You have never, not once in your life, encountered raw reality. From the moment you acquired language as a child, a membrane was installed between you and existence, a membrane made of words. You do not see a tree; you see the concept "tree," and your nervous system responds to the emotional residue attached to your internal symbol "tree." For one person, this symbol carries the warmth of childhood summers; for another, the terror of a forest where they once got lost. The tree has not changed. The symbol determines everything.
Korzybski called this the structural differential: the recognition that language operates at multiple levels of abstraction, each level losing more of the original reality. At the bottom is the event itself: the actual, unspeakable, infinitely complex happening. Above it sits the objectâwhat your senses manage to capture, already a reduction. Above that sits the label, the word. And above that sit inferences, judgments, and emotional associations piled upon the label like sediment over millennia. By the time a word reaches your conscious mind, you are responding to ghosts of ghosts of ghosts.
This is neuroscience and not a metaphor. When a word enters your ear, it does not travel politely to some rational processing center where you calmly evaluate its meaning. It detonates. The auditory cortex fires, and within milliseconds the amygdala has already begun releasing its chemical verdicts: cortisol for threat-words, dopamine for reward-words, oxytocin for belonging-words. Your "rational" prefrontal cortex receives the news after your body has already begun its hormonal cascade. You have been moved before you have thought. The word "terrorist" does not invite contemplation; it triggers a physiological state. The word "freedom" does not describe a concept; it floods specific neural pathways with specific electrochemical signals conditioned by every prior encounter with that symbol.
The Empire Builders Knew
History is a graveyard of those who underestimated this mechanism and a throne room for those who mastered it.
Consider the Roman genius for semantic engineering. When Rome conquered a people, it did not merely impose taxes and garrisons, it imposed words. The concept of "Pax Romana" was not a description of peace; it was a linguistic virus designed to make subjugation feel like safety. The conquered were not "enslaved peoples"; they were "citizens of Rome," a semantic promotion that cost the Empire nothing but purchased loyalty that gold could never buy. The Romans understood that :
If you change what a thing is called, you change what it is in the minds of men.
A "province" sounds like an administrative unit; "occupied territory" sounds like oppression. Same land and legions but different nervous system response.
Julius Caesar, in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico, performed one of history's greatest acts of linguistic manipulation. He wrote of his genocidal campaigns in Gaul using the passive voice, the third person, and the detached tone of a naturalist observing insects. "Caesar ordered the town to be burned" carries none of the screaming, the smoke, the children's bodies. The semantic distance he created allowed Roman senators, and centuries of school children to process mass slaughter as mere administration. He demonstrated that the careful selection of words could make atrocity boring, and boring things do not trigger outrage.
Leap forward to the twentieth century. When the Nazi regime wished to implement industrialized murder, they faced a problem: German soldiers and bureaucrats were human beings with consciences, and consciences respond to words. The solution was to route around it through linguistic engineering. Jews were not "murdered"; they were "processed." They were not "killed"; they underwent "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung). The gas chambers were not execution facilities; they were "disinfection rooms." Each semantic substitution was a small anesthetic injection into the collective nervous system of the Reich. The bureaucrat signing transport orders was managing logistics and not signing death warrants. The words made the unthinkable thinkable by making it unspeakable in its true form.
Viktor Klemperer, a Jewish philologist who survived the Holocaust, documented this process in his extraordinary work LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich). He observed that the Nazi regime poisoned the German language itself, and through the language, the thought, and through the thought, the soul. "Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic," he wrote. "They are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all." This is Korzybski's warning made flesh and bone:
The word is not the thing, but the wrong word, repeated enough times, becomes the thing in the circuitry of the brain.
The Architects of Desire
But let us not imagine this dark art died with the dictators. It merely changed costume and moved to Madison Avenue.
Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of modern public relations, understood the Stimulus-Symbol-Response Loop with sociopathic clarity. In his 1928 book Propaganda, he wrote with chilling candor:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
Bernays did not sell products but symbols attached to products. When he was hired to increase cigarette sales among women in the 1920s, he did not advertise the taste or quality of cigarettes. Instead, he staged a publicity stunt during the Easter Parade in New York, hiring fashionable women to light up cigarettes while photographers captured the moment. He called the cigarettes "Torches of Freedom." With three words, he transformed a nicotine delivery device into a symbol of women's liberation, suffrage, and equality. The cigarette itself had not changed. But the symbol, and therefore the response had been completely rewired. Sales to women exploded.
