Sema
The most natural, intuitive way anyone conceives of sema after being introduced to the concept is to think of them as material objects, sort of like atoms or some other fundamental particle. They’re not.
Sema are first and foremost a mental — or intelligible — construct, that refers to some intangible, yet very concrete, structural element of reality. Philosophically, you might identify them (with some caveats, of course) with the notion of monads — as conceived by the neoplatonists and elaborated by Leibniz -, but also Platonic ideals or more broadly the concept of “categories”. In mathematics you could call them types — or, in the domain of Category Theory, the equivalent of an object (0-simplices). In physics: gauge groups? I’m not sure. In chemistry, one can draw some parallel to the concept of a mol (hence our use of the term molarity).
The point is, sema do not refer to a single sort of entity, but can be used to characterize various different aspects of reality depending on the angle one takes. Not everything is a semon, though.
To be one, an entity must fulfill those basic qualities that define it: be invariant with respect to the quality under consideration (if we’re talking about life, for example, it should be something all possible types of living beings have in common), as well as no particular features (which is only logical; “life” couldn’t be defined in relation to any one property of a specific type of living creature, otherwise how could it possibly represent the multiple and many times conflicting characteristics of each?). Here a distinction is necessary: before we argued that a semon shouldn’t have any intrinsic features, and yet, what we were really defining is a particular kind of semon we shall call basal semon. Basal sema are the actual elements of reality that make up everything else, but they’re often in too extreme scales to be of any practical use to the study of everyday phenomena. For that purpose, the more general notion of a semon is applicable, which is characterized by having less stringent constraints for its use (it needn’t be ontological, for instance); further, a basal semon must necessarily be devoid of any such intrinsic or even extrinsic features (with the exception of reality and worldtree structure, respectively), making it a rather plain entity in and of itself. But general sema, being available at every description level of the cosmos, have no such restrictions, the only requirement being that in respect to the property for which they’re assigned they remain complete and featureless (which is to say: for something to be the “life semon”, it mustn’t have in itself anything that could be defined as life, but only those elements that if properly employed could constitute every instance of the thing). A semon is, thus, the ontological object that corresponds to the unity or cohesion of any ensemble of entities, but in a a prioristic sense — it’s a unity that supersedes their own particular existences, and actually begets them.
This notion is a bit divorced from our usual intuition of object ontology, so at first it may be greeted with skepticism, but I’ll show how it’s actually much simpler than the norm. It is an example of negative ideal, or the notion that the essence of something is made solely of the things that something is not. So, contrary to what Plato might argue, the idea of a man would not be some ethereal ensemble of all the qualities associated with men, but rather the absence of any of them; it’s like saying the ideal man is not a man, or the ideal life is no life at all. “What makes it the ideal-something then?”. The fact that it contains the germ for all instances of that something. The ideal man may not be a man, but it contains every possible man within itself.
And in case you haven’t made the jump yet, this concept of a negative ideal is exactly that of a semon. A semon per se doesn’t have any qualities, but can through the process of partition generate any structure pleased — and structure is everything in this worldview. As a case study, consider again the example of life: the “life semon” likely encompasses elements such as some sort of code in which it’s written (think of the genetic code), a clear boundary between that being and its environment (enough to differentiate it from the surroundings), and an internal metabolism; mind you that it doesn’t contain “life” as one of them, which is only reasonable since that would lead to a circular argument of first needing a thing to produce that same thing, and that’s absurd. So, in our example, these elements, together with some combination rule, constitute this entity called “life semon”; let’s check if it fits the criteria for such: can it produce all the objects in the class? Yes, given some reasonable caveats (we don’t focus our definition on carbon or even material-based lifeforms, but it may still be the case that life is a much broader phenomenon than we care to reckon); is it featureless regarding the class of objects it represents? Yes — there’s nothing properly characterizing as “life” in the elements listed (computer software for one both contains code and exists within a boundary, but can’t be said to be alive because its ‘metabolism’ is entirely dependent on the commandeering of an outside agent). There is one more criterion we haven’t mentioned yet, however: is the relation between the semon and the set of its iterations a bijective one? As in: could there be a different ensemble of elements fitting those requirements, or does exist any such element that’s is not comprehended in the semon’s iterations? If affirmative, we’re not dealing with a semon. An example of the first case would be that of stars, which do fulfill all requirements set for our definition of what a living thing must be, yet don’t appease to our intuition of an organism; and, of the second one, viruses, since they don’t fit the latter requisite (autonomous internal metabolism), but most definitely act as though they’re alive — and both cases seem to suggest to us that our conception of “life” may be the root of the problem in question.
