Yesterday I finished reading “Signs of Meaning in the Universe” by Jesper Hoffmeyer, which appeared as "En Snegl På Vejen: Betydningens naturhistorie" (A Snail on the Trail: The Natural History of Signification) in the original Danish, and I’ll be thinking about it for a long time. He’s as sweeping as David Grinspoon and Peter Corning in breadth, but in addressing subjective meaning he’s more intimate than either. It’s one of those books that can change the way you see everything. Hoffmeyer wrote “Back in the seventies when, as a young biochemist, I first realized how serious the problems of pollution and global ecology were I began for the first time to suspect that a serious imbalance existed between living things and the science of living things, that is to say biology. ...The determination of humanity’s place in the natural scheme of things was far from being in safe hands.“ (90) This imbalance was also noticed by Rosi Braidotti, when she remarked that the conventional Humanities suffer from a lack of adequate concepts to position subjectivity in a continuum with the totality of things.2"The biosphere must be viewed in the light of the semiosphere rather than the other way around."
- Jesper Hoffmeyer
All living organisms are guided by natural and artificial signs that (1) enable organisms to flexibly adapt their activities to constantly changing conditions, (2) structure and organise individual behaviour within the larger community, and (3) serve as a means of coordination and communication among and between diverse species, where nothing exists in complete separation from anything else.
- Paulo De Jesus
After ecology has delineated the relationships between different agencies (individual species, populations, communities, and ecosystems), biosemiotics integrates these matter/energy dynamics with information, communication and meaning. The result is a combined empirical and epistemological exploration of ecological complexity that is able to provide a more detailed description of the interactions between organisms, their aggregation, and resources.
- Almo Farina
“We must look at adaptation as a semiotic phenomenon, that is, as a process of signification.” - Eugen Baer
"The logic of evolution produces a tendency to greater extents of 'semiotic freedom' or semiotic abstraction and complexity." - Wendy Wheeler
"Signs are triadic relations: one thing representing another than itself to yet another." - John Deely
"Truth may be found in signs whatever their kind." - Aristotle
Some approaches to semiotics see it as basically the study of words or other signs that refer to some object in the world. Signifier, signified. The relationship of one thing to another thing. But C. S. Peirce's major insight was that signs don't do anything on their own. There's only meaning because someone sees meaning in it. In other words, the reaction is the thing. In technical terminology, this third piece is called the "interpretant."3 “Semiotics is the study of meaning-making – the process of how people interpret and make sense of life events, relationships, and the self. Biosemiotics is the combination of the scientific fields of semiotics and biology and studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, or production and interpretation of signs and codes in the biological realm.”4 Hoffmeyer expands further by introducing the semiosphere. "The concept of the semiosphere adds a semiotic dimension to the more well known concept of the biosphere, emphasizing the need to see life as belonging to a shared universe of sign activity through which cells, organisms and species all over the planet interact in ways that we still hardly understand." But why a "sphere?" How do these signs integrate/interact? "In semiotic interactions behavioral or morphological regularities (habits) developed by one species (or individual, tissue, or cell) are used (interpreted) as signs by individuals of the same or another species, thereby eliciting new habits in this species, eventually to become sooner or later, signs for other individuals, and so on in a branching and unending web integrating the ecosystems of the planet into a global semiosphere."5 If this is a fair representation, then it is clear that if we do not "recognize the signs" present in our environment, the indicators of harm, or opportunities for healing, then we become more vulnerable, with grave implications for future survivability. In other words, if you can’t see the smoke, you might burn in the fire.
“At the ecological level biosemiotics requires us to extend our concept of an ecological niche to embrace the semiotic niche, i.e., the totality of cues around the organism (or species) which the organism (or species) must necessarily be capable of interpreting wisely in order to survive and reproduce. ...This implies that the relative fitness of changed morphological or behavioral traits become dependent on the whole system of existing semiotic relations that the species finds itself a part of and, accordingly, the firm organism-versus-environment borderline will be dissolved, and a new integrative level intermediate between the species and the ecosystem would have to be considered—i.e., the level of the ecosemiotic interaction structure.”6
I believe that Jesper Hoffmeyer's "semiosphere" is similar to Foucault's "governmentality.” For if one has control over the signs in the milieu, one has the surest route to gain influence over the relationship between the "interpretants" and the "objects," which is to say, the people and their environment. C. S. Peirce said that "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs” Given this perspective, humans are just one type of semiotic process, rather than the sole controller, interpreter and generator of signs (the anthropocentric view). The fascinating thing is that once we leave anthropocentrism behind, regardless of how that is done, the tools and methods of governance shift in likewise manner. Given the framework of indirect realism, if you know the representational theory of mind, that is to say, the process of biosemiosis, then instead of directly engaging with subjects, governance can be effectively achieved by indirect engagement with the environment as a whole as opposed to direct engagement with subjects. The "action without action" of the Tao Te Ching, as it were.
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| A Biosemiotic Approach |
I’ve encountered the field of semiotics before (and not just through stigmergy). Maynard Smith links the study of animal signals to the field of semiotics, the communication of meaning, and of which Umberto Eco wrote, tongue in cheek, "semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything that can be used in order to lie." Eco further proposed that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. In 1984, Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous ethologist alive, characterized animal signaling as an arms race between signalers as 'manipulators' and receivers as 'mind-readers.’ In 2010 Dawkins introduced me to Amotz Zahavi, through a casual reference made in “The God Delusion.” Zahavi developed his version of “signaling theory” in his book “The Handicap Principle: a missing piece of Darwin's puzzle” and redefined Darwin's original categories of natural selection and sexual selection as utilitarian selection and signal selection, respectively. More recently, having read "Synergistic Selection" (Peter Corning), "The Secret of Our Success" (Joseph Henrich), and "Earth in Human Hands" (David Grinspoon), I see "Signs of Meaning in the Universe" by Jesper Hoffmeyer as a work that is clearly of the same caliber. He draws together Pierce, Uexküll, and Darwin into a single vision. If the implications for future research weren't enough, the historical context it provides definitely is.
Keywords: semiotics, semiosphere, semioethics, ecosemiotics, cognisphere, biosemiosphere, semiome, semiosis, realism, indirect realism, mental representation, pragmatism (fallibilism), metasemiosis, subjectivity, suprasubjectivity, information (data), epistemology (knowledge), connection, relationship, relational ontology, meaning (definition, denotation, interpretation), sign (signification, significant, significance)
Natural examples: hares and foxes; parasitic wasps, caterpillars, and plants; honeyguide birds; Clever Hans (horse); birds that feign injury; wolves and sheep, land mine sniffing rats, dogs and illegal drugs.
Postscripts (Partial Outline):
Terminology and historical context
Terrence Deacon on causality and normative consequences
John Flach and cognitive systems engineering
Winfried Nöth on machine semiosis and computer science
Almo Farina and a "General Theory of Resources"
Peter Harries-Jones and communicative order
Paulo de Jesus and biosemiotic enactivism
Susan Petrilli and semioethics, semiocide, and symptomatology
John Deely on suprasubjectivity
Wendy Wheeler on semiotic freedom
Biosemiotics, genetics, and evolutionary transitions
Biosemiotics in the Case of Global Climate Change
Biosemiotics and Climate Action Plans
Cultural implications of biosemiotics
Semioethics and activism in Alaska
Social Science emphasis only:
pedagogy and edusemiotics
semioethics, semiotic freedom and constraints
social semiotics and social credit systems
fallibilism, misinformation, and deception
ecosemiotic health and disruption
1. Terminology and position within academia
For a bit of history of terms, semiotics derives from the Greek σημειωτικός "observant of signs." By comparison, cybernetics derives from the Greek κυβερνήτης "steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder." There’s a relation between these: in order to steer a ship and clear the shoals and eddies, one must be able to read the weather and the waves. Semiotics, as a field of study, is situated within the 'philosophy of information', and as a result has direct implications for both biology and the philosophy of mind.
1.1 Historical context
More often than not, academic papers tend to be very dry to read. But from time to time there are those writers who are both experts and skilled storytellers, pulling you into the mysteries they uncover. John Deely was one of these people. In his paper he begins by tracing the early beginnings of semiotics with Hippocrates (370 BC) who used the notion to establish medicine as a scientifically founded art, through Plato (385 BC), Aristotle (347 BC), the Stoics and Epicureans (300 BC) who debated the difference between natural and conventional signs, Origen of Alexandria (253 AD), Augustine of Hippo (430 AD), Thomas Aquinas (1274), Duns Scotus (1308), John Poinsot (1632), John Locke (1690), Charles Peirce (1867), Jakob von Uexküll (1940), all the way up to the diversity we see today with Bateson, Sebeok, Hoffmeyer, and Deely himself. Origen's place in this timeline was suggested by Wendy Wheeler, all others by Deely. There are certainly many others that could be added, and the field today is probably more diverse than at any time in the past. This is a very brief timeline only intended to add
historical context.
Semiotic consciousness endured in Western Europe until the first modern philosophers switched the attention from suprasubjectivity to the being of the mind. Peirce effectively picked up again where Poinsot left off. As Deely writes "Peirce was able to recover the Latin notion of 'signum' very nearly at the point where the Latins had left it, that is to say, at the point where it had been realized and definitively explained that signs strictly speaking are not their sensible or psychological vehicle, but that this vehicle is not subjective but suprasubjective..." This is a critical point. Like signs themselves, meaning/significance is always one step removed from the thing/process. "If the most important development for the immediate future of philosophy (and perhaps for intellectual culture as a whole) is to be, as I believe, the realization of the centrality of the doctrine of signs to the understanding of being and experience for human animals, then Peirce’s recovery of the notion of signum from the Latins may be said to have marked the beginning of a new age in philosophy." And elsewhere: "Sebeok made the point that semiotics provides the only transdisciplinary or “interdisciplinary” standpoint that is inherently so; in other words, semiotics thematizes the study of what every other discipline had (perforce) taken for granted - semiosis... What is distinctive of the action of signs is the shaping of the past on the basis of future events; the future beckons the present to draw upon the resources it has from the past... theoretical justification and practical exploration of this hypothesis marks the final frontier of semiotic inquiry."
Deely, John, The role of Thomas Aquinas in the development of semiotic consciousness (2004)
Deely, John, The Impact of Semiotics on Philosophy (2000)
1.2 Semiotics: the study of the possibility of being mistaken
In his glossary at the end of "Peirce: A Life", Joseph Brent includes this definition:
"Fallibilism. The doctrine, a consequence of pragmatism, that no matter how completely we may believe that some claim we make about reality is true, it remains radically subject to error. Even though certainty is impossible, because of the continuity of mind and matter, we can be secure in our everyday knowledge of the world and are justified in believing that we can correct errors."
In his book "Four Ages of Understanding" Deely writes "Semiotics as the study of the possibility of being mistaken. Peirce had another name for pragmaticism. He also called this way of thinking fallibilism; and insofar as pragmaticism is conceived in function of the doctrine of signs, this alternative designation for it is truly excellent. For just as the sign is that which every object presupposes, so the study of signs and the action of signs, semiotics, is eo ipso the study of the possibility of being mistaken. The movement of human understanding from confusion in its first apprehension to clarity, unfortunately, is not a simple linear development from confusion to the clear grasp of truths. It is just as often a development from confusion to a clarity that is mistaken."
This reminds me of what Jacob Bronowski eloquently stated years ago: "We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: 'I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken.'"
Brent, Joseph, "Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life" (p352)
Deely, John, "Four Ages of Understanding" (p636)
Bronowski, Jacob, "The Ascent of Man" (p374)
1.3 Physiosemiosis
"The search for the non-biological regularities of the universe that alone make semiosis veridical becomes a field of (at least theoretical) investigation in its own right. Deely designates this field – which examines the pre-existing “patterns of knowability” or “virtual thirdness” inherent in the regularities of the non-living surround that can potentially function as signs for some agent – as physiosemiotics, to distinguish it from what he considers as the “dangerously misguided” notion of pansemiotics, which would designate the polar opposite belief that the semiosis of living being is inherent in all non-living things.
Deely, John, "Physiosemiosis and phytosemiotics" (1990), as quoted by Donald Favareau in "Essential Readings in Biosemiotics" (2010)
Semiotic consciousness endured in Western Europe until the first modern philosophers switched the attention from suprasubjectivity to the being of the mind. Peirce effectively picked up again where Poinsot left off. As Deely writes "Peirce was able to recover the Latin notion of 'signum' very nearly at the point where the Latins had left it, that is to say, at the point where it had been realized and definitively explained that signs strictly speaking are not their sensible or psychological vehicle, but that this vehicle is not subjective but suprasubjective..." This is a critical point. Like signs themselves, meaning/significance is always one step removed from the thing/process. "If the most important development for the immediate future of philosophy (and perhaps for intellectual culture as a whole) is to be, as I believe, the realization of the centrality of the doctrine of signs to the understanding of being and experience for human animals, then Peirce’s recovery of the notion of signum from the Latins may be said to have marked the beginning of a new age in philosophy." And elsewhere: "Sebeok made the point that semiotics provides the only transdisciplinary or “interdisciplinary” standpoint that is inherently so; in other words, semiotics thematizes the study of what every other discipline had (perforce) taken for granted - semiosis... What is distinctive of the action of signs is the shaping of the past on the basis of future events; the future beckons the present to draw upon the resources it has from the past... theoretical justification and practical exploration of this hypothesis marks the final frontier of semiotic inquiry."
Deely, John, The role of Thomas Aquinas in the development of semiotic consciousness (2004)
Deely, John, The Impact of Semiotics on Philosophy (2000)
1.2 Semiotics: the study of the possibility of being mistaken
In his glossary at the end of "Peirce: A Life", Joseph Brent includes this definition:
"Fallibilism. The doctrine, a consequence of pragmatism, that no matter how completely we may believe that some claim we make about reality is true, it remains radically subject to error. Even though certainty is impossible, because of the continuity of mind and matter, we can be secure in our everyday knowledge of the world and are justified in believing that we can correct errors."
In his book "Four Ages of Understanding" Deely writes "Semiotics as the study of the possibility of being mistaken. Peirce had another name for pragmaticism. He also called this way of thinking fallibilism; and insofar as pragmaticism is conceived in function of the doctrine of signs, this alternative designation for it is truly excellent. For just as the sign is that which every object presupposes, so the study of signs and the action of signs, semiotics, is eo ipso the study of the possibility of being mistaken. The movement of human understanding from confusion in its first apprehension to clarity, unfortunately, is not a simple linear development from confusion to the clear grasp of truths. It is just as often a development from confusion to a clarity that is mistaken."
This reminds me of what Jacob Bronowski eloquently stated years ago: "We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: 'I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken.'"
Brent, Joseph, "Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life" (p352)
Deely, John, "Four Ages of Understanding" (p636)
Bronowski, Jacob, "The Ascent of Man" (p374)
1.3 Physiosemiosis
"The search for the non-biological regularities of the universe that alone make semiosis veridical becomes a field of (at least theoretical) investigation in its own right. Deely designates this field – which examines the pre-existing “patterns of knowability” or “virtual thirdness” inherent in the regularities of the non-living surround that can potentially function as signs for some agent – as physiosemiotics, to distinguish it from what he considers as the “dangerously misguided” notion of pansemiotics, which would designate the polar opposite belief that the semiosis of living being is inherent in all non-living things.
Deely, John, "Physiosemiosis and phytosemiotics" (1990), as quoted by Donald Favareau in "Essential Readings in Biosemiotics" (2010)
2. A sphere of infinite semiosis"The concept of semiosphere was first formulated by Juri Lotman in 1982. He compared it with biosphere, the concept as described by Vladimir Vernadsky. In concordance with Sebeok’s thesis on coextensiveness of life and semiosis, Jesper Hoffmeyer has introduced the concept of semiosphere as covering semiosis of all life processes. According to Vernadsky, biosphere is the matter that is chemically changed in result of life processes (whereas noosphere is the matter that is chemically changed in result of human mind). Semiosphere is not the matter but the whole set of semiotic relations. We describe the main elements of the model of semiosphere, as introduced by Lotman. Theory of semiosphere can be seen as a basis for general semiotics."
Kotov, Kaie; Kull, Kalevi 2011. Semiosphere is the relational biosphere. In: Emmeche, Claus; Kull, Kalevi (eds.), Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life is the Action of Signs. London: Imperial College Press, 179–194.