This is the mechanism the video game companies have deployed. By mandating "defeat" over "kill," they are not changing the actionât, he animated head still separates from the animated body. They are changing the neural pathway that fires when processing that action. "Kill" carries evolutionary weight; it is connected to taboos as old as the species, to cortisol releases, to moral alarm systems. "Defeat" routes around all of that circuitry entirely. It connects to competition, sports, games, victory, dopamine pathways, reward circuits, the pleasure of winning. It is neurological rerouting performed at scale.
The Pavlovian Cathedral
Ivan Pavlov's dogs have become a cliché, but the cliché has buried the profundity. Pavlov discovered that any neutral stimulus, if paired repeatedly with an unconditioned stimulus, will eventually trigger the unconditioned response by itself. The bell means nothing to a dog, until it means food. And then the bell is food, as far as the dog's nervous system is concerned.
But Pavlov's deeper insight, often ignored, was that this conditioning is not limited to dogs. The human being is an animal of vastly greater complexity, but the underlying mechanism is identical. We are conditioning machines. Every experience you have ever had has been a pairing event: a stimulus (word, image, sound, smell) paired with a response (pleasure, pain, fear, desire). And every subsequent encounter with that stimulus triggers the conditioned response, whether you will it or not.
Words are the most potent conditioned stimuli ever invented because they are arbitrary, they have no natural connection to what they represent. The sound "snake" has no scales, no venom, no fangs. But speak it to someone with ophidiophobia and watch their pupils dilate, their skin flush, their heart accelerate. Their nervous system is not responding to a reptile; no reptile is present. It is responding to a symbol, and the symbol carries the charge of every prior encounter: real, imagined, or inherited from the warnings of ancestors.
Consider: you have never met "freedom." You cannot shake its hand or measure its dimensions. Yet speak the word in a certain tone, in a certain context, and you will watch humans march to war, sacrifice their lives, topple governments. They are not dying for a concept; they are dying for a conditioned response to a symbol. The symbol "freedom" has been paired through education, through media, through a thousand cultural rituals with emotional states so powerful that it can override the survival instinct itself.
This is why marketers, must first identify their target demographic before choosing language. A word is not a word; it is a key to a specific set of neural locks. "Adventure" unlocks the dopamine pathways of a young urban professional bored with cubicle life. "Security" unlocks the cortisol-management systems of a parent worried about retirement. "Rebellion" unlocks the identity-formation circuits of an adolescent differentiating from their parents. The product being sold is almost irrelevant. What is being sold is a symbol that triggers a conditioned emotional cascade, and the product merely attaches itself to that cascade like a remora to a shark.
The Strange Parallels
In ancient India, the sages who composed the Mandukya Upanishad taught that the sacred syllable "Om" contains within it the entire architecture of consciousness: waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and the transcendent fourth state beyond all three. They were not being mystical; they were being precise. They understood that a sound, properly contemplated, could trigger transformations of consciousness because sounds are not merely vibrations in air, they are keys to neural states. The mantra traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism are, at their core, technologies for using the Stimulus-Symbol-Response Loop to liberate rather than enslave.
Meanwhile, in the twentieth century, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein arrived at a conclusion that would have made Korzybski nod in recognition: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." What you cannot name, you cannot think. What you cannot think, you cannot perceive. The words you possess literally construct the cage of your possible experience. A person with no word for "melancholy" will feel something when sad, but they cannot think it, cannot isolate it, cannot work with it. The emotion happens to them like weather. The person with the word possesses a handle on the experience. They can examine it. But the handle is not the thing. They are now examining their concept of melancholy, not the raw feeling itself.
And in the quantum realm, we find the strangest parallel of all. The physicist Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that the act of observation affects what is observed, that you cannot measure a particle's position without altering its momentum. The observer and the observed are entangled. Is this not precisely what Korzybski claimed about language and reality? The word you use to label an experience does not passively describe that experience; it participates in shaping it. Name your emotion "anxiety" and it becomes a clinical condition, something wrong to be fixed. Name the same physiological state "excitement" and it becomes fuel for performance. The labeling is an intervention. The map reshapes the territory.
The Biological Substrate
The Stimulus-Symbol-Response Loop is not a human invention. It is a discovery of a pattern that predates humanity by billions of years.
