The Self Rises Up from Lived Experiences: A Micro-Semiotic Analysis of the Unfolding of Trajectories of Experience When Performing Ethics

Abstract

This paper presents a semiotic–genetic model of how representations of objects, psychological processes, and the self get constituted as semiotic objects throughout the temporal unfolding of actuations that produce the lived experiences. Trajectories of experience are conceived as dynamic systems in which iterative changes in the organism and in the environment drive the system toward transitory states of equilibrium (bifurcation points) and eventually to a final state of (transitory) equilibrium that appears as an attractor. The result is the development of a self-steering mechanism that usually is named subjectivity—a domain of experience only accessible to the subject, that affects the way phenomena, objects, situations, events, and one’s own self are understood, and so profoundly influences overt behavior, even if its inner workings are not accessible for either external or internal observers, and can only be modeled with the help of formalisms.