Meanings and values learned and discovered in our sign systems are not “located” “in” anyone’s head or any-where, but are cognitive-social events that we activate and instantiate by using our “cognitive-symbolic resources. Umberto Eco uses the phrase ‘unlimited semiosis’ to refer to the way in which meaning is a process. In Peirce's triadic model of semiosis the "action" of a sign is a limitless process of infinite semiosis, where one "interpretant" (or idea linked to a sign) generates another. In his book "The Play of Musement" (p11), Thomas Sebeok pointed out that Heraclitus supplied the essential link between the biosphere and the semiosphere, in his aphorism: "I went in search of myself". Sebeok went on: “there is a structural isomorphism between the inner personal world of the psyche and the vaster natural order of the universe... What Heraclitus meant was that once he encountered the law of the microcosmos within himself, he discovered it anew in the external world."
Logos Group, Peirce, Eco, and unlimited semiosis (2014)
Irvine, Martin, From the Film Arrival to Semiotics (2017)
3. Applications: symbiotic relationships
There are many topics that biosemiotics may shed light on. One is in regard to Dawkins' theory of the extended phenotype, which dissolves the supposed unity between the organism and its genome. How, it must be asked, can the receiver (in some instances this is the host) be got to behave according to the interests of the sender (or parasite, in parasitism)? [See reference to indirect realism above.] Less pernicious mutualistic relationships present similar challenges for explanation. This may be where the concept of the "semiome" becomes useful.
3.1 Applications: sensory specific satiety, fiber, emulsifiers, and the microbiota
Studies show that the greater the variety of food choices in front of us, the longer it takes to feel full, a phenomenon known as sensory specific satiety. “It’s the reason you always have room for dessert at a restaurant even when you’re full,” Dr. Pontzer said. “Even though you’ve had a savory meal and you can’t eat one more bite of steak, you’re still interested in the cheesecake because it’s sweet and that button hasn’t been worn out in your brain yet.” The Quantified Self movement, with it's data-driven insights into human behavior patterns, can shed light on these and similar biological predispositions to help us make more informed decisions. But note, a purely "quantified" self is devoid of significance, and so that meaning must be supplied by whomever utilizes the data. Perhaps a better label for the movement would be "semiotic self".
“Antagonizing the microbiota by highly processed diets — starving it by removing fiber and attacking it [with emulsifiers] — promotes inflammation.” That can hamper the body’s ability to feel satiated and result in overeating. For example, eating causes the body to release the hormone leptin, which quells hunger. But inflammation interferes with leptin’s action. “Put another way, our results do not question the notion that the obesity epidemic is driven by overeating,” he added. “Rather, it suggests that such overeating is driven, in part, by alterations in the microbiome inducing inflammation.”
Belluz, Julia, Processed foods are a much bigger health problem than we thought (2019)
3.2 Applications: Phytomining and phytosemiosis
Monica Gagliano performed research with plants, as she describes: "Just as Pavlov used a bell to condition a dog, if you present a fan to condition a plant, the plant will anticipate light following the stimulus. Eventually the plants learn that "just by the fan, I can start preparing and turn towards the light, because the fan tells me where the light is going to be". Somehow a decision is being made based on a value system. How much do you want that light? What does the fan mean? And just like for the dog, not all plants are the same. The plant is deciding and choosing based on how it feels about things, and the experience of those things. Just like for the dog, the plant is actually stretching the field of perception, because dinner, in this case the light, is actually not even there (at the moment the stimulus of the fan is presented). So you know where I’m going, just as with Pavlov's dog, the food is actually a concept, an idea in the plant’s mind. Or in other words, the plant is imagining the food arriving."
"The field of biosemiotics has contributed extensively to an inclusive conception of language that transcends its rigid alignment with verbal utterance. Particularly drawing on the work of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, and Danish biologist Jesper Hoffmeyer, contemporary biosemiotics generally conceives of language as an evolutionary response that humans share, albeit in different manifestations, with other forms of life. Following on Peirce’s footsteps, the biosemioticians of today have likewise argued that language is “pervasive in all life.”
Gagliano, Monica, Plant Intelligence and the Importance of Imagination In Science (2018)
Vieira, Patrícia, Monica Gagliano, and John Ryan, Introduction to The Language of Plants (2017)
In the context of the increasingly intertwined future that both humans and the planet have in the Anthropocene, the biosemiotic signalling processes in organic material can be used to contribute to the betterment of the planet. In this paper phytomining is described in the context of biosemiotics.
Gapševičius, Mindaugas, Semiotic Thresholds, Between Arts and Biological Science: Green Technology and the Concept of Phytomining (2018)
3.3 Applications: Social semiotics and socio-semiotic research (compare with Alex Pentland's "social physics")
Social semiotics includes the study of how people design and interpret meanings, how semiotic systems are shaped by social interests and ideologies, and how they are adapted as society changes. When considering notions of environmental justice, this subject has direct relevance. A social semiotics approach can be used to raise awareness of how each choice we make affects other choices, and can ultimately affect the wider social semiotic context of which we are part. We not only communicate already established social meanings and norms, but also assess those norms and, where necessary, create alternative meanings and norms. A socio-semiotic research project begins by making an inventory of multimodal semiotic resources and investigates how they are used in context to produce objects, form knowledge, and how they change over time. For example, if signs of climate change enter the public awareness and a shift to cleaner forms of energy and other industrial processes is sought, then identifying the current semiotic processes within society will allow us to see where social inertia and resistance to change may prevent the rapid uptake of these alternatives.
Social Semiotics in the Classroom (2018)
Social Semiotics (2011)
In a lecture he gave, Nicholas Christakis said that “our experience of the world depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we are residing, so I came to see these signs of social networks as living things that we could put under a kind of microscope and study and analyze and understand." This bears obvious similarities to Peter Corning’s study of synergy, Alex Pentland’s social physics, and perhaps Thomas Sebeok’s semiotic web. Could it be that a social network is a semiotic network by another name?
3.4 Social credit systems
Social credit systems haven’t just appeared from nowhere. Their long history is well documented in this article by Mara Hvistendahl on how Alipay is used in China. More recent advances in computational social science and related fields have pushed these capabilities still further. In addition, David Brin pointed out that India's version, Aadhaar, will also be very big, so we must be prepared to answer such surveillance with sousveillance. Daniel Estrada developed a proposal called Polytopolis, a self-organizing governance framework designed to work on stigmergic principles to allow for radically decentralized normative policies to develop. As he wrote in a separate article “We must have digital tools for generating spontaneous direct actions and broad democratic consensus as the political needs arise. These tools must operate openly, transparently, and independent of any centralized state or corporate control.” Heather Marsh likewise applied stigmergy to government, and biosemiotician Victoria Alexander noted that creative and intelligent behavior emerges when individuals have semiotic freedom. Semiotics, as applied to social credit systems, is sure to grow.
3.5 Applications: political manipulation and post truth polarization
"The illusion of choice is the most important of illusions, the main trick of the Western way of life in general and of Western democracy in particular, which has long been committed to the ideas of Barnum rather than Cleisthenes. ...Foreign politicians ascribe to Russia interference in elections and referendums across the globe. In fact, the matter is even more serious - Russia interferes in their brains, and they do not know what to do with their own altered consciousness. Since, after the failed 90s, our country abandoned ideological loans, began to produce meanings and switched to the information counteroffensive to the West, European and American experts began to err in their forecasts more and more often. They are surprised and enraged by the paranormal preferences of the electorate. Confused, they announced the invasion of populism. You can say so, if there are no words."
Surkov, Vladislav, Putin's Long State (02/02/2019)
In "The Road to Unfreedom", Timothy Snyder describes how Russian leaders first mastered “fake news” in the digital era as part of a broader strategy to disorient their own society. It went something like this: Use the internet and TV to flood society with misinformation, demonize the institutions charged with uncovering facts, and then exploit the confusion that results. By cultivating enough chaos, people become cynical about public life and truth itself. The intended message is that you can’t trust any information, you can’t trust anyone or anything. There’s no reason to believe in anything. There is no truth. Your institutions are bogus.
"In the 2010s, Russia began to deploy these techniques abroad as a means of destabilizing Western countries (an information counteroffensive, per Vladislav Surkov). In Trump, they found a particularly useful tool that they could use to stoke America’s internal divisions and subvert democracy. We’re now in a world in which information warfare is one of the primary modes of warfare and Russia, more than anyone else, is uniquely prepared for this kind of conflict. Americans often think that it’s not real war if it doesn’t involve combat, but that’s not how the Russians see it. War is about breaking the will of the enemy, and historically, combat was the means to that end. But you can break a country’s will without combat, and that’s how Russia uses misinformation."
Lawrence Martin-Bittman, who spread disinformation as a spy before teaching at Boston University remarked that at first, “it was too hard for Americans, especially journalists and scholars, to accept that deliberately false stories could be planted in our news media.” But it was only a matter of time before corrupt political groups everywhere have turned to some of the same methods to further their own causes, as Stephanie Mencimer outlined in her article for Mother Jones. The result has made "post truth" a recognized term, and growing political polarization an accepted reality. What is the remedy? Beyond increasing public access to quality education and strengthening other social institutions, we need a deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of truth, error, and how we can be led to either. That's fallibilism; that's semiotics. This is the terrain on which conflicts increasingly play out, so it's time to become familiar with it.
Illing, Sean How Russia pioneered “fake news” and then used it to sow chaos in America (2018)
Boston Globe, Lawrence Martin-Bittman (2018)
3.6 Neurofeedback (biofeedback) and semiosis
"By linking brain activity to an image or sound in real time, we can use simple game-like techniques to get people to train themselves to forge new neural connections and voluntarily adopt (or avoid) certain mental states. The fact that people can see and hear what their brain is doing provides a lever that allows them to internally regulate their own mind. With a map of an individual’s neural activity while thinking of a particular concept or phobia, it’s possible to give patients positive reinforcement when they manage to reduce activity in the areas of the brain that correspond to the experience of overwhelming fear. It can be effective even when participants aren’t aware of the goal of the procedure. New research shows it’s also possible to implant thoughts into people’s brains without them being aware of it. Referencing the Hollywood blockbuster Inception (2010), this is being called ‘incepted neurofeedback’. It has a potential dark side: the risk that neurofeedback could become a back-door for manipulating our brain states, without us even realising it. The clinical and ethical implications of such methods have barely been explored." And we can also use fMRI scans of brain activity to interpret what a person is thinking. This technology is only in an early stage but already surprisingly good. What are the full implications of laying bare our inner semiosis if we can 1) tell what people are thinking and then 2) control those same thoughts, and all without their being aware of it?
Kimmich, Sara, Brain, heal thyself (2019)
Greene, Tristan, Mind-reading AI isn’t sci-fi anymore. (2018)
Mok, Kimberley, Mind-Reading AI Optimizes Images (2018)
Rousmaniere, Tony, What Your Therapist Doesn’t Know (2017)
3.7 Conservatives, liberals, politics and semiotics
"People who are very conservative seem to have a much larger volume and a much more sensitive amygdala – the area of the brain that is involved in perceptions of fear. People who are more liberal seem to have a greater weighting on the region of the brain that is engaged in future planning and more collaborative partnerships. They seem less sensitive to immediate threats; instead, they are looking to the future. What we see in propaganda through the centuries is that if you heighten someone’s fear response using environmental manipulation, you are more likely to make them vote in a rightwing way." This reminds me of Jennifer Gabrys, who described the potential impact of her research in a 2014 paper titled "Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City" in which she utilizes the "governance through milieu" concept of Michel Foucault. Foucault himself borrowed the concept “milieu” from Georges Canguilhem. According to Canguilhem, the contemporary notion of milieu refers to relationality itself, where it is impossible to separate the object from its environment (that is, the systems of relations in which it is embedded and functionally dependent upon). The takeaway is that if you want to understand or influence something, no matter how big or small, then you must understand relationships.
A semiotic perspective effectively enables us to reinterpret traditional political power structures. Foucault once said "In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king." Since all forms of power are bottom-up, embodied in the style of everyday practices, the understanding of power as emanating from the sovereign or the state is incorrect. Consequently, in "Biopolitics 2.0", as Gabrys terms her particular version, the focus is less on governing individuals or populations and more about establishing environmental conditions in which responsive modes of behavior can emerge.
Tucker, Ian, Neuroscientist Dr Hannah Critchlow: ‘Changing the way that you think is cognitively costly’ (2019)
Element, Anthony, Liberals and Conservatives — they really are different (2013)
3.8 Applications: film and video games
All forms of entertainment involve semiotics. In video games every aspect of the game is designed to convey meaning. In movies like Arrival, Silver Linings Playbook, and Inception the dialogue, subject, or other aspects of the film explicitly or implicitly reference how we make sense of life and life events. If, as Peirce said, "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs”, then to adopt the tagline from Dune, wouldn’t “he who controls the signs controls the universe”? In the movie Watchmen, “through Ozymandias (aka Adrian Veidt) Moore alluded directly to semiotics itself and to the ‘gordian knot’ quality of signs. The Gordian knot is also an allusion to the problems facing Adrian Veidt in his attempts at ‘untying’ the threat of nuclear annihilation in the world of Watchmen. Veidt is a watch-man in the sense that he watches a bank of simultaneously broadcasting television screens (whose channels randomly change every hundred seconds) that enable him to detect trends in our image saturated postmodern world [the zeitgeist].”
Touponce, William, Signs and Synchronicity in Watchmen (2006)
According to Yuval Noah Harari, “biotech and infotech” (by which he means algorithms, essentially) will remake our world. But he leaves out the ‘subject’ (subjectivity) in his discussion and is thoroughly within the ambit of Cartesian dualism. Signs (semiotics) are more fundamental than algorithms, and more complex as well. Algorithms may rule us and the world, and after a manner of speaking, they do. But they will never, alone, elucidate the how and why of it, we cannot figure out how or why this “ruling” is capable of occurring. For that we need a deeper understanding of subjectivity, and this understanding is afforded through semiotics (as best described by Pierce/Sebeok/Deely etc.) Infotech may rule, but semiotech will allow manipulation at a deeper level.
Q: But do we even matter to algorithms? You're on the human side of the equation in which what we think, what we need; our knowledge, our understanding, our... narcissistic prometheanism - our egoism of being at the center - our subjectivity is the all important thing. It's not! It thinks us, there is no subjectivity... we don't need to 'know'; maybe, as in Bataille, unknowing is what is important... or as in Deleuze/Guattari: delirium is all...
A: Of course we’re not at the center. Semiotics has moved outside of anthropocentrism, with the exploration of biosemiotics, and even hypothetical physio-semiotics, to name a few. Now regarding there being “no subjectivity“, one of the minimal criteria for subjectivity is a sense of “meaning”, that is to say, the ability for one thing to stand for another thing (to a third thing, or rather to the system for which such a connection is relevant). If you want to understand how “ruling” is capable of occurring, you have to understand why anything is relevant or rather why such “standing for” connections are made in the first place, hence the need to account for subjectivity and moreover to collapse the mind/matter duality.
3.9 Aikido and biosemiotics
This is "the martial arts principle or tactic of blending with an attacker's movements for the purpose of controlling their actions with minimal effort. One applies 'aiki' by understanding the rhythm and intent of the attacker to find the optimal position and timing to apply a counter-technique." To understand the attacker on must know their semiotic processes more intimately than they themselves do. This applies to politics as well as combat.
4. Marcello Barbieri's function metaphor
"If we generalize the concept of interpretation, why do we not say, following Taborsky (1999, 2002), for example, that any function f(x) = y is an act of interpretation, whereby the function “f” interprets “x” as representing “y”? In this way, all physical laws expressed by functions like f(x) = y would be processes of interpretation and, therefore, acts of semiosis. This point is important because Peirce himself embraced this view and concluded that semiosis exists everywhere in the Universe. We realize in this way that if we extend the concept of interpretation, we end up with a pansemiotic view not a biosemiotic one." However John Deely notes that Barbieri, with his views being a quintessence of the Enlightenment ideal, has imposed one of the last spells of positivism on biosemiotics.
Markoš, Anton, Biosemiotics and the Collision of Modernism With Postmodernity (2010)
5. Terrence Deacon“Simple model systems provide a first step toward re-legitimizing the concepts of reference and significance that have so far been excluded from the natural sciences. Demonstrating that an empirically realistic simple molecular system can exhibit interpretive properties is the critical first step toward a scientific biosemiotic theory. A better understanding of how interpretive dynamics can emerge from simpler chemical and physical processes should also point to new ways to study biological, neurological, and even social processes.”9
Thermodynamics and functional relationships figure large in Deacon’s paper “Steps to a science of biosemiotics.” Here he combines the concept of entropy (as it is differently defined in thermodynamics and the information sciences) with issues of reference and functional significance and concludes that “biological evolution can be understood in terms of a process that tends to optimize the relationship between information and the work that it organizes to preserve itself” by utilizing a “capacity to interpret immediate physical conditions as representing other as yet unrealized possible conditions, or some phenomenon that is displaced in space, time, or abstraction.”