Consider the orchid Ophrys apifera, the bee orchid. This flower has evolved to produce a structure that mimics the appearance, texture, and pheromones of a female bee. Male bees, encountering this simulation, attempt to mate with it. In doing so, they pollinate the flower. The orchid is exploiting the bee's Stimulus-Symbol-Response Loop: the visual and chemical symbols of "female mate" trigger the response of copulation, regardless of whether an actual female is present. The symbol is the reality as far as the bee's nervous system is concerned.
The cuckoo bird goes further still. It lays its eggs in the nests of other species, and its chicks have evolved to produce a super-stimulus, a gaping red mouth so large and so red that it triggers the host parent's feeding response more powerfully than the host's own offspring. The symbol (red gaping mouth) has been amplified beyond what occurs in nature to hijack the response (feeding) with greater efficacy than reality itself. The cuckoo chick is, in effect, an advertisement, a hyper-stimulus designed to exploit a pre-existing neural pathway.
Now ask yourself: what is a McDonald's arch but a cuckoo's gape? What is a Coca-Cola logo but an orchid's mimicry? These symbols have been engineered, through decades of repetition and reward-pairing, to trigger response patterns in human nervous systems. The golden arches are not yellow because yellow is aesthetically pleasing; they are yellow because yellow triggers appetite centers in the brain. The Coca-Cola script is not cursive because cursive is elegant; it is cursive because the specific curves have been associated, through billions of dollars of conditioning, with refreshment, happiness, and belonging.
We have become the bees. And corporations have become the orchids.
The Physics of Collapse
But there is an even deeper pattern here, one that operates at the level of information itself.
In information theory, Claude Shannon demonstrated that all communication involves compression. An infinite, continuous signal must be reduced to a finite, discrete code in order to be transmitted. This compression necessarily loses information, the technical term is "lossy compression." The message received is always less than the message sent.
Language is the most aggressive compression algorithm ever deployed. It takes the infinite, continuous flow of experience and compresses it into discrete packets called "words." But this is the critical insight: the compression is not neutral. What is preserved and what is lost is determined by the structure of the language itself. A language with no word for "blue" will compress blue and green into a single category. Speakers of that language will literally perceive blue and green as more similar than speakers of a language that distinguishes them. The compression algorithm shapes the output.
Now extend this to social systems. What is a "market crash"? It is a phenomenon that exists in the collective nervous systems of millions of investors, each responding not to economic fundamentals but to symbols of economic fundamentals, headlines, numbers, charts. A cascade begins: negative symbols trigger fear responses; fear responses trigger selling; selling triggers more negative symbols. The crash is not a correction of prices to reflect reality; it is a self-reinforcing loop of symbol-response-symbol-response, a resonance cascade in the collective human nervous system.
A star collapses in precisely the same way. When fusion pressure can no longer counteract gravitational pull, the star begins to contract. The contraction increases density. Increased density increases gravity. Increased gravity accelerates contraction. A self-reinforcing loop ends in supernova or black hole, depending on mass.
A market crashes exactly like a star collapses because both are systems where feedback loops, once triggered, become self-amplifying. The difference is only in substrate: plasma versus neurons. The mathematics of collapse are identical.
And what triggers the market collapse? What corresponds to the failure of fusion pressure in the star? A word. A headline. A phrase. "Subprime crisis." "Bank failure." "Recession."
The symbol enters the collective nervous system, triggers a conditioned response, and the cascade begins.
What Korzybski Could Not Say
You do not have a self; you have a symbol of a self.
The entity you call "I": your identity, your personality, your sense of continuous existence across time is not a discovery but a construction, and it is constructed primarily out of words. You narrate yourself into existence. "I am ambitious." "I am shy." "I am a failure." "I am a survivor." Each of these statements is a compression, a label applied to an infinitely complex flux of sensations, memories, and impulses. And once the label is applied, it becomes a filter through which all subsequent experience is processed.
Consider: a child performs poorly on a mathematics test. A parent says, "You're not good at math." This is not a description; it is an installation. The child's nervous system now has a symbol: "not good at math" attached to an emotional charge of shame or inadequacy. Every subsequent encounter with mathematics will be processed through this symbol. The child will approach math problems with cortisol already flooding their system, attention narrowed, working memory impaired. They will perform poorly. The poor performance will confirm the symbol. The symbol will strengthen. A self-fulfilling prophecy has been initiated through the internal architecture of symbol and response.
This is how identity crystallizes.