Now that we have a working definition of a semon, let’s examine some examples. Is a person, for instance, a semon? It may seem otherwise at first, but we will find there’s no reason to dispute that claim. The most common objection anyone would probably raise is a “Theseus’ Ship” sort of argument — as in: we exchange about 99% of all the atoms in our bodies every two years, making the issue of whether we really are the same individual we used to be a couple of years ago a challenging one. But that is a totally atomistic perspective, and Synesism (despite all the talk of sema and anads) is not an atomistic, but a monistic worldview. Remember that, in our system, the material contents of the world are of a lesser importance; what really matters is the structural substrate holding things together. Everything else, even the corpuscular properties of matter and the seemingly infinite number of fundamental particles, is an emergent property of this underlying array of being and “less-being”. All electrons, irrespective of their mind-bogglingly large numbers, are particular instances of a single entity: the electromagnetic field. What does it really matter then if you exchange one for another? Nothing! The issue of fluid identity is hence a non-problem to us; it’s not any particular atoms or molecules that make us what we are (and, in the case of fundamental particles, remember the ones of a same kind are all effectively the same), but their arrangement within our bodies encapsulating those that are our really distinguishing features: our phenotypes and genotypes, our mental states and chemical composition, our sensory inputs and connectomes, etc. — and those are all emergent properties from ensembles of elements.
Another objection might be that an ‘individual’ is a much too specific entity to be himself a semon, but there’s no reason to assume that’s a valid assumption. First of all, because sema don’t have size limitation (other than being smaller than the Semes, which is a moot point because it is infinite), and hence the entities they enable shouldn’t have one either. Second, there’s nothing in a semon’s definition expressly prohibiting such thing; as a matter of fact, with the exception of the prima synod, every semon has some degree of nontriviality, or specificity, associated with it. So, not really a problem as well.
Not only is every single person an example of a semon, but so are groups of people (like ethnic groups or groups of friends), and ultimately even humankind itself. Matter of fact, there are endless examples of sema in our everyday experience — countries, ideas, currencies, properties, species -, as well as the ones of a more philosophical bend (mental models and categories). And they’re all equally useful for the purposes of examination and study. One must never lose sight of the fundamental fact regarding them though: they’re ultimately mere constructs used for approximating some aspect of reality. With the exception of basal sema, all other instances of these objects don’t really have materiality on their own — but that doesn’t make them any less useful though, because they’re still somewhat analogous to actual (basal) sema, so their behavior naturally mirrors theirs as well.
Reality is, therefore, the product of basal sema and their many configurations. One would be excused to think this offers a bleak, rather black-and-white picture of the universe, but the truth is this granularity is at a level so far-removed from our frame of reference that the objects we’re familiarized with couldn’t even be conceived without the reunion of countless portions of them. This way, when considering a matter as seemingly banal as “was such act immoral?”, binary answers such as yes or no must subside to fuzzier ones, where the actual shades of grey that make up the objects are shown. Just consider how many anads would take to constitute a human being, let alone the entire social context on which a notion of morality needs to be based, and you can have an idea of the complexity inherent to such questions. And this brings us to two very important and illuminating notions: the ones of resolution and expressivity.
Resolution refers to the minimum-required amount of anads to give rise to a particular feature under consideration. Expressivity, on the other hand, is the measure of variety or richness a particular ensemble of sema enables. To further increase understanding on these notions, let’s resort to a couple of illustrations.
The easiest way to visualize both of them is to imagine a two-dimensional grid, like a table or spreadsheet, such as the one below:
It’s a 3x2 table, meaning three lines and two columns. Now imagine you’re given this table and asked to represent all the numbers from 1 to 9. So you proceed with your chore. First 1:
Seems alright. But then you hit a roadblock at 2. How can you possibly represent anything resembling the algarism using only six squares? “Pretty obvious”, one might say, “instead of writing the numbers, just represent each one with a marked square”. So that would mean one marked square for the number 1, two marked squares for the number 2, and so on. But then we hit another problem: by the time we reach 7 there are no more squares left to mark (of course one could achieve something of the sort with some other combination of marked and non-marked squares, even one as trivial as binary numbers, but you get the idea). As a matter of fact, we’d need a grid of at least 5x3 to represent the numeral 2, and even then it would be a rather ambiguous representation — how do we know it’s a 2 and not a “ Z”, for instance?
The point I’m trying to make is that every structure has a corresponding degree of complexity, which can be measured by its resolution requirement — ie, the smallest number of entities required to emulate it -, and indeed, this is fundamental principle behind the very notion of emergence that’s so ubiquitous in nonlinear fields of knowledge, such as biology and climatology. Alternately, not only can a higher number of sema naturally enable the composition of more and more complex structures (that is, more expressive ones), but lower-ordered sema are more expressive than higher-ordered ones — for fairly obvious reasons, but also because some structures are naturally more expressive than others, even when they share a semonic number.
Example of how the resolution can effect the outcome of a system (the numbers represent pixel quantity)
This all speaks to the very essence of the canonical principle of Synesism, if you recall it — that equally semonic-valued entities are all essentially the same, but contingently not so. And this means that, in whatever system we’re dealing with, its molarity can only tell us so much about it; to truly have an understanding of the system, one must be able to tell in which configuration (or scheme) it is found at any particular instance, for whether the molarity is distributed in n or n-1 sema, and how exactly they’re arranged, will ultimately determine the system’s behavior and action space. Lower-ordered sema are, though not fundamentally, incidentally very different beasts than the higher-ordered ones they sprout.
What this translates to is that there’s a basic inequality at the heart of the cosmos, one between its trivial and nontrivial aspects, enabled by the lower or higher-order semonic setups of the system under consideration, respectively. Of course, ‘trivial’ here doesn’t refer to any uninterestingness of the subject matter, but rather to the notion of simplicity — understood as ‘not having proper parts’, or being noncomposite (at least in the aspect under consideration) — naturally, that happens to be our operational definition of what a semon even is -, whereas ‘nontrivial’ designates some particularity (and hence multiplicity) of the subject matter.
To understand how this works, let’s go back to our first example, that of a man. A human being is without question a very complex thing indeed, one possessing many different sema (organs divided into tissues divided into cells divided into amino acids; not to mention mental states, affections, etc.), as well as dependent upon several others to survive (nutrients, energy, a supporting environment, social bonds, among others); if we look for its place on the grand scheme of things — the Worldtree — we’ll see that it’s positioned way up on the outermost branches, meaning a lot of sema had to break (and some to reassemble) before it could spring into existence. These lower-order sema (or synods) directly below him, connecting all the way down to the prima synod, are what in philosophy one would call the necessary properties of that particular being, ie, the ones it couldn’t do without to be what it is. The statement “All men are mortal” refers to a necessary property: all men are living things, and all living things are subject to death, hence you can’t have one without the other. However, the converse “All mortal creatures are men” is false, because there are tons of creatures that qualify as mortal but do not share those qualities that make a men; therefore being a man is not a necessary property for mortality, but a contingent one — that is, one that can either be the case or not. A lower-order semon that’s directly linked to an entity thus constitutes one of its necessary (or trivial) properties, whereas a higher-order semon makes up a contingent (or nontrivial) one (we might as well call them objective and subjective properties as well, respectively, but both words seem too overly charged with conflicting and contentious meanings to be bothered with).
