Quantum Semiotics

Peder Voetmann Christiansen

Baranna Baker

Abstract Quantum physics describes a strange, but exquisitely beautiful world in which science and the philosophical discipline of semiotics come into a perfect union with one another. Quantum physics describes the underlying basis of the realities of our world’s physical foundations. Semiotics explains the way in which we interact with this world. It is only through a synthesis of these two ways of knowledge that we can possibly hope to know this marvelous, awe-inspiring, yet puzzling world we live in and how our interaction with it plays a part in its existence as we experience it. Heisenberg’s concept of probability is essential to an understanding of this process. Through the process of semiosis, we create an entire world out of probabilities. What quantum physics indicates about how we influence this world in a semiotic fashion is of prime importance in understanding who we are as semiotic animals, the only animals who consciously use signs.

John Keane

Sergey P. Suprun, Anatoly P. Suprun

This volume elaborates upon functioning of a quantum computer and the analysis of mind phenomenon in a natural scientific paradigm. Many outstanding physicists - Bohr, Heisenberg et al.- considered that many aspects of quantum physics could be understood considering the laws of perception, linguistics and semiotics within the world's semiotic description. An analysis of would-be scientific theories and paradoxes connected with a number of unformulated statements regarding initial information is therefore presented. These, in turn, could be used to draw algorithms that generate a picture of reality in the human mind. The eBook also attempts to find out what is available to an observer from his/her standpoint (reference system), and from what theoretical standpoints that observation is developed. The initial point of this approach is recognizing that we are closed inside the semiotic system in which the "universe" can only be presented to our mind. Such semiotic restrictions for translation of knowledge in any field are considered. This book is intended as a resource for senior students and researchers in natural sciences, scientific philosophy and contemporary psychology.

O. L. S. Silva Filho, Samuel J. Simon, Marcello Caio Ramon e Barros Ferreira

When a physical theory is in its early stages of development, it presents many concepts and constructs that may not be necessary for its interpretation, or may simply be equivocal. As the theory is developed by the physics community, it hopefully passes through a depuration process that washes away many of these constructs and introduces others not initially devised. This process can be viewed, and modeled, as a semiotic process by which the suggested interpretations of the theory, initially dispersed in the space of concepts, taper off in a way that leaves only a small number of possibilities, ideally only one. However, to qualify this process and impose semiotic and epistemological constraints on the depuration process, it seems natural to consider a physical theory as an excerpt of a language and its suggested interpretations as texts, endowed with syntactics and semantics. In this paper we present this framing of general physical theories and apply the resulting semiotic and epistemological constraints we uphold to the special case of quantum mechanics, which shows particular resistance to interpretation tapering. We then show that the findings of this paper are especially important for allowing one to form a hierarchy of interpretations of the same formal structure of a physical theory, even in the case of an experimental underdetermination of these interpretations, which is precisely the case for quantum mechanics. This result is particularly important for more modern physical theories, which are becoming increasingly more abstract and difficult to interpret.

Robin Chapman