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First circulated on June 16, 2021, Towards the realization of a conceptual symbol proposed that the foundational crisis of meaning, art, and subjective experience cannot be resolved by passive structuralist observation or rigid physicalist systems of measurement, but by collapsing the signifier and the signified into an active causal operator: the conceptual symbol. This unified edition presents the original living manifesto and its Addendum for Semioticians alongside a second addendum addressed to qualia and consciousness research. It relates the 2021 proposal to relational, category-theoretic, and evolutionary-interface approaches to mind; contrasts the Conceptual Symbol with Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loops and Christopher Langan’s Cognitive- Theoretic Model of the Universe; and develops four proposed principles: a reversible semiotic operator, paraconsistent self-reference, perceptual plurality with shared inference, and the ethical priority of consent and access intimacy over imposed consensus. The formal equations are conceptual proposals rather than established derivations or empirical demonstrations of consciousness.
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Alexis Eleanor Fagan (2026) studied this question.
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