Kalevi Kull provides a useful critique of Deacon's book "Incomplete Nature." Kull writes: "I myself have a strong preference for describing and explaining biological matters in positive terms of what is present... Deacon would have to show much more clearly and precisely how approaching biological and psychic phenomena in terms of “absent contents” has specific explanatory advantages." The notion of "absent contents" is the fundamental shift in perspective that Deacon is advancing. It's very intriguing. But I agree that in order to be a rigorous explanation, it should be possible to translate these ideas into positive terms as well. It appears that this is in fact what Deacon does later in the book, and some of his papers published subsequent to it also point in that direction.
Daniel Dennett's review: "What is missing from the computational approach [aka the machine metaphor] now so dominant in biology and cognitive science? According to Deacon, it is, well, missingness. Absence does not just make the heart grow fonder; in many places at many levels absence marks the ultimately thermodynamic asymmetries that power evolution and life, and reactions to absence play the foundational causal role in mental phenomena. ...By divorcing information processing from thermodynamics, we restrict our theories to basically parasitical systems, artifacts that depend on a user for their energy, for their structure maintenance, for their interpretation, and for their raison d'être. ...[Deacon] digs deeper and reconstructs the arguments about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, drastically revising the standard (and woefully out-of-date) ideas about causation that bedevil many —but not all— thinkers today."
"[Incomplete Nature’s] radically challenging conclusion is that we are made of these specific absenses — such stuff as dreams are made on — and that what is not immediately present can be as physically potent as that which is. It offers a figure/background shift that shows how even meanings and values can be understood as legitimate components of the physical world." In Gestalt psychology this shift in perception determines which parts are identified as the figure, and which are the background. It fully depends on the observer and not on the item itself. How did you decide what is part of the figure and what is part of the ground? Deacon suggests that we need to recognize a causal role for absence, not just presence. Nonexistence is a defining property of life (and mind); we are shaped by absences. ...If I understand Deacon (and Hoffmeyer) correctly, we might say that semiotic relations are like the tiger represented by the negative space, the absential features, the background of this image.
6. A review of Dennett's review
“[Dennett] no longer believes that neurons work like computers! …The reason for this remarkable change of heart is that Terrence Deacon and others have convinced Dennett that the nature of neurons as entities with metabolism and a lifecycle is actually relevant to the way they work. …The implications are large; if this is right then surely, computation alone cannot give rise to consciousness!”
“I’m inclined to say Incomplete Nature is Deacon’s callout to the incomplete explanation of natural processes like metabolism. All science yields right now are rather simple mechanical descriptions that do not take into account all of the forces at the molecular level. Even the splitting and recombination of DNA can be described and mechanically-computationally manipulated by biologists without taking into account all of the actual physical forces at work at the molecular level. Even the words physicalism, computationalism and materialism still carry very mechanical baggage because they do not describe the forces at work; hence classical dualism gets invoked.”
7. Deacon and Tononi
“Information theory as a key to consciousness has a pedigree - David Chalmers (1996) admits thinking that such a theory could be constructed, and Giulio Tononi (2010) actually did construct one: an info-theoretic measure of consciousness that is fully formalized in discrete systems. But why is Terrence Deacon, an anthropologist, and Tononi, a psychiatrist, the only ones following this up?” Incomplete Nature is largely about how a refocus on absence (i.e. what's not happening) as a constraint can help to shed light on the processes of life. This seems to be a very different approach from Tononi, but aside from that (and a host of other ideas related to semiotics), it is true that both Deacon and Tononi address information theory from this same angle.
Max Tegmark's view has been described as information realism or structuralism, but it also sounds a lot like biosemiotics to me. A similarity that appears to be lost in most reviews of his books and articles (but not all those who have considered this possibility would agree). Here are a few interesting thoughts he expressed:
"We live in a relational reality, in the sense that the properties of the world around us stem from... the relations between these building blocks. ...Our brain may provide another example of where properties stem mainly from relations. According to the so-called concept cell hypothesis in neuroscience, particular firing patterns in different groups of neurons correspond to different concepts. The main difference between the concept cells for "red," "fly" and "Angelina Jolie" clearly doesn't lie in the types of neurons involved, but in their relations (connections) to other neurons." Source: Max Tegmark, "Our Mathematical Universe" 2014 (p267)
7.1. Terrence Deacon, Moving Naturalism Forward workshop (Oct. 2012)
"Right now I'm very much interested in rethinking the very concept of information. I think we have a remarkably powerful physical and logical theory of information that dates from Claude Shannon. But of course it has nothing to say about reference, has nothing to say about anything normative. When you provide information to me there's a normative feature there, and in biology our understanding of information both has reference and normativity. So the Shannon model is not good enough, and so I've been struggling to make sense of this idea in evolutionary biology, and I think it's really a crucial question and for the origins of life people. How is it that a molecule becomes about something? That's a really interesting question. I've been struggling with a way to think that through and to become formal about it, to really make it clear. What I think that relationship is, because I think it can be, has to be something that we can make sense of. So in this respect there's a couple of things that I first of all think to be the case, but I'm willing to be convinced of.
"Number one: I don't think brains are like computers. I've spent a lot of time with brains and they just don't look like computing devices to me, and yet I'm not saying that it's not a functionalist physical kind of story. I just don't think our understanding of computation is big enough to accomplish what we want to say about this. I'm really interested in how to expand that notion because I give all the meaning to my computer. My computer's like a car engine, but I've assigned various values to what it's doing and so on. If I'm a computer too, then who's assigning it? You know, you get the same problem - sort of running back, and back, and back. Now a number of people say "Oh no, it's just because we're now situated in the world." What? My computer is situated in the world, and certainly one that runs an arm in a factory is situated in the world. I don't find any reason to think there's somebody home there. I think there is something more that we have to deal with. I'm willing to be convinced that I'm just a computer and all this stuff is just running programs. That's one thing I'm willing to be convinced of, but I need to have good science that tells me how to think that through."
7.2 Terrence Deacon: Interview with Tom Palmer
In this video Deacon explores the relationship between evolutionary and semiotic processes and the emergence of end-directed processes in nature. This is how teleonomy sheds light on biosemiotics. If we can explain biosemiotics then we can better understand how and why we value the things we do. The utility of such knowledge would be immense.
"Minds have changed the causality of the surface of the Earth. Everything that is happening on the surface of the earth is radically different than it was before humans came onto the planet. Certainly before living things came onto the planet things were very, very different. Life changed the surface of the planet. We're now in the process of doing planetary changes without really being in control of it. That's because of minds, because of our ability to represent the world, to anticipate things, to think about how things work, to manipulate the physics." [This line of thinking, with still deeper roots of its own, is what led later to David Grinspoon's concepts of the "Sapiezoic" and "Terra sapiens."] "We recognize that the "hard sciences" view of the world leaves value out, leaves meaning out. Of course that's what we're missing in this whole process. And yet just trying to marry them back together has failed. We really can't say "Okay let's put a little mind in here, and then machines over here, and then the minds and machine will interact. We don't understand what the relation is between the mind stuff and the physical stuff, and that's what gets us into trouble.
"We of course constantly talk about values. We constantly talk about the value of the ecosystem, the value of each species, the value of diversity, those sorts of things. If the ecosystem gets hotter and hotter and hotter we worry about that, but we don't have a sense of how value comes into the world. There's a point in time at which mind, values, and morality came into the world. It emerges into the world, it's part of the world. Matter gets organized in such a way that that organization brings this about, and so the fact that we exist means that there has to be a real story to be told about us, that we did come about somehow. The key is to figure that out. The key is to figure out that, yes indeed our experiences our values are really part of the world, they come out of the world they're not something separate that can't be figured into the physics of the world. We need a bigger physics, so to speak, that is big enough to encompass what we are."
8. Information theory
“I didn’t like the term Information Theory. Claude [Shannon] didn’t like it either. You see, the term ‘information theory’ suggests that it is a theory about information – but it’s not. It’s the transmission of information, not information. Lots of people just didn’t understand this... I coined the term ‘mutual information’ to avoid such nonsense: making the point that information is always about something. It is information provided by something, about something.” [Interview with R. Fano, 2001]
Semiotics has been seen as a tool for approaching the epistemologic problems of biology. This has several dimensions. Firstly, biosemiotics seems to propose for biology a sort of philosophical basis or background. Secondly, it enables the introduction of subjectness, i.e. organism as a subject, into the biological realm. And thirdly, it helps to understand the development of mental features through the semiotically interpreted evolutionary epistemology. ...Eugen Baer said, “we must look at adaptation as a semiotic phenomenon, that is, as a process of signification.”
Source: Kull, Kalevi, Theoretical Biology on Its Way to Biosemiotics (2009)
9. Moiré patterns
“If a pattern is that which, when it meets another pattern, creates a third – a sexual characteristic exemplified by moiré patterns, interference fringes and so on – then it should be possible to talk about patterns in the brain whereby patterns in the sensed world can be recognized.” - Gregory Bateson (from a letter to John Lilly on his dolphin research, 10/05/1968, cited in “Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson's World of Difference” By Peter Harries-Jones)
10. Machine semiosis
There is disagreement over the extent to which machines participate in semiotic processes. The discussion is very interesting. On the one hand, the popular materialist explanation is well represented by Marcello Barbieri, who wrote: "A computer has codes but is not a semiotic system because its codes come from a “codemaker”, which is outside it. This makes it legitimate to say that cells too can have a code without being semiotic systems. All we need, for that conclusion, is the idea that the genetic code was assembled by natural selection, i.e., by a codemaker that is outside the cell just as the human mind is outside the computer."
That’s an oversimplification as it ignores aspects of the extended evolutionary synthesis, like the Baldwin effect (teleonomy), but it is representative of such a perspective. Then we have the incremental semiosis views of Søren Brier, Winfried Nöth, and (probably) N. Katherine Hayles. Søren Brier (in "The Cybersemiotic Model of Communication") enumerated a five level schema that identifies levels of semiosis. In that paper Brier quoted Winfried Nöth (from "Semiotic Machines"):
“One could describe the operations of a digital computer merely as a sequence of electrical impulses traveling through a complex net of electronic elements, without considering these impulses as symbols for anything” ...What is missing for these signs to develop from dyadic to triadic signs is an object relationship. The dyadic relations are merely dyadic relations of signification, but there is no denotation, no “window to the world” which allows to relate the sign to an object of experience ...the messages produced by a computer in the interface of humans and machines are either messages conveyed by a human sender and mediated by the computer or they are quasi-signs resulting from an automatic and deterministic extension of human semiosis.”
That is apparently the view shared by Terrence Deacon and the majority of the biosemiotic community as well, that where human mediation is required, semiosis isn't really complete in a computer. This is an important point and probably the area of greatest inquiry in biosemiotics today. But semiotic machines are definitely a real possibility (if not already actualized). Gregory Bateson distinguished between systems capable of drawing distinctions (creatura) as compared to systems of purely mechanical interactions (pleroma). To him, “information” itself was a fundamentally relational concept – i.e., a “difference” between states of being that exists not “in itself,” but only such as is registered as relevant to the workings of a given system by that very system. These seem to be minimal requirements for machine semiosis, though Nöth likely elaborates further. We can turn to Rothschild, Dennet, and Einstein to see why such issues need to be addressed in any rigorous explanation of semiosis:
Friedrich Rothschild (1963) wrote that "The difficulties created by the categorical rift between manifestations of consciousness as against physiological brain processes cannot be solved by merely proclaiming a unity of body and mind. Nor will it suffice to view these two avenues of analysis as two aspects of a higher unity beyond the grasp of human understanding: the first, the anatomical and physiological analysis of processes occurring in the central nervous system, and the other,the introspective analysis of the consciousness. For once this formula is accepted, nothing prevents us from continuing in the style of the old dichotomy. Rather, it is necessary to introduce novel methods of thought based on the intimate connection of psyche and soma, rather than on their separation. For this purpose, the semiotic method is the only choice remaining."
Daniel Dennett’s (1992) “flight simulator video game” argument against the explanatory viability of a purely physicalist explanation of brain activity for understanding and explaining our experience of “mind”: Observing the activity of the electronic impulses taking place on the computer’s circuit board, no matter how minutely, will not reveal the relevant entities, categories, and relations that constitute the consequential semiotic products of those activities for the user of the software."
Albert Einstein observed that one could, if one wished, construct a graph of air pressures as away of “analyzing” the beauty and emotional power of a Beethoven symphony, but that one would thereby be ignoring the very thing that, in doing so, one first set out to explain.
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| Michael Bergman, A Knowledge Representation Practionary (2018) |
This was the insight that Charles Sanders Peirce had about semiotic processes, later developed within biosemiotics by Sebeok, Hoffmeyer, Deacon and others. If these representations can be compared and distinguished by a system, then they are cognitive processes (per Hayles), and if these comparative distinctions are made according to their relevance to that same system, then they are semiotic processes (per Bateson), and lastly since consciousness is a semiotic relation (per Hoffmeyer), such a system displaying these traits would at some level be conscious.
The biological systems that we consider to be conscious display a degree of complexity far greater than artificial systems do at present. As Judea Pearl has noted, we currently have a limited ability to compare and distinguish representations computationally. Pearl specifically notes that the concept of causality is incompletely articulated. Without a rich computational toolset for interpreting immediate physical conditions as representing other as yet unrealized possible conditions, or some phenomenon that is displaced in space, time, or abstraction (per Deacon), the reach of machine semiosis will remain limited. But there is reason to suppose this will not always be the case. If machines do become capable of making the full range of distinctions, relations, and interpretations as humans, then the semiosphere will expand still farther. As Beever and Tønnessen write in Justifying Moral Standing by Biosemiotic Particularism: "If information and meaning are linked by semiosis, then the door is open to understand complex computational systems – from human minds to artificial intelligence systems – as semiotic and, in consequence (on some interpretations), morally considerable."
Karen Hao writes "For example, if you know that the shape of a handwritten digit always dictates its meaning, then you can infer that changing its shape (cause) would change its meaning (effect)." If we use deep learning to reveal not only why the world works the way it does, but also how meaning, or an interpretant, is generated from representamen, then watch out! The potential is great for both good if we shape them to promote the object of health, or ill if manipulated to undermine the same. Let's ensure goal alignment, to the extent that we are able. This is the intersection of semiotics and deep learning. Computers are improving their ability to understand how representations relating to other things can be interpreted. That’s big.
Hao, Karen, Deep learning could reveal why the world works the way it does (2019)
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| John Flach, Supporting productive thinking (2015) |
Cornelis de Waal wrote: "The debate between nominalists and realists, a debate that according to Erasmus even led to fistfights among medieval philosophers, plays a prominent role in Peirce’s thought. Whereas the nominalist claims that only individuals are real, the realist holds that relations are as real as the individual objects they relate." That's a simplification of course, but a useful one nonetheless, with interesting implications. For example, the concept of causality specifies a dyadic relation between things, and notably Judea Pearl has claimed we are in the midst of a "causal revolution." In the same way, the concept of semiosis specifies a triadic relation between things. A few formal definitions have been proposed:
"We may define a cause to be... if the first object had not been, the second never had existed."Pearl, a computer scientist and philosopher, states that while the observational component of science has benefited from the power of formal methods, the design of new experiments is still managed by the unaided human intellect. But, when experimental science enjoys the benefit of formal mathematics along with its observational component, another scientific revolution will occur that will be equal in impact to the one that took place during the Renaissance. And AI will be the major player in this revolution. ...I suspect that, both causality and semiosis being relational concepts, their relevance for all forms of cognition, whether human, AI, or other, is critical.
- Hume (1748)
"A sign is something, A, which brings something, B, its interpretant sign determined or created by it, into the same sort of correspondence with something, C, its object, as that in which itself stands to C."
- Peirce (1902)
Terrence Deacon has added a new twist, when he wrote in the opening to his book Incomplete Nature: "A causal role for absence seems to be absent from the natural sciences." Relational concepts are not only lacking from computer science, but they are insufficiently understood within natural science as well. In "What is Life?" Erwin Schrödinger wrote: “Living matter, while not eluding the ‘laws of physics’ as established up to date, is likely to involve hitherto unknown ‘other laws of physics’, which, however, once they have been revealed, will form just as integral part of this science as the former.”
Charles Sanders Peirce: The Architect of Pragmatism (2003)
Reasoning with Cause and Effect (2002)
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| Recursive normative triad, Marc Champagne (2011) |
Interpretation is ultimately a physical process, but one with a quite distinctive kind of causal organization: some favored consequence must be promoted, or some unwanted consequence must be impeded, by the work that has been performed in response to the property of the sign medium that is taken as information. This is why an interpretive process is more than a mere causal process. It organizes work in response to the state of a sign medium and with respect to some normative consequence - a general type of consequence that is in some way valued over others.
