Semantics, Self-Relation, and Consciousness

This essay develops a structurally minimal account of semantics and consciousness grounded in the concept of pre-reflective self-relation. It begins by distinguishing information from communication, thereby separating formal signal processing—paradigmatically articulated in the work of Claude Shannon—from questions of meaning and experience. Self-relation is then introduced not as a mental act, but as an ontological phase relation between actuality and possibility, formally expressed as a ↔ ia. On this basis, the essay reconstructs a dynamic sequence from rotation and iteration to fields and attractors, yielding a notion of rudimentary semantics as a non-neutral ordering of differences. Semantics is thus shown to be structurally operative prior to life and consciousness. A precise tipping condition is identified in which biological systems bind such differences to their own persistence, giving rise to orientation. Consciousness does not constitute an additional ontological layer, but a phenomenal localization of this already structured semantics. The central conclusion is that self-relation implies no universal consciousness, but an ontologically necessary capacity for consciousness—universal as structure, local as appearance.