Semiotics (2): Four Phases of Consciousness

A Practical Thinking Tool for Analyzing Experience

You are walking down the street. It is a freezing morning.

As you make your way down the busy morning street, you are perceiving a multitude of qualitative sensations. The cold air enters your lungs and there is an icy feeling in your hands, feet, and thighs. Cars are honking, lights are blinking. A plethora of sounds, sensations and colors surrounds you.

You are still a bit sleepy and this constant overwhelming bombardment of perceptions makes you feel confused. For a minute, you lose yourself, and find yourself disoriented and absorbed in this amalgam of qualities. What’s going on? Is that something red?

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You recognize a red traffic light and come to a timely stop, watching the cars pass by.

Despite the sensory overload, your mind was able to focus on some salient aspect of this “qualitative soup” surrounding you. In your experience, some aspect pops into the forefront of your attention, allowing you to navigate through this qualitative storm.

Furthermore, you feel a sense of presence. You feel how its like to be you, right here, right now, in this very moment. It is the feeling of being conscious, of having a personal experience.

As you stand there, observing the world, you become conscious of the difference between you and everything else. You are not absorbed into the qualitative soup, for it is now evident that there are boundaries between you and the external world. Between yourself and these cars driving by, these people standing, waiting.

You come to the realization how you, as a individual person, are always embedded in some particular situation doing something. In this case, walking, as the light turns green again.

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But you are not walking randomly or without constraints. You are being guided, by the habits and rules governing this situation. You are understanding and participating with these regularities.

You are navigating the streets in harmony with other pedestrians, seamlessly passing by each other without collisions. There's a natural rhythm to how streets are crossed. The flow of traffic is seamless, as the unspoken rules are guiding and governing everyone’s steps.

As you reflect on these shared habits, you notice how your mind is no longer fixated on anything particular, that would steal all your attention. Instead, you are identifying larger regularities, tendencies, and laws. You begin to see living patterns.

The sensation of your personal ego starts to fade as well, and you feel united with the world once more. However, this time you are not absorbed into an undifferentiated qualitative soup. Rather you are reunited into the whole as distinct part of larger regularities guiding your action. You play a part in this symphony.

You feel a deep sense of participation with these habits. The shared habits themselves become the object of your thoughts, and you experience a sympathetic understanding with them. It is pleasant to act out patterns. They make everything flow so smoothly on this bustling morning street.

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In fact, everything runs so smoothly, that you get absorbed in your thoughts, that is your talking with yourself. Your attention is no longer fixed at your perceptions, your personal presence, or even on the habits governing your behavior. You are in your thoughts, sharing ideas with yourself, absent from the concrete situation, being absent-minded.

While talking to yourself, you remember that you should find a place to eat. You grab your phone and search for a restaurant. In no time you find one. Maybe I should eat lunch there, as the prices are seem to be quite low.

Information was just shared. Your read through some text, which shared information about restaurants and their prices through symbols.

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You thus moved from 1) immediate undifferentiated sense perceptions to the 2) personal experience of something salient, that you 3) understood to be guided and governed by some habits and rules, which enabled the 4) sharing of symbolic information.

You notice how you can approach your experience from four different perspectives. These are the Four Phases of Semiosis.

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Powerful and Accessible Tool for Thinking

The Four Phases¹ is a model of the growth and development of semiosis. And as everything in our universe — from the simplest organism to the entirety of the cosmos — can be understood as semiosis, the Four Phases can describe everything that can be described.

Above all, we are speaking about a tool for thinking, a psychotechnology. With the Four Phases, one is able to conceptualize and analyze experiences and phenomena. The tool is simple, but deep. This makes it a powerful tool.

So here are the Four Phases:

1. Perception phase

2. Experience phase

3. Understanding phase

4. Sharing phase

The journey through the phases begins with the most fundamental Perception phase grounded in immediate “raw” perception. And it ends with the most developed and abstract Sharing phase, where symbolic information is shared in a community.

All of these phases build on top of each other. The more fundamental phase is always contained within the more developed phase. For example, the Understanding phase contains both the Experience and the Perception phase. Here is (one possible) diagram of the Four Phases:

The four cycles stacked are the four phases. I’ve chosen three characteristics about this diagram that clarify the nature of the Four Phases.