This allows causal linkages between phenomena that otherwise would be astronomically unlikely to occur spontaneously to be brought into existence. And this is why information has so radically altered the causal fabric of the world we live in. It expands the dimensions of what Stuart Kauffman has called the “adjacent possible“ in almost unlimited ways, making almost any conceivable causal linkage possible (at least on a human scale).
Source: Terrence Deacon, “Incomplete Nature,” (p392, 397)
Graphical/diagrammed semiotics and experimental semiotics. There are all sorts of diagrams, flow charts, and other graphical tools used within the disciplines of semiotics, logics, second order cybernetics, computer programming, epidemiology, symptomatology, and scenarios modeling. Deacon’s description of how the causal nature of interpretation involves normative consequences can also be represented in this way to help elucidate the connections involved.
10.3 John Flach and Cognitive Systems Engineering
"Peirce framed the problem of semiotics as a pragmatic problem - what is the capacity for humans to intelligently adapt to the demands of survival? How does our interpretation of a sign (e.g., pattern of optical flow) provide the basis for beliefs that support successful action in the world? The central question: How do we see the world the way it is?" John Flach is a cognitive systems engineer and provides a very useful perspective on semiotics in his recent work. He has a blog, academic papers, and a book he made freely available online. Of note, he takes an engineering approach to semiotics which is similar to the logical approach Peirce took, and that makes his interpretations particularly lucid. His applied semiotic diagrams are great, and it would be interesting to pair these with Marc Champagne's normative triad idea. In a pragmatic sense, I believe that application is the key to understanding in semiotics. Champagne places Ayn Rand within the Aristotle/Thomism/Deely tradition. This seems counterintuitive to me since by all accounts she espouses nominalist values rather than the realism of Poinsot and Peirce.
Flach, John, A Triadic Semiotics
Flach, John and Fred Voorhorst, What Matters? (2016)
Champagne, Marc, Axiomatizing umwelt normativity (2011)
“There is information in the light to specify affordances .... this radical hypothesis implies that the value and meaning of things can be directly perceived. The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal .... either for good or ill. By affordance I mean something that implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. The notion that invariants are related at one extreme to the motives and needs of an observer and at the other extreme to the substances and surfaces of a world provides a new approach to psychology” (Gibson 1979: 179).
Pickering, John, Affordances are Signs (2007)
"Technology is a constructed extension of humanity's semiotic capacity... The technological age draws out the importance of connectivity and the notion of the human as the animal semioticum, the semiotic animal. Because of it's transcendence over subject and object, all semiotic relations per se are suprasubjective; the denial of semiosis leads to solipsism."
Richard Grablin, The Disconnected Connecting Self (2014)
Stephen Sparks, "Semiotics and Human Nature in Postmodernity: A consideration of Animal Semioticum as the Postmodern Definition of Human Being" (2010)
10.4 John Sowa, Mike Bergman, and Marvin Minsky on Peirce, AI, and "Thirdness"
Minsky: "I find most people say, well it’s either this or that and I’m always inclined to look for a third thing. Every now and then I get a new theory because I found that some community has gotten stuck making a di-stinction. The joke I made was that there’s no word – in English at least – for tri-stinction or trifference. Could you adapt Legos so that they had more triangular structures? Well then, it would be harder to make things at first, but easier later." Pierce's thesis is that all relations may be constructed from triadic relations, but monadic and dyadic relations are not sufficient. John Sowa agrees, and noted that in conceptual graph terms, it is trivial to show that there will always be one or more nodes in the graph with three or more attached arcs. That reminds me of the Tao Te Ching: "Tao produced the One. The One produced the two. The two produced the three. And the three produced the ten thousand things."
Mike Bergman writes: "While the current renaissance in artificial intelligence can certainly point to the seminal contributions of George Boole, Claude Shannon, and John von Neumann in computing and information theory (of course among many others), my own view, not alone, is that C.S. Peirce belongs in those ranks from the perspective of knowledge representation and the meaning of information." He describes what Deely termed "suprasubjectivity," in other words how Peirce provides perspective to dyadic structures: "A thirdness is required to stand apart from the relation, or to express relations dealing with relations." In his book "A Knowledge Representation Practionary: Guidelines Based on Charles Sanders Peirce" (2018) Bergman applies these insights: "A triple is a basic statement equivalent to what Peirce called a proposition. We often represent triples as barbells, with the subject and objects being the bubbles (or nodes), and the connecting predicate being the bar (or edge). This terminology is the language of graphs. As one accumulates statements, where the subjects of one statement may be an object in another or vice versa, we can see how these barbells grow linked together, wherein a single statement grows to become a longer story."
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| Peter Harries-Jones, "Upside-Down Gods" (2016) |
Muz: "Explain what biosemiotics’ value is as a field, since you think people are misunderstanding it. If you think it is fact-based and worthwhile, could you say how?
Gerald Ostdiek: "The central idea of biosemiotics is that living things go about living by ‘reading’ what ‘signs’ they are able to discern from the environment. A ‘sign’ is that thing that stands for another thing to some living thing; signs are not limited to abstract symbolic constructs, but co-exists with every ‘minding’ – signs are inferred within every interaction in which some living thing is seen to extract awareness of some feature of its surrounds. (E.g., an amoeba swimming up a glucose gradient or a human getting directions to Brno from a roadside placard.) This not only informs the actions of the living thing and its individual development, but also serves as a factor of selection and evolution. The argument is that biological mechanisms are semiotically realized. If this is true, then we can expect to learn something (not everything, something) about biological processes by isolating and identifying various sign functions (as best we can, semiosis, like biology, is messy, irrational, and driven by history and need). This is neither limited to, nor eliminated by human culture: in my view (Deacon would agree, Barbieri would not), biosemiotic function is the ‘missing link’ between abstracted human constructions and the rest of nature; it eliminates the need for the ill defined philosophical concept of epistemology by memetic replication. I know of no-one who thinks that biosemiotics simply replaces the neo-darwinian synthesis; the argument is that it complements it. In addition to serving to isolate some specific factors of evolutionary and developmental biology, it also allows for a useful extrapolation from biological processes to human experience."
From a separate presentation: "Accessing the adjacent possible is necessary for biology because we have to see the future state of having a full belly. We have to see a possible future, a full stomach. This becomes a game in a technical sense that is played by all living things. For example one of my favorite examples of this has to do with a study that's been done repeatedly with foxes and rabbits where the fox is tracking a rabbit. A fox has to invest his energy wisely. He sneaks up. If the rabbit sees the fox before the fox gets to the rabbit the rabbit doesn't run away. He stands up on his hind legs and looks at the fox "I see you." And what does the fox do? Does he run real fast up to the rabbit? No, he goes around because the fox cannot manage catching a rabbit [without the element of surprise]. It doesn't fit the fox's past experience. And the rabbit doesn't want to run away because he knows he can escape."
11.1 Hares and Foxes
“Let us consider the hare-fox situation discussed by Anthony Holley (Holley 1993). A brown hare can run almost 50 per cent faster than a fox, but when it spots a fox approaching, it stands bolt upright and signals its presence (with ears erect and the ventral white fur clearly visible), instead of fleeing. After 10 years and 5000 hours of observation Holley concluded that this behaviour is energy saving: if a fox knows it has been seen, it will not bother to give chase, so saving the hare the effort of running. Holley rejects the alternative explanation, that the hares just want to better monitor the movements of their predators, partly because the behaviour does in fact not help them to see the fox more clearly, and partly because they do not react the same way to dogs. While a fox depends on stealth or ambush to catch a hare, the dog can run faster and it would therefore be counterproductive for a hare to signal its presence.
“The hare 'knows' that the fox has the habit of not chasing it if spotted. Thus it develops the habit of showing the fox it has become spotted. Whether this habit has become fixed in the genomic set-up of the hare or whether it is based mostly on experience is probably not known, but it doesn't matter much.
“It should be noticed that the fox profits from this communication as well since at least it spares the time and effort of trying to sneak up on the hare. So, this is actually a kind of mutualism, the whole situation presupposes the existence of a shared interpretative universe or 'motif', we might term it an eco-semiotic discourse structure (with a little help from Michel Foucault's concept 'discours', which very briefly stated refers to the symbolic order relating human subjects to a common world (Foucault 1970, Cooper 1981)). How much of this kind of semiotic co-operation goes on in nature? Probably we have only seen the beginning of these kind of studies, and it would be my guess that our present knowledge gives us only a small glimpse of a nearly inexhaustible stock of smart semiotic interaction patterns taking place at all levels of complexity from cells and tissues inside bodies up to the level of ecosystems.”
Source: Jesper Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics: Towards a New Synthesis in Biology (1997)
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| Karma incarnate, a hyperparasitoid (Piotr Naskrecki) |
Parasitic wasps and plants have common, if opposite, interests in caterpillars, and have each worked out a cooperative way of satisfying those interests by actively sharing a small part of the semiosphere. When a caterpillar munches on the leaves of certain plant species, a component present in the oral saliva of the larva induces the formation of a signal that spreads to the whole plant. This signal causes the plant to emit a volatile compound, a terpenoid, which is carried off with the wind. When the terpenoid arrives at the antennae of female wasps, it is interpreted as a sign for oviposition, prompting the wasps to fly upstream towards the source of the terpenoid. Upon detecting the caterpillars (who are, meanwhile, happily munching on the plants), the wasps lay their eggs on them. When the eggs hatch the young wasps eat the inside of the caterpillar, eventually killing it. The terpenoid has become a sign that means many different things to many different species. How complex can the semiosphere become? There are parasites of parasites, or "hyperparasites!" So depending on what kind of insect you are, that sign may mean food, and that food is either the plant leaves, the caterpillar, the wasp eggs, or...? Relatedly, one of the world’s worst agricultural pests, the silverleaf whitefly, can hack a plant’s airborne chemical communication systems so that they convey information about the wrong threat. That induces the wrong defense, which then cascades through an entire field.
Source: Jesper Hoffmeyer, The Semiotic Niche (2008)
Yong, Ed, Pretty Sly for a Whitefly (2019)
Keartes, Sarah Illusionist butterflies coerce ants (2016)
Shuter, Avishai Hey, That’s My Cone: Gharial training (2019)
Keartes, Sarah Illusionist butterflies coerce ants (2016)
Shuter, Avishai Hey, That’s My Cone: Gharial training (2019)
11.3 The honeyguide
"An example of a biosemiotic interaction between humans and birds concerns the African Boran people and a bird known as the black throated honeyguide, Indicator indicator. Collecting honey is an ancient human practice as witnessed by 20,000-year-old cave paintings. The honey guide often accompanies the Boran people when they go out to collect honey. Indicator indicator guides them from tree to tree by characteristic call-outs. Thanks to this assistance, the time Borans expend finding the bees’ nests (which is otherwise approximately three hours) is shortened by one third. The bees are smoked out, the hives are opened, and the honey collected. And while the honey guide birds cannot themselves open the hives, after the Borans have taken their honey, much valuable larvae and wax still remain in the hives for the birds to eat. The honeyguide family designation "Indicatoridae" bears witness to the semiotic intuition that many biologists have upon discovering such interactions."
Source: Jesper Hoffmeyer, The Semiotic Niche (2008)
11.4 Clever Hans
"Hans’s trainer would pose to it a simple arithmetic problem, such as 3 x 4, by writing with chalk on a blackboard, and Hans would then reply by tapping one foreleg twelve times. In spite of many attempts, nobody was able to disclose any cheating. The horse, of course, did not possess any capacity to do mathematics or understand writings on a table, but it did an eminent job of reading the wishes of individuals from a foreign species. If the horse could not see the person posing the question, it could not then perform, and the explanation for its artful tapping was shown to reside in the horse’s ability to notice an ever so slight - and obviously unconscious - body movement by the trainer, when the correct number of tappings was reached. At the point when the cue showed up, all Clever Hans needed to do was to stop tapping.
"In a comment on the Clever Hans phenomenon, the Swiss pioneer in nonverbal communication studies, Hans Hediger writes, “The apparent performance of these ‘code-tapping’ animals is only explainable by the continually repressed fact, that the animal - be it horse, monkey or planarian - is generally more capable of interpreting the signals emanating from humans than is converse the case. In other words, the animal is frequently the considerably better observer of the two, or is more sensitive than man; it can evaluate signals that remain hidden to man”. Horses are capable of perceiving movements “less than one-fifth of a millimeter” in the human face."
Source: Jesper Hoffmeyer, The Semiotic Niche (2008)
11.5 Laozi and Zhuangzi on semiotics, and the "use of the useless"
Laozi wrote: “Tao produced the One. The One produced the two. The two produced the three. And the three produced the ten thousand things.” Zhaungzi explains: “The one and what I said about it make two, and two and the original one make three. If we go on this way, then even the cleverest mathematician can't tell where we'll end, much less an ordinary man. If by moving from nonbeing to being we get to three, how far will we get if we move from being to being? Better not to move, but to let things be! ...Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger.” The semiosphere truly has no limit. I don't know if Peirce was aware of this passage or not, but I do know he would've appreciated it if he had been.
When I approach Eastern philosophy from a new perspective I often gain a deeper appreciation. Rereading Zhuangzi as a commentary on semiotics is not very difficult. For example he told several short parables about the use of being useless (Carpenter Shih, Crippled Shu) "All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless!” “As for me, I’ve been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I’ve finally got it." Those words were put into the mouth of a tree that managed to live a long life by virtue of being useless for a carpenter. How does this relate to semiotics?
Semiotics is the study of significance. In a purely utilitarian sense, if an object is of no significance it is typically left alone and ignored, however if it can be of significant use, then it may be taken and used for some other end. Look around the natural world and there are many examples of the most useful things being exploited until they are gone. A tree that cannot be used, whose wood is of no significance, is a tree that stands a better chance of living to maturity. But if we look at these parables from another perspective (one very familiar to Terrence Deacon), then we can see that "useless" is very similar to the notion of "absential features", the way in which constraints limit some possibilities and enable others.
11.6 Mantis shrimp and umwelt
In the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, an organism’s “umwelt” is its perceptual model of the world. As a term, umwelt also unites all the semiotic processes of an organism into a whole. For example, it has been suggested that the mantis shrimp can see with sixteen color receptive cones in its eyes (compared to the three humans have). If these function in a similar way to those in our eyes, this might imply a very colorful umwelt, but there are other significant differences in the shrimp's eyes that could also impact their perceptual model.
11.7 Biosemiotics and gifts in anthropology and zoology (nuptial gifts)
The Gift, a book by sociologist Marcel Mauss, focuses on the way that the exchange of objects between groups builds relationships between humans and can promote a better way of living. Early exchange systems centered around the obligations to give, to receive, and, most importantly, to reciprocate. Mauss' book has been very influential in anthropology, where there is a large field of study devoted to reciprocity and exchange. A nuptial gift is a nutritional gift given by one partner in some animals' sexual reproduction practices.
11.8 Microbiome of the digestive system
Gut microbes produce compounds that modify brain chemistry, and thereby behavior. This biosemiotic connection seems credible from an evolutionary perspective. After all, bacteria have lived inside humans for millions of years. Over time some microbes developed ways to shape their hosts’ behavior for their own ends. Modifying mood is a plausible microbial survival strategy - happy people tend to be more social, increasing the chances that microbes have to exchange and spread.
Kohn, David, When Gut Bacteria Change Brain Function (2015)
11.9 Firehawks and TEK
"Kites and falcons, colloquially termed “firehawks,” have been documented intentionally carrying burning sticks to spread fire. While it has long been known that birds will take advantage of natural fires that cause insects, rodents and reptiles to flee and thus increase feeding opportunities, that they would intercede to spread fire to unburned locales is astounding. While new to Western science, these behaviours have long been known to the Alawa, MalakMalak, Jawoyn, and other Indigenous peoples of northern Australia whose ancestors occupied their lands for tens of thousands of years." Both western science and traditional ecological knowledge has access to portions of the semiosphere the other does not. An accurate appraisal of Traditional Ecological Knowledge requires a critical approach that recognizes both observational and interpretive content. If we can combine the observational wealth of traditional knowledge with the additional interpretive capabilities of western science then we have a very powerful combination. For one example, consider the medicinal knowledge of plants by certain indigenous peoples, it's incredibly valuable from a scientific perspective. And from a semiotic perspective I think it's fascinating. There exist many alternate phylogenies, alternate constellations, and alternate causal analyses that can all help improve our understanding of nature by reordering the way in which we form the "big picture" out of the data in our minds.
Nicholas, George, It’s taken thousands of years, but Western science is finally catching up to Traditional Knowledge (2018)
Kyle, Kate, Alaskan researcher documents 100 Northern Dene star names (2016)
12. Peter Harries-Jones, "Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson's World of Difference," (2016)
“A phrasing of Hoffmeyer appears as follows: Suppose a living system arose from the primordial soup - or wherever it was. "We will have to ask: Who was the subject to whom the differences worked on by such a system should make a difference?" If one admits that living systems are information processing entities, then the only possible answer to this question is that the system itself is the subject.”
