Toward a semantic general theory of everything

Abstract

The notion of a universal semantic cognitive map is introduced as a general indexing space for semantics, useful to reduce semantic relations to geometric and topological relations. As a first step in designing the concept, the notion of semantics is operationalized in terms of human subjective experience and is related to the concept of spatial position. Then synonymy and antonymy are introduced in geometrical terms. Further analysis building on previous studies of the authors indicates that the universal semantic cognitive map should be locally low-dimensional. This essay ends with a proposal to develop a metric system for subjective experiences based on the outlined approach. We conclude that a computationally defined universal semantic cognitive map is a necessary tool for the emerging new science of the mind: a scientific paradigm that includes subjective experience as an object of study. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2010