1. The arrows in each cycle represent the dynamic nature of semiosis. The phases are not static, but dynamic, as semiosis switches swiftly between them. In reality, the phases are somewhat blended together, and the movement between them is smooth and continuous.

2. The stack formed by the four cycles represents the teleological nature of semiosis. Semiosis is not random or purposeless. On the contrary, it has a goal in mind, which is to progress towards states of higher information and generality. We metaphorically ascend upwards, as semiosis seeks to reach the higher phases.

3. The dashed lines flowing back to the bottom of the diagram (Perception phase) represent hierarchy and nestedness. As already said, the more fundamental phases are contained within the more developed phases. However, regardless of the phase, the flow of semiosis always returns to the beginning, which is the most fundamental Perception phase. Thus, semiosis forms a feedback loop.

There are countless ways to approach and apply the Four Phases. However, in this post, we will think of the phases as Four Phases of Consciousness. Your mind is always active in one of the phases, which then determines the nature of your experience.

There is a lot to unpack, so I won't even try to do that in one post. Instead, we will tackle the phases head-on, so that you can have a working tool for your thinking as quickly as possible. Let's begin with the most fundamental phase.

Perception Phase

The Perception phase is about immediate perception here and now. It is the raw and pure experience. As William James puts it, one “feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” It is akin to the experience of a newborn.

The Perception phase can be broadly conceived as a meditative and open state of mind, where one sees the world as an undifferentiated qualitative whole. Nothing specific stands out from this amalgam of qualities and feelings.

Furthermore, any sense of ego is absent. You are completely one with the world, merged into the common qualitative continuum of reality. There are no distinctions, no self, just a perfect unity with everything.

However, meaning is absent in the Perception phase. Conscious interpretation of perceptions is impossible, as nothing becomes salient. In order for signs to be meaningful, they must separate themselves from the qualitative screen. Signs cannot represent and embody information about their objects if there are no distinctions between them.

An example of the Perception phase could be the creative mind of an artist who perceives the world only through its qualities. Think of impressionist paintings where the depicted objects are not clearly distinguishable. Painters who make such art have a gift of observing the world as it is presented to the mind.

Another example might be a walk in the forest. Instead of approaching the walk with a specific goal in mind, such as getting exercise, one could simply lose oneself in the moment and observe the various qualities (sights, sounds, colors, and textures) for their own sake. One would feel unity through quality.

Experience Phase

The Experience phase could be seen as the personal experience, the feeling of being you — right now, right here, right in your own shoes. It is the sense of being present in the moment, with your mind deeply immersed in a concrete situation. Your ego awakens as you become aware of the distinction between yourself and everything else.

You are no longer perceiving pure qualities in themselves; now, you perceive objects and signs that have evolved through semiosis. Various individual signs are popping out of the qualitative screen as they are discerned and abstracted from it, adding a layer of meaning on top of the purely qualitative layer.

You are no longer passively floating in the sea of qualities. Instead, you become curious and inquisitive about the signs that are appearing. The world is now bursting with signs, filled with information, waiting to be explored.

An example of the Experience phase would be traveling to a new place and experiencing novel sights, sounds, and smells of the environment. One would feel a sense of curiosity about the different signs that emerge from the surroundings and the meanings they hold.

Understanding Phase

The Understanding phase is about the habits, laws, and norms that guide the objects and signs we experience. Our focus is not on the individual signs that emerge from the qualitative screen, but rather on the underlying pattern that governs the occurrences of those signs.

More practically the Understanding phase is about understanding the habits that govern our conduct. It is the understanding how one is expected to behave in specific social contexts. Traditions and cultural practices belong to this phase.

For example, there are certain rules for how one should behave in public places like restaurants. Breaking these norms can disrupt the flow of the situation and cause confusion.

Sociologist Harold Garfinkel designed many "breaching experiments" where individuals deliberately violate social norms in order to reveal them. More contemporary examples of this phenomenon include shock comedy acts like those of Tom Green or Eric Andre.

At an individual level, the Understanding phase can also be conceptualized as the skill or ability to fluently maneuver through one's environment. As we understand and embody the habits governing various situations, we become better navigators, more fluid participators.

Furthermore, as semiosis permeates everything, this embodied fluency extends beyond social situations and applies to all environments. For instance, in order to be successful, a hunter must understand the habits of their prey. Or a farmer must understand the regularities that govern the growth of crops, such as weather patterns, changes of seasons, crop rotation, etc.

