Perhaps the greatest scholar you never knew, Charles Laughlin is at the vanguard where neuroscience meets anthropology; his major contribution is a theory of consciousness-phenomenology he posited called biogen structuralism. One of his key arguments is that semiotics is a backwoods plateau in philosophy, that it isn't aiming for completion nor can it become self-aware, and it cannot export accurate data and analysis for a collective since it is based purely in observation. In a way he considers semiotics fictional, and he has considerable arguments based in neural science, stemming from structural patterns that emerge after the stage of observation.

Why is this important? Because it indicates we may have diverged from evolving thought and turned instead to a fashion of thought - semioticians and most current day philosophers may be no different than fashion designers, except their slender lines and curvy metaphors are set in text, the caress of opinions now institutionalized into an academic jet-set. All components and agencies for the semiotician's discussion, gender, class, skin color, ethnicity, are not considered biologically or even neurologically (which would make us examine their uses and misuses as tools) they are instead viewed as values, mostly through a cross-lateral of emotion and logic, data like cultural values which shift individually. Science under this lens should be viewing current-day philosophy as hopelessly medieval, as the pulses of egos merely vaunting for attention.

Laughlin is one of the few crossover talents between myth and science since he explores storytelling, metaphor and memory as neural function. He can cogently describe formulas of thinking and memory and how they are structured by referencing neuroscience, he's a scientist's Oliver Sacks. In his emeritus stage, his two central collaborators no longer living, and with his central thesis book out of print, Laughlin continues to explore the possibility we may have overlooked central tenants to our evolution by ignoring the basic evidence of what our brains are showing us. His recent blogposts, though a year old, are critical, and deal with something he labels The Crisis. By dissolving semiosis as a shared tool, Laughlin alters the late 20th century's order, he forces us to look at thinking we may have missed: unconscious, or hidden structuralism rather than the conscious semiosis that was being taught and formalized into academic conditioning. In a way, conspiracy fantacists like Robert Anton Wilson, myth seekers like Carlos Casteneda, and novel historians like Michel Foucault were each operating with a glass ceiling, they were stylists scratching at the edges of science, where analogue and vast 'formulas' remained invisible in the dark, they themselves embodied key archetypes (the primary) as they perceived others (secondary). Wilson and Casteneda don't claim to know the rationale for their observations, it seems as if they've stumbled across their prose, even their subjects. Foucault on the other hand is a detective by choice. His semiosis is the least-knowing perhaps since he claims to comprehend it so well that he prepares for his own ridcule in preface to the Archeology of Knowledge by defying it in advance. Foucault's descendants, articulators like Zizek and Delueze, are probably getting more least by the day.

Read on and break your chains.

http://charleslaughlin.blogspot.com/

http://www.biogeneticstructuralism.com/index2.htm

This pivotal work is available on his site, An Ibis in the Tree, here previewed below, our underline.

It is our view that the emergence of structuralism in a science is a mark of its maturity.  What do we mean by structuralism in that sense?  We mean that observables are explained by reference to non-observed principles, schemes, operators or structures, the activities of which produce, perhaps even cause, the observables (see Ackoff and Emery 1972 for the distinction between “cause” and “produce”).  Prior to the emergence of a structuralist theory base, a science tends to be pretty much a natural history of observables (see Brown 1963).  You collect all the butterflies you find, pin them to a wall, and then you try to order them in some way.  They all have blue wings, all red wings, or are all big butterflies, medium-sized or little butterflies, butterflies with a black thorax, brown thorax, and so on.  This was the state of biology before Darwin, the state of chemistry before the periodic table, and the state of physics before Newton’s Principia.  This was also the state of anthropology before structuralism.  Anthropological theory today has an unsettling, unsatisfying effect upon many of us unless it has some kind of structural underpinning to it, and this is a sure sign of the maturation of the discipline. 

            This means that in some sense the explanation of observables is by reference to unobserved operations.  For semiotic structuralists these unobservables are usually formulated by deduction from abstracted patterns of similarity in observables.  Similar patterns in observables lead to the deduction of the structures underlying them and that produce or cause them.  So Levi-Strauss likens the relationship between “mechanical models” (or principles of reason) and observables (like patterns of elements and relations in myths or symphonies) to the relationship between the camshaft in a machine that produces jigsaw puzzles and the puzzles themselves.  The analyst is no longer interested in the jigsaw puzzles once he has deduced the shape or configuration of the camshaft.  It is the task of science to get at the camshaft.  In the last volume of Mythologique (1971), he admits that the camshaft must have something to do with the human brain.  But a mere admission of relevance is insufficient from our point of view to preclude him being classed as a semiotic structuralist because he only gives lip service to the neurosciences.  His theory remains uninformed by the neurosciences and the methodology he uses, which is almost totally deductive from patterns in cultural texts, treats the matter of mind as though the brain itself was not also an observable.  In other words, he makes the mistake that Jean Piaget, Earl Count and others do not make, being trained as they were in biology.