Finding common ground between neuroscience and semiotics requires reframing neurological processes as semiotic processes and semiotic processes as neurological processes. In the neurosciences, this requires abandoning both the computational metaphor and the view that the basic functional unit of cognition is a correlation between the level of neuronal activity and the presentation or recall of a stimulus. In semiotic theory, this requires abandoning a structuralist conception of signs as discrete types defined by intrinsic properties such as formal similarity, physical correlation, or arbitrariness. I argue, instead, that the basic neurosemiotic operation is iconic interpretation and that its neurological correlate (i.e., the interpretant) is the production of a dynamical attractor constituted by neural signals circulating within a local cortical area produced in resonance to the spatiotemporal pattern of inputs from peripheral sensors or other cortical areas. Indexical interpretation, in turn, involves parallel iconic interpretants generated under iconic resonance with the primary iconic interpretant. This facilitates the generation of a distinct iconic interpretant in response to independent features (affordances) shared by these secondary interpretants. The generation of this higher-order correlated iconism and its simultaneity with the initial iconic interpretant constitutes an indexical interpretant (i.e. the linked activation of distinct iconic interpretants). Symbolic interpretant generation involves the generation of a yet higher-order iconic interpretant in response to the yet higher-order indices. Thus, iconic, indexical, and symbolic interpretation involves phases in a hierarchically recursive interpretive process for which these sign-vehicle properties are merely affordances, enabling complete displacement of reference.

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