An interest that preoccupies me currently is the development of a scientific meta-semeiotic. Essentially this means that if you have a well-defined (formalized) semeiotic model of how the world is apprehended by individuals in species then how do you achieve the same goal – a formalized model – that describes the behavior of collections.

More specifically, let’s say you know how an individual (a worker or a terrorist, for example) sees herself in the world then – all conventional influence aside – what are the underlying inevitable behaviors when they are in groups? How do various group notions arise? What makes a population accept oppression or rebel? Conventions mitigate these extremes of behavior. Read the rest of this entry »