In the Understanding phase, you are no longer experiencing singular objects popping out of the qualitative screen, but actively understanding and participating with the regularities, patterns, and habits that govern the behavior of these objects.

Sharing Phase

The Sharing phase is fully symbolic, with language and discourse being phenomena of this phase, as all words are symbols. Symbols enable various interesting developments.

Symbols, to a significant extent, are context-independent. Unlike habits in the Participation phase, which are always associated with specific concrete contexts, symbols are detached from concreteness.

For instance, the sign of raising your hand to pay the bill only holds that significance in the context of a restaurant. On the other hand, the dollar symbol ($), regardless of the context (such as bills, music videos, graphs, price tags, websites, clothes, jewelry), always signifies dollars.

For this reason we speak about the “symbolic realm” where stories, mythologies, scientific knowledge, and literature reside. Contrary to the other phases, symbolic information can be stored and shared without it being embodied in practices.

When a culture dies, it cannot be authentically reborn, as all the tacit knowledge and forms of cultural participation are gone. On the other hand the ancient (symbolic) stories of Iliad and Odyssey continue to live in our times, although the culture that created them is long gone.

This is possible, because symbolic knowledge is shared through language (symbols). Compare this to the tacit knowledge of Understanding phase, which must be ultimately learned by actual participation. An apprentice learns the skills of the master, not through symbolic language, but by imitating the practices.

Applying the Model

As already mentioned, the Four Phases can be applied to every possible phenomena. This makes it a fractal model, meaning that the whole model can be nested inside itself. Here is a table exemplifying that:

Disclaimer: This application is completely tentative. I won’t be going through all the contents in this table, as I’m merely showcasing the fruitfulness and fractal nature of this tool.

Couple of comments:

• In the context of society, the Perception phase can be conceptualized as the foundational basis upon which a society is built. It is the initial stage of human interaction with the environment, providing the raw materials for the subsequent phases of society.

• In the context of self, the Cosmic self means the living idea of a person that gains a symbolic and therefore context-independent nature. For example, Albert Einstein is still with us, although he is no longer concretely participating with the scientific community.

Four Phases of Music

Finally, let us apply it to something completely different, let’s say music:

1. Perception: The immediate qualities of sound such as timbre (the unique quality of a sound), pitch (the frequency of the sound wave), and rhythm. At this point, we don’t yet distinguish music. We perceive a continuous flow of sound. It is the fundamental ability to hear sound.

2. Experience: The continuous sound is identified as music. Notes, melodies and chords emerge from the continuum of sound. The sounds become signs of different musical instruments. It is the ability to play notes, melodies, and chords.

3. Understanding: Understanding of musical styles and traditions. Recognizing the style of music (jazz, samba, hip hop) that governs the individual notes, chords and rhythms. Understanding the rules and the context (bluesy playing in a blues song). The ability to play in a certain musical style. Participation in living musical traditions.

4. Sharing: Music notation, sheet music, and music theory. The ability to teach and share musical ideas through symbols and language.

Music is an art, which makes it aesthetic and embodied. A musical genius does not have to reach the Sharing phase at all. Music is already fully expressed before that phase.

The fundamentals of music are learned at the lower phases. Musicians train their ear to perceive different timbres and rhythms. They practice to master their instruments. They play with others to learn the conventions and habits of certain styles of music.

Of course, the further symbolic knowledge of music theory is beneficial, but without the lower phases, the knowledge about theory does little to improve you as a musician.

Summary - Enhancing Your Cognitive Toolkit

The Four Phases is a powerful tool that enables us to conceptualize and navigate through various phenomena. While it may require effort to become fluent in applying it, the rewards are worthwhile.

I encourage you to take the plunge and test this tool for yourself. From personal experience, I can attest that using the Four Phases is not only enlightening, but also incredibly enjoyable. So why wait any longer? Seize the opportunity to unlock the full potential of your mind!

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Thank you for taking the time to read this! I'm glad you found the thinking tool of the Four Phases valuable.

Together, we can share this tool and empower more people to think semiotically and creatively. So why not join me in growing the Community of Inquirers? Let’s spread the word far and wide.

Sincerely,
Markus

1. In this post the description of the Four Phases is simplified. I am willing to sacrifice nuance for intelligibility. Nevertheless, the tool is usable and faithful to the complete logic of the 66 signs.