Semiosis and culture: a bandwidth model of semiotic evolution.

Abstract

Human semiosis is taken to be a very specific forro of a more general faculty, which allows organisms to construct representations that determine the interaction with the environment. The basis for semiosis is given with the emergence an awareness of difference that separates memory from actuality in perception. The whole semiotic setup is a sophisticated exploitation of this capacity for the separation of memory from perception. Semiosis carne about in human evolution due to the novel use of an existing cerebral organization: following the development of binocular stereoscopic vision, the brain no longer has to relate two flows of different information. It now synchronizes two different flows relating to the same information.

This doubling ofthe information processing results in semiosis. Once in place genetically, the evolution of semiosis is no longer Darwinian, but obeys a formallogic, inherent in the structure ofthe semiotic process. This evolution, which grounds historical changes, is described in terms of a bandwidth model -implying that the evolution ofhuman representation can be described in terms of the changing "weight", within the limits of a given bandwidth, of a restricted number of basic semiotic modes: the iconic, the symbolic and the indexical.