13. Robert Rosen, Howard Pattee, and early biosemiotics
There are several approaches and scholars whom we can identify as biosemioticians but who themselves did not know or use that term. Beginning in the 1950s the Information School of molecular biology focused on a semiotic perspective. And Robert Rosen’s book "Life itself" (1991) reached the biosemiotic understanding — his emphasis is on the triadic relation and “relational biology” depended on semiotic rather than material relations. (Later, William Bechtel in "Mechanism and Biological Explanation" (2011) would cite Rosen's book.)
-Howard Pattee and Kalevi Kull, A biosemiotic conversation: Between physics and semiotics (2009)
14. James, Pattee, and Benesch (or mysticism, biosemiotics, and epistemology)"A classic piece of scientific literature in the psychological study of mysticism remains William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE). A current definition of mysticism embraces seven key components for mystical experiences: the first four were originally developed by William James and the later three were proposed by F.C. Happold. The fifth of these components is “consciousness of the oneness of everything, [in which] existence is perceived as a unity.” However it has been noted that there can be no escape from duality through sense perception, for sense perception is conditioned by the presence of polar opposites, nor through discursive thought, which is bound by the same dualism. So such experiences may be more accurately characterized as approaching a realization of oneness, in the same way that a line approaches a vertical asymptote, but never actually touching it.
According to Howard Pattee, "Epistemology by its very meaning presupposes a separation of the world into the knower and the known. That is, if we can speak of knowledge about something, then the knowledge representation, the knowledge vehicle, cannot be in the same category as what it is about. This separation is often called the epistemic cut. ...A symbolic description, whatever form it may take, has a physical structure that is independent of its interpretation." Incidentally, Pattee wrote an earlier paper about "bridging the epistemic cut," a concept he frequently returned to. (This subject-object distinction was a frequent point of discussion in Walter Benesch's classes as well.) Pattee said "In my opinion, biosemiotics will make the most lasting contribution by addressing the classical problems inherent in symbolic description and control of material systems at all levels ― the symbol-matter problem. In this way it will contribute most to the epistemic foundations of all the sciences, of both the living and the nonliving [with consequences for the humanities and for the relationship between physical sciences and humanities]."
Pattee enumerated the basic questions that biosemiotics deals with (and Terrence Deacon later addressed in his book): "So, the question of the origin of the epistemic cut can be approached by asking: What are the conditions under which the simplest act of observation and interpretation take place? This question is ambiguous and a source of controversy even in the highly evolved domain of physics where it is called the “measurement problem.” Measurement is a physical process, but the function of measurement, recording specific initial conditions, is beyond physical laws to describe. One way to see this is to ask for the cause of a measurement. What determines when and where a measurement is made? Clearly this decision is not made by the laws, but by the observer. In the context of the origin of life the question becomes even more ambiguous because the most primitive observer is not defined. To define the simplest observer we might ask: What is the function of an observer? This leads to even more ambiguous questions: What is the simplest function? What is the simplest system where a physical interaction requires an interpretation because it has acquired significance or meaning beyond simply obeying the universal laws? What is the simplest system that requires symbolic communication as a category distinct from physical interactions?"
Anu Soul, Mystical Experience as Altered States of Consciousness
Extracts from the Literature 3: Mysticism and Oneness: From ‘Mysticism’ F.D. Happold (2016)
Pattee, H.H. The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut (2001)
Pattee, H.H. The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics (2005)
14.1 Developmental, educational, and occupational semiotics; Semiotic freedom, and Wang Yangming
Some relationships are more highly structured than others. In occupations, for example, there are usually clear expectations and standards of performance. Training to fulfill these roles begins at a young age. Children are socialized in school to take on more responsibilities and exercise greater autonomy from caregivers with increasing self control. At graduation (sometimes much earlier) youth take on the roles of adult members of society with attendant responsibilities. During this entire process children undergo many other changes. Their bodies mature, interactions with peers change as a result, and the new signs present both internally and externally can make navigating this environment difficult. There are many ideas on how to raise children, and regardless of whether they focus on behavioral, emotional, cognitive, or environmental factors, they are all amenable to a semiotic analysis. How should a youth engage with others and their environment to support their healthy growth and maturation? Growing up and becoming an adult is a process of finding meaning and establishing relationships among ideas, and thereby expanding one's semiotic freedom.
Morten Tønnessen wrote “The healthy development – growing up, coming-to-be – of an organism presupposes that it is surrounded by an environment that is rich in terms of signs and meets its requirements. Only in a rich and suitable environment can an organism act by selecting what is meaningful to it, attribute meanings to environmental objects and develop its subjective world, its Umwelt.” I imagine that Wang YangMing similarly had such a rich world of signs in mind when he wrote:
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| Tim Cheongho Lee, Peirce on Person |
Wang YangMing, Inquiry on The Great Learning (1572)
14.2 Self knowledge
Winfried Nöth: All knowledge we have of the universe has come down to us by the mediation of signs, but the human interpreter of these signs is also a sign, maybe a hypersign, for all of our actions, the signs we convey, and the thoughts we have are signs. Peirce said: “Are we really shut up in a box of flesh and blood?” His answer is no, and in his explanation, he tells us “The word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign”, says Peirce. “When I communicate my thoughts and my sentiments to a friend […] so that my feelings pass into him and I am conscious of what he feels, do I not live in his brain as well as in my own – most literally?” If this is so, then it may be that our lived experience recapitulates the lives of others. Our loves are as old as the first love. As a sign, the human being is able to transcend the boundaries of flesh and blood. As such, human beings have “a meaning subtle as it may be”, even though they “cannot know their own essential significance”.
There is an explanation for why humans cannot know their own significance. Try as you might, you cannot make your own awareness the object of your awareness. You cannot be in a relation to yourself (that which makes the relation). To do so is to become only an object, and not the complete sign (object/representation/interpretant). In other words, no line is perpendicular to itself, that requires a second line. It’s a simple truism once recognized. An agreement related to this point exists between semiotics and the Buddhist perspective of emptiness as a consequence of dependent origination. All things, including mind, are created through synergistic processes. Like Indra's net, everything is reflected in everything else. It's a popular metaphor that writers like Douglas Hofstadter have used as well to describe radical complexity. Semiotics, as described by Peirce, involves this same infinite recursion when describing the process of semiosis - what is an object for one thing can be a sign for another thing, and on and on. In the end you get a semiotic web of relationships that is indistinguishable from Indra's net. Dependent origination applies to both. This web can be deeply confusing at times. The chaotic version of Indra’s net is a hall of moving mirrors. Catch sight of something in the corner of your eye, turn, and it’s gone. The mirrors alternately reveal things then cause them to disappear the next moment. ...There are signs I see, signs I do not see, signs I want to see, and signs that I refuse to see. It is the last category which concerns me most. Do I hide my eyes? (cf. "three wise monkeys")
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| Mirror labyrinth |
Richard Scott Bakker has a unique perspective on consciousness and epistemology. Here’s some premises that he’s advanced:
1. We are, as a matter of empirical fact, fundamentally blind to what we are and what we do.
2. Scientific cognition will tell us what intentional cognition is, and if I’m right, then that will turn out to be nothing intentional.
3. Semiotics is a heuristic, low-dimensional way of tracking extremely complicated systems.
4. Our social environments are transforming, our native communicative habitat is being destroyed, stranding us with tools that will increasingly let us down.
But the conclusion Bakker wishes to draw, that “meaning is dead” or the greater project of semiotics cannot succeed, would require stronger support to be valid. Nonetheless these are important points, and can actually usefully inform and strengthen biosemiotics. In particular, the danger presented by the transformations occurring in our environment today only lends urgency to resolving these issues. In "Enlightenment Now", Steven Pinker wrote that the challenge for us today is to design an informational environment in which our ability to prefer correct ideas prevails over our vulnerability to illusions and fallacies (355).
Here’s a representative conversation, this one between Robbert and Bakker. While I think Robbert is the more right, I don’t think he defended his position as well as he could have and failed to bring up a number of examples that biosemioticians have provided. Bakker did a great job defending his position, but had he addressed the stronger position of biosemiotics it might’ve been harder going. Though it is not a foregone conclusion, I suspect that some form of a mutual resolution between the positions of Robbert and Bakker lies in the project of biosemiotics. It contains essentially what they are both looking for. For Bakker, a mechanistic explanation for significance and meaning wherein phenomenological illusions might be said to evaporate. For Robbert, an account of meaning that is entirely relational, or suprasubjective. For it is suprasubjectivity and relation that Bakker, with his radical nominalism, appears blind to.
14.4 Semiocide
Morten Tønnessen again in Animals craving for meaning in the Anthropocene – a perspective on the global semiocide: “All biosemioticians concede that all animals are sign users. When animal lives are subjugated to human purposes, their biosemiosis is tentatively adapted to our human semiosis. The Estonian palaeontologist Ivar Puura has introduced the word semiotsiid (semiocide) to signify “a situation where someone´s malevolence or negligence brings along destruction of signs and stories, which are meaningful to someone else, whose identity is thus violated”. If the Anthropocene is the Age of Man, then in a biosemiotic perspective it is also the era of an emerging global semiocide.” This is the case with many species, including the Denali wolf packs studied by Gordon Haber.
Yong, Ed, Chimpanzees Are Going Through a Tragic Loss (2019)
Yong, Ed, Humans Are Destroying Animals’ Ancestral Knowledge (2018)
14.5 Nominalism, meaning, semiotics, and high suicide rates in America today.
The effects of this crisis aren’t felt equally by all. It depends on exposure and resilience factors that aren’t easily understood. People, sometimes entire societies and cultures, getting exploited by other people/cultures/classes. One adapted way of living forcibly supplanted by another, families disintegrating, lives unraveling. So what do the victims do? They try to make sense out of the disruption. Sometimes they pull together. Sometimes they fall apart. But they all turn to some explanation. These men have done the same. And the explanation they've chosen really well for a while, but at some point it stops working. The problem isn’t the people, it’s the way we’ve been trying to make sense out of the disruption, the information we take in, piece together, and use to form our internal narratives. This is about meaning in life. You can’t live without it for long, we gotta pay attention to it. Answer that riddle and you’ve gone a long way toward solving this problem. ...The “every man for himself” kind of ‘meaning’ ends badly. We have to choose wisely.
I differentiate between two primary senses of the word 'meaning': existential and semiotic: "Semiotics associates meaning with 'explanatory power', our ability to relate one thing to another. Take for example the sort of meaning we talk about when we say, "where there is smoke there is fire". Here the perception of smoke signifies something to a person: there is a fire at approximately the same location. The squiggles on a screen we call letters we interpret to mean a word, which in turn represent an idea. And so on. All these significations contain meaning for us. In this sense of 'meaning' we are simply describing the processes by which we navigate our daily lives." So meaning is not an illusion. To say as much is as strange as to assert that the fact we will die tomorrow means that we aren't alive today. Of course we are alive today, and of course there is meaning to our lives, otherwise all this talk of maintaining healthy environments and social systems is pointless. I say it is most certainly significant! In other words life is all about meaning, these are coextensive concepts.
It is possible to point out that people do willingly die in senseless wars or even kill themselves for the sake of some greater purpose or meaning that has no apparent bearing in reality. The lesson to take away from this is that how we construct meaning in our lives can be (and very often is) distorted by powerful interests or misinformed perspectives. The ethical considerations involved here are far from trivial, and cannot be avoided by simply declaring that all meaning is illusory. That would cede too much ground to the political right in our current culture. They've already trademarked the fight against "political correctness", which they may very well use to consolidate their ranks and re-elect Trump. We cannot give them full reign over defining what "meaning in life" is as well. That would be checkmate. Game, set, match. No need to keep trying. Instead, we must shape that narrative based on fact. Disinformation is the current Trump/fascist/far right (and their sycophants) modus operandi. By virtue of simply living, we create meaning. And yes, valuing cooperation and the common good creates the conditions for a much more meaningful life than we can live otherwise. Independence has a place, but it has been unjustly vaunted in contemporary culture and no longer bears much resemblance to reality, at least not so much as is imagined. It's a tragedy that those who build their lives on such a false understanding cause harm to those around them, and inevitably face disappointment themselves if they live long enough.
Q: But isn't meaning self-constructed? Or is it culturally created? Doesn't our approach to meaning die with us?
A: How is meaning created? We can rule out the possibility that we individually make all our own 'meanings', because there is a very strong cultural component to it. That implies that when we die, our approach to meaning doesn't die with us - it is sustained by the culture that gave it birth. There are a few other things we can deduce from this. 1) By extension, human culture emerged in an evolutionary process from nature, so our meanings are embedded within the greater biosphere. And 2) meanings, like cultures, evolve. Within our sigle lifespan, what we find significant has changed as we grow older and incorporate new information. 3) This process of semiosis (meaning making) extends back to the dawn of life and horizontally across all life on Earth today. 4) Semiosis is so dynamic and open that demarcating any real beginning/end is problematic. What these men (in the article linked below) wish to do is cordon off their lives from this entire process. It's simply impossible to do in theory or practice.
Rodrick, Stephen, All-American Despair (2019)
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| Rats trained to detect TNT (Simon Guillemin) |
"Consider for example, the spider which casts its web in a particular location in order to catch flies or the bird which feigns a broken wing so as to lure away a predator from its nest. In both these examples the organism benefits from its creative ability to enact bio-semiotic relations (signs) in its environment. The spider uses the relations between sun and shadows as a guide to cast its web. While the bird has developed the ability to use the connection between clumsy movements and an easy prey item, which informs certain predators, to fool predation. Note moreover that, due to their bio-semiotic nature, in either case these relations can fail to yield the intended outcome: flies aren't always caught in the web and predators aren't always fooled by the bird’s pretence. This is due to the fact that bio-semiotic relations are not efficient causal (dyadic) relations but involve what Hoffmeyer calls triadic "semiotic causation."
"Signs not only enable organisms to flexibly adapt their activities to constantly changing conditions but also serve as means of coordination and communication among and between diverse species. As Donna Haraway notes, communication always, to some extent, involves communion with and a "becoming with," others. Indeed, according to Haraway "Beings do not preexist their relatings." Life is of fundamental necessity inherently communicative and therefore social. All living organisms inhabit an entangled web of intermingled enacted material realities guided by natural and artificial signs. Because organisms live in communities and not in isolated hermetically sealed worlds, communication processes structure and organise individual behaviour and the larger community. Within these dynamic unfolding realities of agential bio-semiotic activity, nothing exists in complete separation from anything else." ...Rachel Armstrong has also noted the dualisms that beset our current society and is working to symbiotically wrap the old in the clothes of the new (indeed, old signs can be transformed by relating them to new signs).
- Paulo De Jesus, "Thinking through enactive agency" (2018) One of five papers by the author exploring "biosemiotic enactivism."
15.1 Donna Haraway, biotechnology, and dark ecology
We can't yet make our own biosphere; there's a lot of parts we still don't understand. Maybe someday we will understand how it all works and be able to recreate it all. Then maybe we wouldn't need worry as much if it falls apart. But even if that day comes, it's important to understand that the biosphere isn't just something "out there" that is separate from who we are. It is a more intimate part of who we are than most people will ever realize. Losing it, even temporarily, means losing a part of yourself. The best analogy I can think of is that of a lover. We're told there are many other people who you can love, and while that's true, sometimes there's just one person you really want and you never want to lose them. That said, this is a great article. It concludes that the biosphere "represents a relatively whole and billion-year stress-tested form of adaptive complexity." That's why the safest and most effective path for ensuring human survival is protecting what we already have. Now, assuming that biotechnology becomes more ubiquitous (and it will), "we might be able to view a radical change in evolutionary processes from a process philosophy or dark ecology viewpoint. Simply put, a new form of genetic information transfer will have evolved, much like in the major evolutionary transitions of the past. There are no real boundaries between humans and the environment, no such thing as an individual, and all things, including gene flows into the future and their routes, are in a constant state of flux. We are inescapably emmeshed with everything and in constant material and informational exchange." This is all true.
"In the far future, consenting adults might welcome a symbiosis with useful augmentations, such as photosynthesising organisms that could be stored in our skin in a way similar to lichen, rather than splice the information from such organisms into our own genome. Or, we might go the whole way and incorporate the genetic information of specific endangered animals into our lineage in perpetuity, in order to become their advocate and information-bearer into the future, as an intimate and protective act." Here the author, Lauren Holt, is referencing eco-feminist Donna Haraway's ideas of green transhumanism (“Staying with the Trouble,” chapter 3 “Sympoiesis” 2016). Insofar as we alter nature, we inevitably alter ourselves and the larger semiosphere. Our role will be to ensure that these evolutionary transitions, and the incorporation of novel new mechanisms, are not indiscriminate or destructive, but in fact do provide the remediation or added value intended, and are not merely advertised in this way while serving ulterior motives, as the potential for either outcome is possible.