You are not born with a self; you accumulate one through thousands of labeling events, each installing a symbol, each symbol carrying a response pattern. By adulthood, the system is so dense, so automatic, so invisible that you mistake the map for the territory. You believe you are your symbols. You defend them as you would defend your physical body. Insult someone's political identity and watch their nervous system respond as if you had threatened them with a knife. The symbol has become indistinguishable from the organism.
Here lies the terrifying implication: Free will, as commonly understood, may be largely an illusion generated by the symbol system. You believe you "choose" your responses, but in the fraction of a second between stimulus and response, your conditioned symbol-network has already fired. The "choice" you experience consciously is often a post-hoc rationalization of a response that has already been determined by prior conditioning. You are not the author of your reactions; you are the narrator who constructs a story of authorship after the fact.
This is not philosophical speculation. Benjamin Libet's famous neuroscience experiments demonstrated that measurable brain activity precedes conscious awareness of a decision by approximately 300 milliseconds. Your brain has already "decided" before "you" know you have decided. What, then, is the "you" that believes it decided? It is the narrator weaving a story of agency from events that have already occurred.
The Mechanism of Love
Isn't "falling in love" the most overwhelming Stimulus-Symbol-Response cascade the nervous system can produce? You encounter another human being: a complex, contradictory, infinitely deep entity and your symbol-making apparatus immediately begins its compression. Within moments, you have reduced this infinite being to a set of symbols: "beautiful," "intelligent," "kind," "mysterious." These symbols are then cross-referenced against your pre-existing templates: symbols of idealized partners accumulated from parents, media, past relationships, cultural narratives.
When the match exceeds a certain threshold, the cascade begins. Dopamine floods the reward circuits. Norepinephrine sharpens attention until the beloved seems to glow against a dull background. Serotonin drops, producing the obsessive rumination characteristic of early loveâthe same neurochemical signature as obsessive-compulsive disorder. You have not fallen in love with a person; you have fallen in love with a symbol that triggered a neurochemical avalanche.
This is why love is so often followed by disillusionment. The symbol cannot hold. The infinitely complex human begins to leak through the compression. They are not always "kind"; they are sometimes irritable. They are not always "mysterious"; they are sometimes predictable. The map and territory diverge. But because you fell in love with the map, the divergence feels like betrayal. "You've changed," we say. But they have not changed. Our symbol has failed to contain them. The tragedy of romantic love is largely the tragedy of mistaking symbols for beings.
And yet mature love may be precisely the recognition of this mechanism. To love someone truly is to hold your symbols lightly, to remain perpetually curious about the territory beyond the map, to allow the other to overflow every category you create for them. This is why long marriages require what the poet Rilke called "the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other." Two people who have recognized that they can never fully know each other, because to know is to symbolize, and to symbolize is to reduceâbut who choose presence over possession.
The Architecture of the Sacred
And what of religion, that vast domain where the Stimulus-Symbol-Response Loop operates with maximum intensity?
Every religion is, at its structural core, a technology for symbol installation. The rituals, the chants, the architectures, the narratives, all are delivery mechanisms for symbols that will trigger specific responses in the nervous system. The crucifix is not a piece of wood; it is a symbol compressed with two thousand years of suffering, sacrifice, redemption, guilt, hope, and belonging. To a conditioned Christian, the sight of the cross triggers a cascade that no rational argument can touch because the response is pre-rational, installed in childhood, reinforced through countless repetitions in contexts of high emotional arousal.
This is not a dismissal of religion; it is an explanation of its power. The sages who designed these systems understood perhaps intuitively, perhaps explicitly that humans are symbol-response machines. To transform a human being, you must transform their symbols. And to transform symbols, you must access the nervous system at moments of maximum plasticity: childhood, crisis, ritual altered states, the threshold between sleeping and waking.
The name of God is the ultimate symbol. In Judaism, the Tetragrammaton was considered so sacred that it was never spoken aloud. Why? Because the sages understood that to speak a name is to reduce the named to a symbol. And God, being infinite, cannot be reduced without blasphemy. The prohibition against speaking the name was a semantic practice, an attempt to preserve the territory against the violence of the map.
And in the Zen tradition, the koan: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" is explicitly designed to break the symbol-making apparatus. The rational mind grasps for a symbol, a category, an answer. The koan refuses all categories. It is a deliberately meaningless statement whose purpose is to force the practitioner into a direct encounter with reality prior to symbolic mediation. Enlightenment, in this framework, is precisely the moment when the map is seen as a mapâwhen symbols become transparent and the territory shines through.
The Warfare You Cannot See
Newspaper headlines are purposely designed to trigger the emotions of an entire demographic. This is the primary mode of modern power.
