Thank you for these comments—I look forward to giving the pointers in particular the attention they deserve. My immediate and perhaps naive answer/evasion is that semiotic physics alludes to a lower level analysis: more analogous to studying neural firing dynamics on the human side than linguistics. One possible response would be, “Well, that’s an attempt to explain saying ‘physics’, but it hardly justifies ‘semiotic’.” But this is—in the sense of the analogy—a “physics” of particles of language in the form of embeddable tokens. (Here I have to acknowledge that the embeddings are generally termed ‘semantic’, not ‘semiotic’ - something for us to ponder.)
semiotic physics alludes to a lower level analysis: more analogous to studying neural firing dynamics on the human side than linguistics
Many classic debates in cognitive science and AI, e.g. between symbolism and connectionism, translate to claims about neural substrates. Most work with LLMs that I’ve seen abstracts over many such details, and seems in some ways more akin to linguistics, describing structure in high-level behavior, than neuroscience. It seems like there’s lots of overlap between what you’re talking about and Conceptual Role Semantics—here’s a nice, modern treatment of it in computational cognitive science.
I think I kind of get the use of “semiotics” more than “physics”. For example, with multi-modal LLMs the symbol/icon barrier begins to dissolve, so GPT-4 can reason about diagrams to some extent. The wikipedia entry for social physics provides some relevant context:
“More recently there have been a large number of social science papers that use mathematics broadly similar to that of physics, and described as “Computational social science”
Thank you for these comments—I look forward to giving the pointers in particular the attention they deserve. My immediate and perhaps naive answer/evasion is that semiotic physics alludes to a lower level analysis: more analogous to studying neural firing dynamics on the human side than linguistics. One possible response would be, “Well, that’s an attempt to explain saying ‘physics’, but it hardly justifies ‘semiotic’.” But this is—in the sense of the analogy—a “physics” of particles of language in the form of embeddable tokens. (Here I have to acknowledge that the embeddings are generally termed ‘semantic’, not ‘semiotic’ - something for us to ponder.)
Many classic debates in cognitive science and AI, e.g. between symbolism and connectionism, translate to claims about neural substrates. Most work with LLMs that I’ve seen abstracts over many such details, and seems in some ways more akin to linguistics, describing structure in high-level behavior, than neuroscience. It seems like there’s lots of overlap between what you’re talking about and Conceptual Role Semantics—here’s a nice, modern treatment of it in computational cognitive science.
I think I kind of get the use of “semiotics” more than “physics”. For example, with multi-modal LLMs the symbol/icon barrier begins to dissolve, so GPT-4 can reason about diagrams to some extent. The wikipedia entry for social physics provides some relevant context: