Semiophysics and Synchronicity

 Hello everyone to another random blog post. Today I wish to expand on some of the ideas I mentioned in my last post 'Stressed Out' from a different perspective which I have been evolving. 

Of course all of this is just speculative and just my perspective so there is no authority from the position of which I am speaking. However, these are just observations which I have deliberated upon and which seem pretty plausible and interesting explanations to me.

I had started reading Semiophysics by Rene Thom (which funnily I came upon by learning about catastrophe theory). It was very fun as the book has extremely dense but insightful concepts from varying disciplines. One of the main ideas mentioned in the book was related to salient forms which are basically discontinuities in the field of perception that allow them to be noticed (which he related to a different way of defining real numbers as discontinuities on a line). These could be anything such as colours, smells, sensations etc.  He also mentioned the related idea of pregnancy whereby certain such salient forms are imbued with a special kind of meaning. Even without any transcendent meanings, there are certain salient forms that may have special pregnancies because they are intimately connected to the organism's drive for survival (nicely connects to nietzsches will to power). This may be related to reproduction e.g, which would explain why salient forms which lead to the release of sexual energy are so immensely pregnant with meaning since ancient times. It may be related to certain aromas which may signal the presence of food which biologically means survival for the organism. These concepts are further abstracted to the ideas of pregnant categories whereby giving the example of Pavlov's Dog, he explains how the pregnancy of the aroma of the food or its taste is slowly transferred to the bell and may also be transitively chained to other perceptive sensations(though the meaning present at each such level in the category keeps on decreasing). These transitive categories are conceptualized as parabolic potential wells where by going successively along the chain we reach the base pregnant form on the meaning of which all the salient forms in the chain have acquired significance. To conceptualize this more rigorously, these forms are then embedded in some manifold where the metric is the gestaltian distance (which can be thought of as measuring the significance of some perceived phenomenon due to its configuration or properties) appended to a spacetime interval (how far the stimulus is in space and in time). These ideas are then expanded to develop theories of language etc. (which I still have to read more into)

This perspective seems very illuminating to me. For example, the immense Freudian emphasis on sexual energy can be seen as the proliferation of the pregnance of the sexual act. Pregnant forms in this sense at their base are nothing but the base desires of human beings. Again as I have probably explained somewhere else, desires and fears are two sides of the same coin. So at their essence these forms are also fear, and the desire for security. Security through material possessions, security through gratification etc. This need for security is again something Krishnamurti has talked about extensively and in Gabor Mate and many psychological works it has been noted that in the first few years of our childhood we are absolutely dependant on our primary caregivers which may somewhat be seen as the origin of this need for security (which many of us never truly separate from). In semiophysics, rene thom also notes how the significance of the myriad salient forms in the world can basically be seen to unfold from the mother archetype of the primary caregiver. The security felt with the mother archetype may be seen as the minima to which all salient forms will flow down to if we transitively follow them. It is the global stable equilibrium in this context (Though it is not explored whether an even deeper source of pregnance that provides meaning even to this archetype would exist, which might be possible). 

Okay, now I have laid down the groundwork for what I really want to say (All these were ideas from others). In Kapil Gupta's conception of prescriptions or in Krishnamurti's conception of Ambition we see that it is possible for these desires to become corrupted. Corrupted not in a puritanical sense of turning away from desires and inspiring self-hatred, for we have already accepted in this model (Though I am not entirely sure whether this is correct) that our basal desires are what are imbuing the salient forms in our perception with meaning, but rather in the way that we get hypnotized by mechanisms similar to the Pavlovian dog to add stimuli to the transitive chains of pregnancy which will not lead to the basal desire in the potential well when followed down. 

As another aside I would also say that in the very purest form the desire also represents being in and for itself losing itself in itself to become being for itself coming back to being in itself. Which is represented in Hindu mythology as the different avatars which the gods take. Funnily enough one of the words for the cosmos in Hindu mythology is also the word for 'play'. So, the religiously inclined would say this is god losing himself in himself just to enjoy the play of finding himself and realising that it was just him all along. 

Coming back to what I was mentioning earlier, it is possible that these desires become corrupted; This is especially possible whenever there is a transition and an imbuing of different salient forms with meanings. For example consider the Pavlovian dog even if the source of food was removed. Because of 'conditioning' (in the way K used that word), the dog would still keep coming back to find the food until the pregnance of spending energy without getting any reward (which is a bad strategy for survival) would propagate to the significant form of the bell and make the dog numb to it. The stronger the significance of the original form the easier it is for its meaning to be contagious to other forms around it (this makes sense if its modeled as some diffusion e.g.). Relating this to our childhood it is easy to see why childhood experiences (and traumas) shape our identities so decisively. As mentioned earlier there is immense significance to the mother and the primary caregiver archetype. Of course, if the propagation of the meaning from this archetype to the other archetypes does not take place in a suitable manner (probably due to the pathologies of our own parents etc. which they may have not suitably dealt with) we may become conditioned. Our ideals of success, the existence of our very self are formed from the meaning propagating from this archetype. Since almost everyone around us is profoundly sick or stressed mentally, it is impossible for these to not be transmitted to the children we take care of.  This manifests in the form of a continued cycle of trauma and psychosis. This also explains Krishnamurti's perspective on how children must be raised in an environment of intense love which is completely free from stress. 

Our desires which we think are our own are hence often just transmitted to us by society through this Pavlovian process of conditioning (e.g. by the expectations of our parents shaping our ambitions, pain and pleasure from the results of exams, The pregnance of feeling secure transmitting itself through money and material possessions etc.). We acquire desires which are not our own and instead of examining them clearly to see what we would get if we followed them to the end, we just start looking for prescriptions on how to get what we think we want.

This is where the idea of Jungian synchronicity can help. Synchronicity involves a sort of 'jumping', of non-locality, of observing the 'Implicate order' which has unfolded itself as Bohm would say, or of Shamans observing connections by taking psychoactive substances. It may be described as looking at salient forms which seem meaningfully related but not to directly follow these chains of transitivity. It is the sort of penetrating insight that Bohm mentions. If you can jump directly, deeper, and further down the potential well, it may become evident to you directly that following the transitive path of salient forms will not lead you to the place you want to go. (Perhaps this can be abstracted to the fact that any salient form cannot lead you to the place you want to go and you must always have such 'jumps' though that would need a transcendent meaning beyond merely pregnant forms to jump to which may be postulated in religious ontologies e.g.). This is an idea I would like to expand upon in the future (and is connected to what alan watts would call stuckness or Krishnamurti would call urgency of change) though right now I think this post is already decently long. Thank you for reading, I hope you found it interesting.