The necessary features are the ones expressed in things like symmetry (in its physical sense). They remain invariant not because of some specific time duration related to them, but for the fact that they must last at least as long as the entity does, for otherwise it couldn’t even be brought into existence. This means the laws of nature as we observe them in our universe are not any special per se, and yet we would never observe the universe without them, for it’s precisely because of their existence that ours is even made possible. On the other hand, its contingent features are the ones positioned above the subject and exemplified by, for example, the choices we make in life (to get a new haircut, to start eating healthy) or even some coercive and external circumstance that, however removed from our action power, is nonetheless something that could be otherwise. A practical way of discerning between one or the other is precisely evaluating whether there’s more than one scenario possible for the considered outcome. if the answer is no, were dealing with a necessary condition; if, however it’s yes, then each of these instances represents a choice, which makes them accidental or contingent.
Clearly then, whether a specific entity is necessary or contingent will depend on the context of the analysis. Ultimately though, all entities are contingent, because they all sprout from the Semes, and so wouldn’t even have come into existence in the first place if it weren’t for its branching. To exist is to be contingent, and the only entity who can be said to be absolutely necessary is the one who’s absolutely real — ie, the Semes, or the first semon. It is by the very virtue of a semon’s partitioning that we are allowed to have any structure. Think of a checkers board in which every house has a piece on it; not only would movement be impossible in such scenario, but we would eternally be stuck in a single, motionless state. And so, only through partitioning (or, in our example: allowing for some houses of the board to be unoccupied) can a semon ever hope to experiment a different character than its own.
An important point to make at this juncture though, given how much has been said about the differences between a semon and its partitions, is that: even after partitioning, NO semon ever ceases to be; it simply branches into new entities (the offspring) that, though distinct and separated from each other, continue to share a same trunk — represented by the synod. To better understand that, it helps to differentiate between the two ways one has to visualize a system: the ontological and phenomenological ones.
Ontologically, we’re interested in the phylogenetic structure of a system, ie, the hierarchical arrangement of synods and their partitions. Phenomenologically, our focus is rather on the state of the world at any given time — the semonic distribution and configuration. They can be referred to as the static and dynamic pictures, respectively, though both of them can encode movement; the difference being that in the static picture we see all the implied sema and their branches at once, whether in the dynamic one we see only the ends or outermost sprouts of these branches, which are then weighted to their correspondent order.
The ontological picture we’re already quite acquainted to, as it is displayed in the form of the graphical representation of a worldtree:
The phenomenological, however, is distinctively illuminating, for it can be displayed in the form of the already familiar grid and one instantly identifies which elements represent the given entities. Below’s an example in which the red rectangles represent the anads, the orange ones represent lower-ordered sema, the yellow ones even lower-ordered ones, and so forth.
Each form will be better suited to a particular set of analyses or demonstrations, but both of them are only a snapshot of the system in a particular moment of its history, and shouldn’t be mistaken for the “whole picture”. If we indeed intend to visualize a system in the most global level, we should imagine its likeness to that of a “cake”, with infinite depth but whose surface is constantly being sliced, only to get glued back together, in a never-ending cycle of creative unfolding.
That’s what sema are: a way to refer to that uncompromising oneness that binds beings together, even after they’re apparently broken apart. A true semon is a unity that transcends time, space and any other instance of separation, an invulnerable trunk sprouting an endless stream of twigs, that on it have not only their support but their very source.
This branching quality of sema is more important than might seem at first, and we’ll explore a bit more about the reasons for that in the next entry.