Holt, Lauren Why the post-natural age could be strange and beautiful (2019)
15.2 Semiotics in anthropology, sociology, and psychology
"The idea of a “semiotic self” needs to be contrasted with the Cartesian “subjective self”. Descartes’ mind-body dualism was useful in the seventeenth century, but it now needs to be overcome. The key aspect of Peirican triadic epistemology is the insistence that in the interpretation of meaning there are always meditative “signs” between “subjects” and “objects.” Subjects never exist in isolation; individuality is the product of social psychological processes." As Augustine first pointed out, the sign functions as a suprasubjective interface between the Cartesian dualism of mind/body or nature/culture. I could ask: How do I interpret the signs in my surroundings? What signs do I create that affect both other people and myself?
"Semiotic objects are not the ultimate reality of Platonic forms or Aristotelian substances. They are part of an interpretive process involving signs which relate to signs, ad infinitum. The “really real” can only be approximated semiotically; it cannot be captured completely once and for all. But groups of scientists working on a scientific problem can asymptotically get closer and closer to detailed empirical knowledge. Similarly, lay people can keep an open mind and keep exploring the true nature of the social reality with which they are confronted. Peirce could have argued that the really real object (i.e. the Kantian Ding-an-sich) is something that we can only approximate through various signs, but even though Peirce had studied Kant carefully he shied away from the notion of a “thing in itself.” Hence, the ultimate reality for Peirce is not something “real,” but something Pragmatic. If a differentiation makes no difference in practical action then it is not worth retaining in our philosophy, our mathematics, or our science."
J. I. (Hans) Bakker, The ‘Semiotic Self’: From Peirce and Mead to Wiley and Singer (2011)
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| Three wise monkeys |
This is a brief comparison of Keller's paper [part 1, part 2] in light of Terrence Deacon's work, and the larger field of biosemiotic research. Biosemiotics encompasses a sufficiently wide range of views, such that there is enough internal diversity to allow for multiple interpretations, but I haven't seen any that conflict with EF Keller. References have been supportive. The same appears to go for Deacon (though he is proud of his interdisciplinary pedigree and hence resistant to lumping his research into any single field of inquiry). The brief description of early teleomechanists in Keller's paper reminds me of Deacon, though he incorporates insights from second order cybernetics, particularly the nature of relational and reflexive systems.
In her paper, Keller notes that the properties that make organisms so insistently different from physical systems include "function, agency, and purpose." This is followed by the observation that no one has yet offered an account of how these emerge. Near her conclusion she writes suggestively "we may find the secrets of biological organization residing precisely in the details that have been washed away." In that she is echoing Warren Weaver, who in 1948 wrote: "One is tempted to oversimplify and say that scientific methodology went from one extreme to the other... and left untouched a great middle region." We are left asking, what is this middle ground that may have been washed away? A few suggestions are offered. One of which is from contemporary biologist John Mattick, who claims that “organized complexity is a function of regulatory information.” This appears promising. Reconceptualizing the nature and function of information is one of the projects within biosemiotics.
17. Victoria Alexander
“Representative Democracy, Capitalism, Communism, Socialism or Anarchy? No matter what philosophy you begin with, over time political systems tend to concentrate wealth and power. Government and individual freedom should really be co-creative of one another. Why is it that we can’t seem to achieve this? As a biosemiotician, I have learned that creative and intelligent behavior emerge in complex systems when individuals have semiotic freedom and enabling constraints. Government/culture should provide the enabling constraints (language, tradition, borders, laws, courts, currency, public buildings, hospitals, schools, mass transportation, energy and communication networks) but the people making use of those constraints should have the semiotic freedom (i.e., the ability to interpret rules and even misinterpret rules) to make their own decisions, set their own goals, and enjoy/suffer the consequences.” This topic reminds me of Heather Marsh, and her application of stigmergy to government, though it is distinctly different from that.
Alexander, Victoria Free Range Humans: What Makes Good Government? (2018)
Alexander, Victoria The Science of Making Choices (from a biosemiotic perspective) (2014)
There doesn't necessarily need to be a conflict between health (broadly considered as mental/physical and individual/social) and freedom/censorship. Consider the “paradox of tolerance”, which states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper first described this in 1945, expressing the seemingly paradoxical idea that, "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance”. So whenever we talk about freedom and censorship I think focusing on “absolute freedom” without constraint can be misleading. What we really need to focus on, instead of freedom per se, is the more nuanced notion of ‘semiotic freedom’, the true freedom to live.
17.1 Semiotics and psycholgical theories
Self-Determination Theory, or SDT, is a theory of psychological well-being that identifies three basic needs, which are only developed through a lifelong sense of curiosity:
* Agency/Autonomy: people have a need to feel that they are in control of their own behavior, can make choices, and have self-efficacy.
* Competence: people need to feel that they have the knowledge and skills to engage in the tasks that are important to them.
* Relatedness: people need to have a sense of connectedness with others; each of us needs other people to some degree. We need to understand relevant relationships.
18. Gilbert Simondon
For Simondon, technological objects are “the materializations of human intentions.“ Once “these intentions are no longer understood, the objects become irrelevant.“ This irrelevance results in an indifference towards the object, which ends up becoming an indifference towards ourselves, the subject. In other words, this is just another aspect of a dualistic mentality that has dissociated the object from the subject. I thought about this today while I walked through the aisles at Costco. It seemed I was looking at so many forgotten intentions, irrelevant objects, and indifferent subjects. And there I was, no less affected by these dynamics.
Reference: Wendy Wheeler, “Expecting the Earth” (p220)
19. Almo Farina, and the biosemiotic approach to a "General Theory of Resources""In a human society, the access to resources is the first priority in everyday behaviour. A constitution lists the common assets that are guaranteed to every individual and community. The availability of a resource is considered to be a right. In this way, the right to freedom of expression, the right to representation, etc., are expressions of resources which shall ‘not be renounced’. The right per se is the conventional context in which to guarantee access to resources. The complexity of human habits obliges societies to provide themselves with oral and written rules which describe the appropriate behaviour to be used so as to not interfere with access to the different resources available.
"The Resource Criterion is not the solution to the problems created by the semiotic expansion of humanity (see e.g., Rockström et al. 2009), but it is nevertheless an important tool with which to justify and address the new proactive behaviour that man ought to adopt in an attempt to reduce the growing risk of an irreversible deterioration in the entire Earth system. Describing resources and their relationships with organisms seems to be a useful approach to a "unified ecology." This contributes to fill the gap between natural and human oriented processes and formulating a "General Theory of Resources."
"The recent field of biosemiotics seems a good candidate to integrate the ecological paradigms and produce a new era of epistemological and empirical exploration of ecological complexity. In fact, biosemiotics enters in action immediately after ecology has delineated the relationships between different agencies (individual species, population, communities, ecosystems) integrating matter and energy dynamics with information, communication and meaning. In a recent paper, Harries-Jones (2009) has argued that the collapse of ecosystems is due primarily to a collapse in its communicative order... [therefore] a biosemiotic approach seems to be the best way to investigate the interactions between organisms, their aggregation, and resources."
I minored in Natural Resource Management, with an emphasis in forestry. Originally I had intended that to be my major area of study. But that was before I realized I had more fundamental questions that my courses in NRM didn't sufficiently address. So I picked up a lot of philosophy classes, which were much more indulgent of my curiosity. That only led to more questions, but better answers (and more questions) as well. Despite a shift in focus, my interest in NRM and the issues that it applies itself to never really ended. Looking back, had I read Almo Farina's paper "A Biosemiotic Perspective of the Resource Criterion: Toward a General Theory of Resources" (2012) as a student, I would have been impressed.
This is the sort of theoretical foundation that appears to better frame the challenge to which the field of NRM addresses itself. We have to ask, what is: quality of life, resource, health, stakeholders, commons, stewardship, management? These are fundamental issues of life, mind, and interaction, and encompass the entire subject/object dynamic. And this is exactly where biosemiotics begins. Farina put this better: "biosemiotics enters in action immediately after ecology has delineated the relationships... integrating matter and energy dynamics with information, communication and meaning." This places the objective of NRM on a firm foundation and makes its various tasks more tractable. Relatedly, Niels Röling's article "Gateway to The Global Garden: Beta/Gamma Science for Dealing with Ecological Rationality" also addresses very similar issues, teasing out the bigger picture. (Röling didn't take the step from "structural coupling" to biosemiosis, though his main economic conclusions still apply, deriving as they do from the same broad considerations.)
Another undeniable advantage of biosemiotics is how it links up our currently disparate fields of inquiry. For example, contrast the different ways in which we manage human resources and natural resources. Why do we consider these separate things, when in reality humans are no less natural than anything else? Why this division? Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was an early syncretic thinker who knew this division was insupportable. Here you can read the Wikipedia entry for "resource," which includes this paragraph:
"There are three fundamental differences between economic versus ecological views: 1) the economic resource definition is human-centered (anthropocentric) and the biological or ecological resource definition is nature-centered (biocentric or ecocentric); 2) the economic view includes desire along with necessity, whereas the biological view is about basic biological needs; and 3) economic systems are based on markets of currency exchanged for goods and services, whereas biological systems are based on natural processes of growth, maintenance, and reproduction." The overlap here is hard to miss. Biosemiotics is not anthropocentric at all. It suggests all life processes involve subjective signification and is conceptually robust with nearly universal implications. It’s those universal implications, with the power to fundamentally change our world, that draws me like a magnet.
Source: Farina, Almo, A Biosemiotic Perspective of the Resource Criterion: Toward a General Theory of Resources (2012)
20. Peter Harries-Jones
"First, studies of communicative interaction in an ecosystem context remain problematic in conventional scientific studies. While research in recent years has shown that all organisms are able to detect chemical signals in the environment and that the ubiquity of pheromones mediate a vast array of interactions, nevertheless, calling such interactions “communicative” still remains a most contentious issue.
"Second, research on global climate change tends to concentrate on the possible damaging effects of changes in the network of energy relations in an ecosystem, while communicative interactions in a systemic context is largely ignored. There are some good reasons for this lack of research. ‘Fast reactions,’ such as plant responses to change in the quality of light, are far more difficult to study than those changes which come more slowly over a much greater global space, as, for instance the melting of glaciers or ice cover in the Arctic.
"I look briefly at Gregory Bateson’s understanding of why the focus of our attention should always be the organism plus environment in circular, or recursive, activity, and to natural timing cycles as an ordering link between bioenergy, communication and multiple levels of biological order. The ‘pattern which connects’, Bateson’s phrase, is vital to our understanding of mutual causality. If he is correct,‘the patterns that disconnect,’ that belong to the fast cycling communicative events of an ecosystem are equally important to understand. For it is these which will bring about ecosystem degradation - perhaps collapse - even before the slower biophysical effects of global warming become apparent."
Source: Harries-Jones, Peter Honeybees, Communicative Order, and the Collapse of Ecosystems (2009)
I've been considering coming at these sort of strategies and plans from a different angle, and I'm not sure how actionable any of it is right now. But the question I'm trying to answer is: How can we leverage our attention given the sign processes that are active within our community? All these plans already incorporate such features, to a greater or lesser extent, but I'm trying to explicitly place these criteria front and center. I think any CAP by necessity operates by two broad mechanisms: constraint and freedom. Constraint: It aspires to limiting anthropogenic drivers of climate change to the greatest extent possible, and freedom: promotes new ways (methods, information, resources) to operate within these limitations.
When we look at various roles (developer, manager, planner, etc.) and policy options (for energy, efficiency, recycling, transportation, food, waste, public engagement) I think identifying where and how our attention is placed, why it is placed there, how it can be redirected, and how the signs and signals that operate within our daily lives can provide the information we need to advance, and enhance progress toward, sustainable goals, is critical to change. So when enhancing CAPs, we can look at stuff like "gamified activism" as an interesting example of applying social technologies for addressing coordination problems (like climate change). But what I'm really interested in is looking at the semiotic dynamics in operation (biosemiotics) as a key to understanding which policies are likely to succeed, and which are not likely to engage community members at all. ...I'd like to evaluate all these CAPs according to those criteria.
Brandall, Benjamin, Get More Done With Gamification (2016)
As Peter Harries-Jones wrote, climate science provides enormous precision in numbers but "fails to give satisfactory meaning to the situation at hand... [we need to] involve people and their values in a narrative that includes but transcends numeric rationalism and redefines the position of the scientific observer in a much wider circle of observers, all of whom render qualitatively expressive opinions. In other words the topic of global climate change requires a re-balancing of subjectivity and objectivity in a manner which modernist norms of scientific methodology would scarcely recognize." The virtue of a biosemiotic approach is that it recognizes the need for, and place of, human meaning, significance, and a focus on relationships, in any successful CAP. In other words, this is exactly what that Nature article was referring to when it described the need to embed the social sciences. A plan that speaks to the people, their sense of value, ethics, fairness, relational identity, and not merely their physical embodiment and carbon footprint. That's been clear for a long time of course, but I don't know if that lesson has been internalized to the degree that is needed. Not for a lack of trying, but for a lack of a clear framework for how to do it.
Peter Harries-Jones, Biosemiotics in the Case of Global Climate Change in "Semiotics 2008" Pages 297-305
In 2010, Frank Luntz announced new research that shows the American people are eager for Congress to act on climate legislation that would promote US energy independence and a healthier environment. "Americans want their leaders to act on climate change—but not necessarily for the reasons you think," Luntz said. "...it is essential for America to pursue policies that promote energy independence and a cleaner, healthier environment." Luntz added: "People are much more interested in seeing solutions than watching yet another partisan political argument." It's time to update the Luntz memo "The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America" to then president Bush about climate change. He knows the communication/semiotic strategies that work, but this time we need to use them to support scientifically informed climate policies.
21.1 Humanity, Climate Change, and the Semiosis of Gaia
"Humans coevolved with other species in Africa, and evolved as relatively insignificant components of African ecosystems. Their numbers were kept in check by predators and diseases. However, when they invaded other ecosystems - Eurasia, Australia, the Americas and New Zealand - they had devastating effects, leading in each case to vast numbers of extinctions. The only real opposition to humans came from other humans. So while humans developed more complex forms of semiosis than had ever previously existed on Earth, and while this facilitated complex forms of cooperation, initially this semiosis in no way served the ecosystems they invaded. Only later, it appears, did humans come to appreciate their environments and through their unique semiosis develop constraints on their interactions with their environments. Subsequent history has been characterized by further advances in semiosis simultaneously augmenting humanity’s destructive potential, but also our capacity for self-constraint."
"Through semiotics we can examine scientific research, the relationships between different branches of science, between science and public beliefs, government policies, decision-making and ensuing action, and also the relationships between different societies around the world and the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature. Semiotics can provide an interpretation of the situation of humanity necessary for humans to comprehend not only their situation but their potential to change accordingly. Science can be construed as a semiotic process of interpreting, producing and reinterpreting signs. In this way, the discovery of global warming can be characterized as a triumph of human semiosis, revealing the threat to the global environment of continued increases in greenhouse gas emissions and the scale of action needed to prevent global ecological degradation... It has generated a concerted effort to convince people that they need to take action and live differently. Can such a semiotic interpretation of our knowledge of global warming and the relationship between this knowledge and people’s actions be carried through in detail?"
"The global ecosystem has developed a stronger form of telos associated with semiosis, a telos involving a symbol (of the state of health of Gaia) which then influences, or could influence action, in the way Peirce characterized such influence. On this basis it is entirely justified to refer to Gaia as acting, or having the potential to act, purposefully.... As David Korten pointed out "Cancer occurs when genetic damage causes a cell to forget that it is part of a large body, the healthy function of which is essential to its own survival. The cell begins to seek its own growth without regard to the consequences for the whole, and ultimately destroys the body that feeds it." This metaphor of cancer can be extended by interpreting it semiotically. The damaged cells not only forget their position in the whole and proliferate uncontrollably, they corrupt the semiosis within the body." On this account, the solution then is to restore healthy forms of semiosis.
Arran Gare, The Semiotics of Global Warming (2007)
21.2 Power and responsibility of semiosis
Paul Kingsnorth wrote "Here in the West, we are deep into a centuries-long crisis of meaning. It is clear that our relationship with the rest of nature is the story by which our species will live or die. We will live right by our inheritance or we will die and the world will continue without us. I think we can make it, but first we are going to have to walk through the fires we have set." This crisis of meaning is real and at the heart of much of what many of us do. And the responses are varied. Some people have decided "meaning is dead", others seem oblivious to the situation, but I think the most appropriate response is to critically consider this new position, the Anthropocene, in which we find ourselves. It isn't the idea of "meaning" that is flawed, but how history has shaped our conceptions - the Baconian and Cartesian notions of nature.