In the attention economy, your consciousness is the territory being conquered. Every corporation, every political movement, every ideology is competing to install its symbols in your nervous system. The currency is not money; it is conditioned response. The entity that successfully installs its symbols in the largest number of nervous systems wins, wins elections, wins market share, wins cultural hegemony.
Social media has weaponized this mechanism beyond anything Korzybski could have imagined. The algorithm does not serve content; it serves triggers. It learns, through billions of data points, exactly which symbols produce maximum response in your particular nervous systemâand then it feeds you those symbols continuously. Outrage symbols. Fear symbols. Belonging symbols. Each trigger releases a small neurochemical reward. Each reward strengthens the conditioned pathway. You are being trained, in real-time, by an intelligence that has no interest in your flourishingâonly in your engagement.
The result is a population segmented into symbol-tribes, each conditioned to respond to different triggers, each living in a different semantic reality. The word "freedom" means one thing to a libertarian nervous system, another thing entirely to a progressive nervous system. They are using the same sound but speaking different languages. And because the response is pre-rational, no amount of "dialogue" or "debate" can bridge the gap. You cannot argue someone out of a conditioned response. You can only recondition them and that requires access to their nervous system at moments of high plasticity, which neither side grants the other.
This is why political polarization feels so biological, so immune to reason. It is biological. It is conditioned responses facing off against conditioned responses, each side triggered by symbols the other side has installed. The map has become the territory, and there are now multiple maps, mutually incompatible, each defended as if it were reality itself.
Language as Reality Engine
Reality, as experienced by human beings, is not given; it is generated, and the generation occurs through language.
You do not perceive the world and then describe it. You describe the world with inherited symbols, with conditioned categories, with linguistic grooves worn into your neural pathways by culture, media, and personal history and your description becomes your perception.
The symbol does not follow the experience; the symbol precedes and shapes the experience.
This is why the choice between "kill" and "defeat," between "torture" and "enhanced interrogation," between "invasion" and "liberation," between "riot" and "uprising" is never merely semantic. It is ontological. It determines what reality will be, for the nervous systems that receive those symbols. The video game company is not choosing words; it is choosing which reality millions of young minds will inhabit.
If reality is generated through symbols, then reality is mutable. You are not trapped in the world you perceive. You are trapped in the symbols through which you generate that world. Change the symbols, and the world changes. Not metaphorically. Actually.
A person who genuinely substitutes "opportunity" for "obstacle" in their internal symbolic landscape will encounter different experiences than a person who does notâbecause their nervous system will respond differently to the same stimuli, they will notice different features of the environment, they will take different actions, and those actions will produce different outcomes.
This is not positive thinking. This is semantic engineering. It is the deliberate restructuring of the symbol-response patterns that generate your experienced reality.
The ancients called it magic. The advertisers call it branding. The therapists call it cognitive restructuring. The Buddhists call it liberation from nama-rupa, name-and-form.
It is all the same mechanism.
The Pattern
All of these are the same event occurring at different scales, in different substrates, across different timespans. They are not analogies of each other. They are not metaphors for each other. They are instances of a single pattern, a universal mechanism that operates wherever information meets response, wherever code meets execution, wherever symbol meets nervous system.
The pattern is this:
Between stimulus and reality lies a layer of encoding. This encoding is not neutral, it carries structure, and that structure shapes response. The response then feeds back to reinforce or modify the encoding. Over iterations, the encoding becomes invisible; it is mistaken for reality itself. At that point, whoever controls the encoding controls the reality experienced by the system.
The bee does not experience the orchid as a deception. To the bee's nervous system, the orchid is a mate. The encoding (pheromone + visual pattern = female) produces the response (mating behavior) so reliably that the distinction between "real female" and "fake female" does not exist at the level of the bee's experience. The orchid has hacked the bee's reality by hacking its encoding layer.
The bureaucrat signing transport orders to Auschwitz did not experience himself as a murderer. To his nervous system, conditioned by the encoding layer of Nazi euphemism, he was performing logistics. "Special treatment" did not trigger the moral alarm that "mass murder" would have triggered. The encoding layer had been restructured, and with it, his experienced reality. He inhabited a different world than we do when we read the history, because he processed it through different symbols.
The child told "you are not good at math" does not experience the statement as a piece of information to be evaluated. The statement installs itself as identity, as encoding. All subsequent mathematical stimuli are processed through this filter. The child does not encounter math problems; they encounter confirmations of inadequacy. Their reality has been altered at the encoding layer, and they will now generate experiences consistent with that encoding.
