Abstract

Since time immemorial, philosophers and scientists were searching for a “machine code” of the so-called Mentalese language capable of processing information at the pre-verbal, pre-expressive level. In this paper I suggest that human languages are only secondary to the system of primitive extra-linguistic signs which are hardwired in humans and serve as tools for understanding selves and others; and creating meanings for the multiplicity of experiences. The combinatorial semantics of the Mentalese may find its unorthodox expression in the semiotic system of Tarot images, the latter serving as the ”keys” to the encoded proto-mental information. The paper uses some works in systems theory by Erich Jantsch and Erwin Laszlo and relates Tarot images to the archetypes of the field of collective unconscious posited by Carl Jung. Our subconscious beliefs, hopes, fears and desires, of which we may be unaware at the subjective level, do have an objective compositional structure that may be laid down in front of our eyes in the format of pictorial semiotics representing the universe of affects, thoughts, and actions. Constructing imaginative narratives based on the expressive “language” of Tarot images enables us to anticipate possible consequences and consider a range of future options. The thesis advanced in this paper is also supported by the concept of informational universe of contemporary cosmology.

Highlights

  • Philosophers were searching for a “machine code” of the common language capable of processing information at the pre-verbal, pre-expressive level

  • Active interpretation as the included middle between oneself and the world creates the “self~other” complementary pair that exceeds just a passive adaptation to one’s environment: evolution should be understood as a reciprocal co-evolution which is only natural because in the computational universe biology is complementary to physics

  • The evolutionary process is characterized by a general law defined as the generalizing “tendency of all things to take habits” [6] that become the archetypal patterns in a continuous flow of semiosis constituting the process of the evolution of signs based on accumulating memes

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Summary

Introduction

Philosophers were searching for a “machine code” of the common language capable of processing information at the pre-verbal, pre-expressive level. Because universal experiences across cultures, times, places and spaces are “contained” within the symbolic level of the collective unconscious, the semiotic interpretation of the deep meanings encoded in the Tarot pictorial language contribute to our learning from this very experience, to our growth and the evolution of consciousness in both intellectual and moral terms. Contrary to Cartesian dualism, the supposedly detached observer becomes what physicist Henry Stapp has recently called a “participating observer” [24]; and subject and object reciprocally presuppose each other It is the structural self-reference that generates a string of (seemingly meaningless) signs that acquire meanings when positioned in specific and, importantly, evolving contexts. Simon on this point and have earlier explained the functioning of intuition in terms of Peirce’s logical category of abduction as an implicit and tacit, bordering on infinitesimal, hypothetical inference [see e.g., 26]

Discussion
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Braziller
39. See Atom and Archetype
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