & Post Modernity’s increasing rejection of Realism and Transcendental Metaphysics.
The Semiotic Triadic and Pragmatic Maxim were increasingly being decoupled by an erosion of Trust in experts and institutions. For example, Post Truth Education and Universities [ LINK ].
The Semiotic Triadic and Pragmatic Maxim were increasingly being decoupled via algorithms, censorship and propaganda.
The Semiotic Triadic and Pragmatic Maxim were increasingly being decoupled by embracing more and more digital semiotic technologies such as digital media, computers, smartphones, large language models, social media, internet etc…
The Semiotic Triadic and Pragmatic Maxim were increasingly being decoupled by the emergence of Knowledge Work which can result in the separation of the practical effects of decision-making (ie. interpreting the meaning of semiotic signs) from the processes of generating and manipulating those semiotic signs.
“Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all”…
— Umberto Eco
Example: The following is an example of this phenomenon - What is Real?
NVIDIA’s Eye Contact effect using AI to simulate direct eye contact - What is Real? [ LINK ]
Please read:
Charles Sanders Peirce’s Semiotics — The Triadic Model [ LINK ];
The Decoupling from Reality - The Nominalist Error [ LINK ];
The collapse of context and the elimination of friction - A retreat into Plato’s Cave [ LINK ];
The Semiotic Landscape of Abstraction - High-Dimensional Computation and Semiotic Signs [ LINK ];
Modernity, Post-Modernity and the Collapse of Transcendent Metaphysics & the Semiotic Triadic. A Phenomenal World anchored in the Ego (Conscious Self — Phenomenon of the Will) without a Noumenal World anchored in the Non-Ego (Unconscious Self — Transcendent Metaphysics) [ LINK ];
The Triadic of Reason - Part 1: Semiotics, Metaphysics and Logic - Abduction, Induction and Deduction – Meaning, Being and Thought [ LINK ];
Truth and Reality - Integrating the Eternal with the Temporal [ LINK ]; and