The lover gazing at the beloved does not experience a complex, contradictory human being. They experience the symbol of their projected ideal, and that symbol triggers neurochemical cascades that make the beloved appear to glow with significance. The encoding layer (romantic projection) generates a reality so compelling that the lover will reorganize their entire life around it. When the encoding finally breaks down, they will say "I was blind," recognizing retroactively that they were perceiving symbol, not territory.
The investor watching the stock ticker does not experience numbers. They experience hope or fear, depending on which symbols (green arrows, red arrows, headlines, analyst quotes) have been conditioned to trigger which responses. Their buy and sell decisionsâwhich move billions of dollars through the global economy are made not on the basis of objective calculation but on the basis of conditioned symbol-response patterns. The market is not a rational pricing mechanism; it is a vast collective nervous system, encoding and responding, encoding and responding, occasionally cascading into the self-reinforcing collapses that mirror dying stars.
The Terrible Symmetry
The orchid, the Reich, the lover, the market, the selfâthey are all the same system.
They all consist of:
- A stimulus (pheromone, word, face, price)
- An encoding layer that compresses the stimulus into a symbol (mate-signal, euphemism, romantic ideal, trend indicator)
- A response triggered by the symbol, not by the underlying reality
- A feedback loop where the response reinforces or modifies the encoding
- An invisibility threshold beyond which the encoding is mistaken for reality itself
This is an informational phenomenon, a pattern that emerges wherever information flows through systems that process, encode, and respond.
DNA is an encoding layer. The sequence of nucleotides (A, T, G, C) is a symbolic representation, a compression of the organism that will result from its expression. The ribosome does not "know" what a protein is; it responds to codons (three-letter sequences) with specific amino acids. The symbol triggers the response. The protein folds. The organism emerges. And the organism's survival or death feeds back to determine which DNA sequences persist. The entire biosphere is a four-billion-year-old Stimulus-Symbol-Response system, evolving its encoding layer through differential reproduction.
Language is an encoding layer. The sequence of phonemes (speech sounds) or graphemes (written marks) is a symbolic representation, a compression of meaning that will result from its interpretation. The human nervous system does not "know" what reality is; it responds to words with specific emotional and cognitive activations. The symbol triggers the response. The experience emerges. And the organism's success or failure feeds back to determine which linguistic patterns persist in the culture. Human civilization is a ten-thousand-year-old Stimulus-Symbol-Response system, evolving its encoding layer through cultural transmission.
Money is an encoding layer. The number in your bank account is a symbolic representation, a compression of labor, value, and social agreement. The economy does not "know" what wealth is; it responds to prices with specific behaviors (buy, sell, invest, hoard). The symbol triggers the response. The distribution of resources emerges. And the outcomes feed back to modify prices, which modify behaviors, which modify outcomes. The global economy is a five-thousand-year-old Stimulus-Symbol-Response system, evolving its encoding layer through market dynamics.
Life itself: biological, psychological, social, economi âis symbol manipulation.
The universe, at every scale we can observe, processes information through encoding layers, and those encoding layers shape what emerges. The quantum wave function is an encoding layer. The periodic table is an encoding layer. The connectome of your brain is an encoding layer. Reality is not "out there" waiting to be perceived; reality is generated through the interaction of stimulus and encoding, and different encodings generate different realities.
The Vertigo of Understanding
The Buddhist philosophers spoke of pratÄ«tyasamutpÄda: dependent origination, the teaching that nothing exists independently; everything arises in dependence upon conditions, including the conditions of perception and naming. They were describing the Stimulus-Symbol-Response Loop two and a half millennia before Korzybski.
The quantum physicists speak of the observer effect: the fact that measurement affects outcome, that the act of observation participates in what is observed. They are describing the Stimulus-Symbol-Response Loop in the language of mathematics.
The postmodern philosophers speak of the construction of reality through discourse, the Foucauldian insight that power operates through the control of what can be said and thought. They are describing the Stimulus-Symbol-Response Loop in the language of politics.
The neuroscientists speak of predictive processing, the theory that the brain is not a passive receiver of sensory data but an active generator of predictions, constantly projecting encoded expectations onto incoming stimuli, experiencing not the world but the delta between prediction and input. They are describing the Stimulus-Symbol-Response Loop in the language of computation.
They are all describing the same thing.