The terms of our relationship with the natural world, which we are a part of, must be renegotiated. We are now the driving force behind global ecosystem change. Consider the "planetary boundaries" as defined by Johan Rockström; it is extremely consequential whether we decide to exceed them or not. This crisis of meaning is a consequence of the expanded abilities and perceptual world that science has afforded. It has given us power, but it has not given us the ability to be responsible in the use of that power. That only comes with an understanding of and appreciation for the actual significance of the global systems that are now under our collective ability to preserve or destroy. That's the challenge we face in this crisis.
The phrase “crisis of meaning” conveys the very personal nature of the problem we are facing. But since semiotics, as a field of study, is situated within the 'philosophy of information', we could also call this an information crisis, a “widespread inaccurate conception of what the very nature of information is and how we relate to it, even as we are surrounded by more of it than ever before, with potentially disastrous results”. Such a society can have arrayed before them all the signs of destruction, but instead only see dollar signs. Hence today we have "freedom gas" without the recognition of what we are doing to global health. Here David Roberts describes the closely related epistemic crisis, a result of tribal politics, and why we are struggling to effectively address it:
“Knowledge and inquiry are not primarily individual, they're social. Knowledge creation, contesting of knowledge, it's all social processes. But when you discuss something like the climate crisis people always say “Let's educate people. They need more facts. Let's create better individual brains.” But it's not happening inside their individual brains. It's happening on a social level, and that's the level at which you have to tackle it, if you want to do anything about it. ...So when Rush Limbaugh said “The four pillars of deceit: science, journalism, academia and media, dominated by the left, lying to you about everything” he was conditioning his listeners to live in a completely separate epistemological world.”
"There's always, in every situation, incumbents who enjoy certain privileges and advantages, and people outside who want some of those privileges and advantages. For those who want egalitarianism, and who want rule of law, and who want knowledge respected, those are all things that require rules and procedures and institutions, sort of like "depersonalizing" everything. That's the whole advantage of rule of law; it's the rule of law, not of men. So it's impersonal. That's what gives the weak and the excluded a chance: impersonal laws applied equally to everyone. The side that is filled with incumbents, the side that's trying to protect its advantages and privileges, would like to personalize these things, would like to personalize knowledge and tie it to identity."
Roberts, David, Assessing America's information crisis with David Roberts (2018)
"Humans are able to constantly redraw the line between what is and what could be, to enhance the quality of the semiosphere and all life. So what kind of world will our semiosis have wrought in this planetary situation? We are responsible not just for our own, but for the whole plethora of sign systems which have made and continue to make our world able to thrive. Unfortunately, this ability has also allowed us to indulge in intolerable fantasies of domination and institutions of servitude."
Deely, John, "The Human Use of Signs" (1994) p116
21.3 Ecosemiotic disruption
“For a tree that lives, say, 250 years, 13,000 years represents only 52 generations. In an evolutionary sense, the trees don’t yet realize that the megafauna are gone.” Without the megafauna, seed dispersal became far less efficient. The addition of nonnative horses, cows, and other proxy herbivores helped return these plants to their earlier range of distribution. I see this in terms of biosemiotic interactions. All this communication is occurring. It’s as if these plants ask: “Who will eat our fruit and disperse our seeds?” The megafauna responded affirmatively “We will.” After they were removed the horses and cows answered in their absence. The critical aspect here isn’t the species per se, so much as the dialogue, the ecological processes.
Rewilding, ecological restoration, and wilderness engineering is fascinating (homologous in many respects to permaculture, and even industrial ecology). In the attempt to reestablish and sustain healthy ecological relationships we are looking at the whole web of semiosis. Are the signs (resources) that are sought out present in the environment? Are the signs being displayed for others (a large ripe fruit) appropriate to the current community of herbivores? Each element in the environment provides an opportunity for interpretation or misinterpretation. In the Anthropocene we have disrupted not just the biological web, but more fundamentally we have disrupted the semiotic web. Signs are ignored or misinterpreted, and we are not adequately prepared to respond to new signs like pollutants. For example, seabirds ingest plastic debris mistaken for food, or songbirds hitting windows they do not see. As we move forward in a rapidly warming climate, we will have anachronistic legacies as species move northward and upward (higher elevations) at different rates and some not at all - hence the 6th extinction. We need to help species as they re-assemble into new communities. Unfortunately, it’s those we conventionally call invasives that are being given the early advantage as we transport them around the world generally accidentally in our commerce, but ecologists remain timid about deliberately moving those that need help.
Invasive species are able to exploit eco-semiotic disruption for their own benefit, with decidedly mixed results. Sometimes they fill vacant niches, sometimes they decimate natives. I absolutely agree that we need to take an active role in moving vulnerable native species that don’t hitch a ride of their own accord or move too slowly. I don’t know how a framework for biosemiotic adaptation can be implemented (aside from a few papers) but I think it’s the sort of approach that inherently understands that there exists a nature/culture unity within the semiosphere. I’m by no means confident that we can figure all this out. The sheer scale suggests only the most superficial grasp is likely. The Earth may be in human hands, but it will always be a group effort.
In “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Being Domesticated” Colin Groves noted that just as all domestic animals have reduced brain sizes over their wild counterparts, so too has the cranial capacity of humans, during the Holocene continuing to present day, reduced even as body size has remained the same. This parallels our history with the domestication of the dog, which occurred in the late Pleistocene. Groves states that in domestic animals the part of the brain that is reduced the most is the limbic system, “presumably signifying reduced aggression.” Not only the limbic system is affected, but sense organs of sight and hearing are measurably diminished. It is speculated that technological innovations, such as “fire, tools, and culture” may have had a similar effect on humans as domestication did on animals, that is, enabling us to flourish as a species even as our “perceptual universe” diminished. While this may all be accurate, I think we have gained in other areas more than we have lost. And what was lost may yet be recovered.
Bronaugh, Whit, The Trees That Miss The Mammoths (2010)
Janzen, Daniel, and Paul Martin, Neotropical Anachronisms: The Fruits the Gomphotheres Ate (1982)
21.4 Self-fulfilling prophecies result from a lack of vision.
Douglas Rushkoff once noted that images and propaganda provide better clues to understanding Trump than any sort of political platform. Here he considers why we are being "trained by our president and other leaders in the dark art of seeing people from other nations as less than human" and why this means the sort of narrative we build around climate change is important: "The rich and powerful now accept the reality of climate change and are actively betting on it happening. They believe us. But we’re losing the war in that they don’t believe the crisis can be averted. As speculators, they’re more committed to betting on the most likely future instead of investing in the future they’d like to see happen. They need to hear that climate change is about to be defeated. If they don’t get in on climate remediation now, on the ground floor, they’ll miss the opportunity. Net-zero greenhouse emissions is not a pipe dream, but a plausible, positive, attainable goal." There are two things we cannot ignore: the scale of the challenge and the power we have to meet it head on. I think we can and will meet the challenge, energy experts like Dan Kammen convinced me of that several years ago. The challenge we face now is a semiotic one, and that is to be able to see the signs that lead to the future we want to live in.
Rushkoff, Douglas, Selling the Green New Deal With Positivity (2019)
Rushkoff, Douglas, Team Human: Don't have to look like a refugee (2018)
Roberts, David, A former Trump science adviser on embracing renewable energy (2017)
To paraphrase Douglas Rushkoff, "Corporations are more committed to betting on the most likely future instead of investing in the future they’d like to see happen... The more we invest in the inevitability of climate disaster, the more assuredly we bring it on and the more devastating a future we are creating for ourselves." The problem here is that entropy, dissolution, and eventual failure are usually the safest bet, in any contest. This kind of ruthless rationalism sees no vision, purpose, or meaning. So as I see it, it's less about corporations and capitalism than it is about how these systems are devoid of normativity and therefore are symptomatic of the crisis of meaning we are experiencing in the Anthropocene. Our public institutions are failing to fill that need. What we need now is a semiotic analysis of the role of both corporations and public policy.
Q: "Okay, how would a "semiotic analysis" differ from Nathaniel Rich's article, or from Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine/Climate Change vs Capitalism analysis? Short-term "thinking" is an inherent aspect of Capitalism that drives the failure."
A: "Yes, short-term thinking is a problem, but it's not unique to capitalism. The main benefit of a semiotic analysis lies in its explanatory power. Rich's article is really too short to be able to say much. But Naomi Klein actually does provide a semiotic analysis in her writings. Consider her book "No Logo". A logo is an archetypal sign, and semiotics is the study of sign processes. It wouldn't be too difficult to integrate most of her work under the conceptual umbrella of neoliberal semiotics, and doing so would strengthen her approach by making it easier to identify points of intervention for policy solutions. A theoretically unified approach to climate solutions is very important for a coordinated and effective response."
Compare with "limbic capitalism": How business has turned evolution’s handiwork to their own ends by targeting the limbic system, the part of the brain responsible for feeling and quick reaction, to encourage excessive consumption and addiction. Paradoxically, this enables profits from activities that work against survival. And think about how incentives work. Many animals are incentivized (via sexual selection) to produce amazing and costly "honest signals" regarding their physical fitness levels that help them attract mates. However these very same signals often gain the unwanted attention of humans, who prefer to decapitate those who bear them, and thus dis-incentivize the production of such signals. To generalize this and pose a question: What if we worked to preserve and incentivize more of what is good for us, instead of working to consume and incentivize what is bad for us? Understanding semiotic relationships can help to do this by shining a spotlight on the trap of "limbic capitalism". In order for a person to make healthy economic decisions there are several preconditions that need to be met, including access to affordable and healthy products and services, and accurate information concerning them. But even if these conditions are present, the pressure to conform to the expectations of peer groups can influence choice as well. And there are other complicating factors where there may be less choice, as for example how some people in recovery from surgical procedures may become addicted to pain medication. But all this is also premised on the idea that people make rational choices, instead of emotional and impulsive decisions that are easily subverted.
Courtwright, David, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (2019)
21.5 The pursuit of semiotic freedom is not hypocritical
As Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes reminds us, “[abolitionists] wore clothes made of cotton picked by slaves. But that did not make them hypocrites ...it just meant that they were also part of the slave economy, and they knew it. That is why they acted to change the system, not just their clothes.” Despite what Garrett Hardin might have said, the climate crisis is less about a tragedy of the commons and more the result of powerful, carbon-polluting interests who have blocked policy reforms, thereby structuring the choices available to us today so as to preserve their short-term profits. The solution involves making the policy reforms that will free us from this carbon-polluting economy that is constraining our choices. In this regard, climate action is really the pursuit of freedom.
21.6 Lem, Wheeler, and the Great Filter
Norbert Wiener studied how feedback loops can regulate behavior. Considering a planetary civilization in this way, Stanislaw Lem posited a set of feedbacks to maintain stability in the face of continual change and increasing disorder. That is, incremental advances in technology would progressively increase a society’s resilience against disruptive environmental forces such as pandemics, famines, earthquakes, and asteroid strikes. More advances lead to more protection, which promotes more advances still. Lem proposed an “information barrier” beyond which we can no longer efficiently interpret and act on the deluge of information. He then went on to propose much more speculative conclusions, but that initial premise is worth thinking about. Relatedly, S.C. Hickman proposed a "mental tipping point". I have remarked on an "information crisis" with real social and environmental consequences, which I tentatively defined as a “widespread inaccurate conception of what the very nature of information is and how we relate to it, even as we are surrounded by more of it than ever before, with potentially disastrous results”.
In reflecting on Orwell's 1984, George Packer writes "Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division—not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions." This is an important consideration. Not only for politics (and especially as many anticipate redoubled efforts to interfere in 2020) but also for efforts to address issues related to social justice, including ecological destruction. In a social context where truth no longer means what it once did, can we really expect a diverse nation of people to unite together in the pursuit of the common good? How about the smaller fraction of engaged and sustained activists that seek to catalyze change? No one is immune to these corrosive effects. We must ground ourselves in a deeper understanding of truth/information/significance.
On the subject of a planetary civilization I think Lem is broadly right in identifying the main obstacle, the "great filter" through which we must pass in order to realize it: we have to understand information in a much deeper way than the superficial grasp that society has today. But, I think passing through the barrier/filter will look differently than Lem conceived it. As Wendy Wheeler wrote: "It seems clear that we are living through a shift, or development, from an Age of Mechanism to an Age of Information. The latter will, I believe, eventually come to be expanded and better understood as a Third Age of Systems and Semiosis which is characterised by relational and semiotic ontologies.” Lee Billings, The Book No One Read (2015)
Packer, George, Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined (2019)
22. Biosemiotics and semioethics“In what ways does a biosemiotic ethics potentially take us beyond sentience-centered approaches? Does biosemiotic ethics represent a new form of consequentialism, or should it be placed within some other tradition? What ramifications do different views on the semiotic threshold have within the context of normative ethics? Is there (something akin to) normativity in the very constitution of the Umwelt? Does the semiosphere at large (qua biosphere) have intrinsic value? And what, in terms of biosemiosis, is the origin of value?" (Morten Tønnessen, University of Stavanger, Norway)
“This paper argues that a robust semiotic moral theory can take into account the natural ecological networks in which all living things are bound. This presentation of a biosemiotic model of value offers a justificatory strategy for our contemporary moral intuitions concerning our semiotic/moral relationships with living things while also productively pushing our normative ethical boundaries.” (Jonathan Beever, Meaning Matters: The Biosemiotic Basis of Bioethics)
Annette Baier said that trust, a basic relation between particular persons, is the fundamental concept of morality. Life is the most precious thing we have. And the first experience we have as babies is trusting that our mothers will care for us and respond to our needs in a loving way; our fragile bodies soon die if neglected long. Trust is rooted in reciprocity. Without that dependability, trust evaporates. That perspective is rooted in the "ethics of care." Without trust one might conclude that cooperation, and indeed society itself, is impossible. And without society, what need is there for morals?
Past experience informs who we trust and who we don't. And once we place our trust, what do we expect in return? In personal relationships that means one thing. In other forms of relationships yet another. But in both cases, trust seems foundational to the relationship and influences the nature and tone of interactions. Trustworthiness is an important trait, and alleging someone cannot be trusted is a serious accusation. How can you tell who to trust? It's not always an easy thing to evaluate. In personal relationships there are a few criteria: How often is he or she correct? Do they uphold commitments? Do they act justly even when it's inexpedient? More ambiguously, do they have your "best interests" at heart?
As Timothy Taylor pointed out, the 'ethics of care', first developed within feminist philosophy, values shared human capacities, such as intimacy, sympathy, trust, fidelity, and compassion. Such an ethics might elide the distinction between relative and absolute by promoting species-wide common sense. Additionally, the focus on relational capacities bears striking similarity to the biosemiotic focus on relationships. So although it has been suggested that consequentialist ethics is a fit for biosemiosis, the relational emphasis of 'ethics of care' appears to be more appropriate to the dynamic processes under investigation. I believe this perspective may be the form in which a biosemiotic ethics is best understood. As Daniel Dennett said, "How can an aggregation of trillions of selfish, myopic cells discover the unwitting teamwork that turns that dynamic clump into a person who can love, notice, wonder, and keep a promise?"
From “nothing but” you get unexpectedly, as it were, “something more.” What makes a sign a sign is always a relation, and no relation can be directly instantiated to perception. It is invisible to sense and indifferent to distance and location regarding its terminus (though location especially is anything but a matter of indifference for the animal seeking a physical instantiation of its object of desire!). Humans have learned that our relations involve us in the whole of Gaia, not just in the human socio-cultural sphere. That is why Jeff Bernard considered the best name for ethics as we must come to understand it today is precisely as Susan Petrilli has proposed: semioethics. (John Deely)
Regarding her theory, Petrilli explains: "Semioethics is not intended as a new branch of semiotics, but rather it refers to the human capacity for listening to the other, to the capacity for critique, deliberation and responsibility. Following Sebeok’s “global semiotics”, semioethics returns to the origin of semiotics understood as “medical sem(e)iotics” or “symptomatology” and, recalling its ancient vocation to care for life, thematizes the relation between signs and values, semiotics and axiology, semiotics, ethics and pragmatism."
Compassion is the extension of caring feelings of warmth and concern for the other. It's also associated with increased brain activity related to reward, affiliation, and positive affect. Usually we experience these feelings toward close loved persons. Steven Pinker wrote: "The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing. Though people in all cultures can react sympathetically to kin, friends, and babies, they tend to hold back when it comes to larger circles of neighbours, strangers, foreigners, and other sentient beings. In his book The Expanding Circle, the philosopher Peter Singer has argued that over the course of history, people have enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value as they value their own. An interesting question is what inflated the empathy circle."
