In today’s discussion, I’ll be first focusing on Fox Harrell’s discussion on a concept known as morphic semiotics, which lays the foundation for the analysis of subjective computing systems. One section that resonated me the most was the on the basics of semiotics, where Harrell provides a potent example of the broad “social salience” in semiotics through the swastika symbol. While it serves represents the achievement of enlightenment in Jain religion, it also serves as broad sweeping representations of the German Nazi party. This dichotomy reinforces the notion of the multilayers meaning of signs, and how these alternate meanings can have strikingly different connotations in different settings. One additional example I researched into was was the Hook ‘Em horns symbol used to represent the mascot of the University of Texas (longhorns). However, this same symbol interpreted in Europe often refers to satanism. These differences in the meaning of signs reveal what Harrell discusses as “phantasms”, where each meaning involves shared epistemic and image spaces.

The second reading focused on Gestalt Psychology, which references the notion that “the whole is different from the sum of its parts.” Under this framework, there are six laws that govern human perception: proximity, similarity, good continuation, closure, prägnanz, and figure/ground. The law that resonated with me the most was closure, which involves the mind’s subconscious filling of missing information to construct the entirety of the shape. For example, this can be seen in image below, where we see a soccer ball despite the lack of the boundary lines. The importance of this framework may lie in our brain’s desire for order, and this can be achieved through perceiving the object as continuing in a smooth fashion all the way around.