Pinker points out "a good candidate is the expansion of literacy" which allows greater perspective-taking. We can see signs in the way others see signs, understand how others derive meaning and significance in their lives, and relate those meanings to our own. So when we empathize, are we really being altruistic? Of course we are (as Frans de Waal has pointed out numerous times). But we are also helping ourselves by expanding our imaginations, and making our own minds richer. It sounds trite, but often the best way to help ourselves really is through expanding our circle of empathy, extending compassion, and helping others.
Ricard, Matthieu, Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training (2013)
Rosin, Hanna, The End of Empathy (2019)
Pinker, Steven Extract: The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011)
de Waal, Frans "The Bonobo and the Atheist" (2014)
22.1 Invidious consumption
The development of Thorstein Veblen's sociology of conspicuous consumption produced the term “invidious consumption”, the ostentatious consumption of goods that is meant to provoke the envy of other people. To the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means of either attaining or maintaining a given social status. When we try to catch the biggest fish or bag the moose with the biggest rack, what used to be a survival advantage for these animals becomes a liability. And in just a few generations we’ve managed to create powerful selective forces against those magnificent traits. Bluefin tuna are probably the most worrisome of the large fish we are losing, but the beluga sturgeon has got to be one of the most charismatic. Trophy fishing for large female breeding halibut in Alaska has also depleted these fish.
23. Deception, The Rectification of Names, and the Tao Te ChingUmberto Eco wrote "Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all." For example, consider how deception operates within a political economy. Simply convince citizens to respond to the wrong signs. For example, if they want a prosperous nation, but they are told that the signs they traditionally associated with prosperity (like civil service) should be exchanged for new signs (like bread and circuses), then their nation will not be prosperous. The misalignment of representamen (bread and circuses) and object (prosperity) is complete, to the detriment of the interpretants (citizens), to use the terminology of Peircean semiotics. In order to rectify that, the correct representamen must be used.
When Confucius was asked what he would do if he was a governor he said he would "rectify the names" to make words correspond to reality, a doctrine that originated with Mozi (470–391BC) and the Chinese school of logicians. Without such accordance between designations and relationships, it was argued that social harmony would collapse and "undertakings would not be completed." The triadic relationship between sign, object, and interpretant must hold valid. Zhuangzi made a related comment on designations, but like Umberto Eco, his point was that it is not the names that matter, but the objects that they represent.
"If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success."Signs have three parts, a signifier or representamen (Magritte’s painting), which is the actual form of the sign, a signified or object (an actual pipe), which is what the sign represents, and an interpretant (the meaning that’s interpreted), which is what an interpreter makes of the sign. Imagine a street light at an intersection turning red and several cars stopping. The red light of the traffic light is the representamen (signifier), the act of cars stopping is the object (signified), and the idea that a red light is a command for vehicles to stop is the interpretant.
— Confucius, Analects, Book XIII, Chapter 3, verses 4–7, translated by James Legge
"Nets are for catching fish; after one gets the fish, one forgets the net. Traps are for catching rabbits; after one gets the rabbit, one forgets the trap. Words are for getting meaning; after one gets the meaning, one forgets the words. Where can I find people who have forgotten words, and have a word with them?"
— Zhuangzi, Ch. 26
Even the first lines of the Tao Te Ching identifies a semiotic relationship: "The Tao that can be told of is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name." It doesn't take much effort to rewrite this as "The sign is not that which is signified; The representamem is not the object thereby represented." The takeaway? The relationship between representamen and object, as identified by the interpretant, is not one-to-one. As John Deely said in A Sign is What?, “After all, even when we try to express in words what a thing is, it is our understanding of the thing that we express, not purely and simply the thing itself."
"When someone points his finger at the moon to show it to someone else, guided by the finger, that person should see the moon. If he looks at the finger instead and mistakes it for the moon, he loses not only the moon but the finger also." (Shurangama) "When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger" (Confucius) "Truth is like the moon in the sky and language is like the finger that points to the moon. A finger can point out where the moon is, but the finger is not the truth." (Huìnéng) Semiotics is the study of the wise person, their finger, and the moon (which might be just another finger, per 'infinite semiosis').
There is a scholastic adage that "action is coextensive with being," in the sense that a being must act in order to develop or even maintain its being. The consequence is that we are able to know any being only and insofar as we become aware of its activity. There is a passing similarity here with Wang Yangming's theory of the "unity of knowledge and action," probably the most well-known aspect of Wang’s philosophy.
23.1 Semiotics, nihilism, emptiness, and the folly of meaning-making
Q: "Well since we live in the age of nihilism almost every project is under the sign of nihil..."
A: Semiotics is the study of meaning-making. It asks the question: How is it possible for anything to have significance of any kind? There is an ancient pedigree of semiotic investigations. These investigations into meaning making are even "inhuman", one might say, insofar as semiosis predates us (and likely will postdate us as well). It’s generally accepted that meaning and ethics are relative, that is to say without a “subject” to whom a thing relates, meaning has no intrinsic relevance at all. The same is true for reality. Semiotics has no difficulty with this. But it pulls a trick. It affirms that while, yes, in a dualistic Cartesian conception, reality, ethics, and meaning certainly cannot exist, but in a monistic nature-culture (in the Rosi Braidotti posthuman sense) it does. Semiotics both decenters the human, and reconceives the mind/matter relationship, confronting both anthropocentrism and dualism head on. To get to the point, there's no coup de grâce for the doctrine of signs in nihilism, rather a surprising confirmation.
Consider Nansen: "The Way is not a matter of knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion; not knowing is confusion. When you have really reached the true Way beyond doubt, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can it be talked about on the level of right and wrong?" It may be suggested that Nansen is talking about infinite semiosis (dependent origination) and fallibilism, in the Peircean sense, in which knowing is always relative and prone to delusion. Furthermore, Peirce's category of "firstness" is likely the specific character of the "Way" being described here. "Those who seek the truth by means of intellect and learning only get further and further away from it. Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate." (The Zen Teachings of Huang Po : On the Transmission of Mind (1958) by John Blofeld) “The Great Sage preached the Law of Emptiness in order to free men from all personal views. If one still holds the view that Emptiness exists, Such a person the Buddhas will not transform." (The Cheng-kuan lun (Treatise on the Correct View) [also called Chung lun (Madhyamika sastra)]) Compare with the Wúménguān: "The great path has no gates, thousands of roads enter it. When one passes through this gateless gate he walks freely between Heaven and Earth." Perhaps Heaven and Earth are the object and representamen, and the gateless gate is the interpretant. But who can say?
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| Yemeni artist Boushra Almutawakel, 'What if' (2008) |
“The biosphere, as well as the semiosphere, is built upon expectations. One important meaning of legs (i.e. their function) is 'for walking'. The child in the womb has never walked, yet biological life incorporates into its processes legs and the expectation of precisely such a relation with the Earth yet to come... Expectations are an important part of what it means to be alive. No life walks or crawls or swims around expecting nothing. We all expect the Earth to be there when we put a foot out to walk or a fin to swim. We all expect the air to be there to breathe each day... In what more detailed sense might it be right to say that we, and all living organisms, are 'expecting the Earth'? What sort of expectations might this involve?"Earlier in her book, Wheeler made a connection few have made clearer: environmental consciousness has been fighting the “nominalist turn of mind” for a long time:
"It seems clear that we are living through a shift, or development, from an Age of Mechanism to an Age of Information. The latter will, I believe, eventually come to be expanded and better understood as a Third Age of Systems and Semiosis which is characterised by relational and semiotic ontologies.” (66)
"Among the things associated with a nominalist turn of mind are individualism, self-interest (from the idea that truth claims are simply self-interested human fictions), utilitarian philosophies of rational self-interest, the denial of universals (such as relations) as real, and radical scepticism. ...Nominalists believe 'that nature and experience are free of values, and a variety of choices of ends is consistent with the same understanding of facts'. For nominalists, community is merely an aggregate of individuals and the role of the state (as in Thomas Hobbes' philosophy) is simply to 'mediate antagonism and provide the stable conditions for the pursuit of individual self-interest'. Under a nominalist dispensation there is no morality or ethical principle discernible in the world that is distinct from human impositions of fictions, not even the principle of natural and cultural flourishing or the obviously telic behaviors of living things. This failure to recognise any teleological principle of growth and development, any meaning-making, in living organisms, plus the earth-hatred which nominalist doctrine would come to engender, was very bad news for any potential environmental consciousness concerning human relation to the rest of creation. Not least, the assumption that organisms were nothing more than mechanisms would blind a nominalist metaphysics to the relational structurations of difference and similarity... As in nature, so in culture, these relations afforded forms of discovery. Nominalist metaphysics would not be able to see that." (50-51)Utopian visions always address social problems, and, after the start of the Industrial Revolution, often environmental problems as well. And in so doing assume a diagnosis can be made and a cure prescribed in most instances. This descriptive/prescriptive dynamic is either explicit or implied. In this light, a dystopia is a misdiagnosis or mistreatment, as often as it is the result of malign forces at work. An understanding of the causal processes in operation is always assumed. To do this we would need to find the "hidden patterns" in life, and then we would need to ask counterfactual questions, which are a cornerstone of scientific thought - that is, to inquire how the causal relationships would change given some kind of intervention. Our ability to understand, but also intervene and change our patterns, is critical. In any utopia worthy of the name, we must be able to say “Perhaps I could have done better." Utopia requires the ability to sense, to question, and to improve, because a state of perfect perfection is inherently unknowable (if not nonexistent). On this account Utopia, insofar as we can speak of it, would require a high degree of semiotic freedom.
“Human creativity involves a new degree of semiotic freedom, greater capacity both for habit-breaking and for new habit-taking. ...[However], we might say that to the extent that forms of social, cultural, and economic organization ‘rivet’ the human to an umwelt, and close the capacity for play and exploration, we are witnessing a diminution of precisely the semiotic freedom by which the human animal is existentially marked out.” (44)
Creating a retrospective like this, describing a successful project, is effective at mobilising large groups of people to make it a success. As noted by anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, describe the project as a fait accompli, and if the description is compelling and exciting enough, if others are inspired by it to make it happen, the resources to do so often follow. Recall John Deely wrote "the future beckons the present". The challenge we face is to be able to see the signs that lead to the future we want to live in. And Wendy Wheeler, who noted that we are always expecting the future.
Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, A Message From the Future (2019)
Doctorow, Cory A short film about the "Green New Deal Decade" (2019)
Deely, John, International Handbook of Semiotics: From Semiosis to Semioethics (2015)
25. Biosemiotics, reductionism, emergence, synergism, and evolutionary transitions
Q: Is semiotics "reductionism of everything to signs" or is it compatible with observed emergent and synergistic effects? Is it capable of illuminating how superorganisms composed of numerous individual parts could have evolved (in fact are evolving) over time?
A: Peter Corning's description of the 'synergism hypothesis' and Jesper Hoffmeyer's biosemiotic concept of 'semiotic freedom' appear to have a clear relationship. As Corning and Eörs Szathmáry describe in "Synergistic Selection" (2015) synergies become causes of differential selection. This appears to be due in no small part to the ability of synergies to increase semiotic freedom. They write "...new forms of information have played a key role in the emergence of complexity at every level, from DNA coding sequences in the genome to pheromone “signals” in social insects, the evolution of language in humankind, and (now) the binary/digital code of the internet age." Wendy Wheeler writes similarly: "The logic of evolution, both natural and cultural, is informational or, more precisely, semiotic; it produces a tendency not to perfection but to greater extents of 'semiotic freedom' or semiotic abstraction and complexity."
25.1 John Deely, evolution, and physiosemiosis
"Up to the present evolution has been understood mainly as building up from below through individual interactions structures increasingly complex. I have a suspicion that this picture is incomplete in just the way that requires semiosis. For the action of signs is distinctive as compared with the action of things in that the action of things takes place only among actual physical existents, whereas semiosis requires at any given time only that two out of the three related elements actually exist. In physical interactions always the past shapes the future, but in semiosic interactions there is an influence of the future upon the present and even upon the past as bearing on the present, so to speak. My suspicion is that wherever you have evidence of such an influence you have semiosis, an action of signs. And since we can see from the semiosis of animal life that the very possibility of semiosis in general is rooted in the indifference of relation to its subjective ground on the one side and to the physical unreality of its object on the other side, I venture to guess that a physiosemiosis will prove to be at the heart of evolution.”
Deely, John, A Sign is What? (2004)
25.2 Alien semiosis: xenosemiotics
Steven Craig Hickman explored a notion in connection with Avi Loeb’s hypothesis: "As Avi Loeb of Harvard surmises humans may be following the path of previous alien civilizations in our galaxy, due to Fermi’s Paradox we should’ve made contact with other advanced intelligent species in the cosmos long ago, but the fact that this has yet to happen brings us to one possibility: advanced intelligence produces short-term thinking, which in turn accelerates the very self-lacerating forces and wounds which eventually kill them. This could entail any number of things from resource depletion, wars, over-population, climate change impact, disease, famine, etc. ...In many ways one feels as if this undetermined anxiety below the surface of life on this planet were accelerating toward not only a climate tipping point, but a mental tipping point..."
Hickman, Steven Craig, Under the Sign of Erasure (2019)
25.3 E.O. Wilson and semiotics
In his most recent book, Genesis: The deep origin of societies, E.O. Wilson wrote: “All questions of philosophy that address the human condition come down to three: what are we, what created us, and what do we wish ultimately to become. The all important answer to the third question, the destiny we seek, requires an accurate answer to the first two. ... while science and it’s attendant technology have grown exponentially, they have only recently begun to address the meaning of human existence in an objective and persuasive manner. For most of history, organized religions have claimed sovereignty over the meaning of human existence.” And in a recent interview he said “[The need to bridge the arts and sciences] is an infinitely important subject, one that I’ve only recently begun to monitor.” Wilson has been referenced by semioticians, who have been quick to point out blind spots in his earlier work, but his recognition of the importance of meaning as a subject (as well as consilience between the humanities and sciences) is becoming increasingly prominent in his later writing.
By the Book, Edward O. Wilson (2019)
26. The germ theory, information, and biosemiotics
Under the Cartesian schema, information could only be one of two things: either a relation proper only to the mind, in which case it was scientifically unexaminable, or a pure product of material interactions, in which case it was not truly “information of” something, but merely whatever it happened itself to materially be (e.g., a catalyst, an agonist, etc.).
When Wilhelm Johannsen (1857–1927) introduced the “gene” concept in 1909 which assigned a property to genes that was in essence informational, he opened up the “problem of information” in a science that, since Descartes, had nothing but success in dealing with things that acted merely as what they were materially. Genes act both as what they are materially and what they are not, but functionally “stand for”. Within developing embryos information exchange takes place in order for cells to differentiate into the structures of arms, brains, livers and limbs. How do genes interact with cellular material to result in the development of these novel structures, when there is only the genes and the material? "Information” per se, and not merely its physical something, had to be accounted for by science.
For Descartes, animals were not conscious agents. Yet today we know the natural world is full of subjective agents whose experiences lead them to act in ways that materially change that world. In the same way, for Francis Crick, genetic information was just the sequence of nucleotides themselves. Yet today we have a greater understanding of the "functional relation" of those nucleotides to the system for which they serve as sequences of code. We must look at “information-bearing” things not in their material isolation, but also in their "functional relation" to the system that makes use of them as signs, in order to see how they can be both “nothing but themselves” and “standing for something other than themselves” in the operation of that system. Exploring this logic of relations within the scientific paradigm is the study of biosemiotics.
Favareau, Donald, Essential Readings in Biosemiotics (2010)
Pollan, Michael, The Intelligent Plant (2013)
27. Cultural Implications
• Potentially, this is the age of biosemiotics. There is now a consolidated and focused literature in the field.Source: Paul Cobley, “Cultural Implications of Biosemiotics” (2016). Cobley delivered a keynote address at the Semiotic Society of America 2008 conference, in Houston, which drew participants from 23 nations. This address developed into an article published in 2010 and subsequently the 2016 book. Cobley is president of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (since 2014).
• Semiotics holds the key to understanding culture, but semiotics’ project is most fully realized on a biosemiotic basis.
• Humans are certainly ‘special’, but they are neither simply ‘different in kind’ from the rest of nature or ‘different in degree’. Humans’ modelling explains the foundations of culture.
• The human’s agency is not unique in the natural world. The human is a natural subject.
• While, ethics might be sustained in the short-term by a willed programme, ethics is a natural phenomenon arising out of human modelling.
• Humans are subject to constraints. The nature of these constraints shapes human evolution but can curb some freedoms while producing specific cultural results.
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| The West-Door of Moria, by Darrell Sweet |
"Imagine you suddenly hear a loud and prolonged steam whistle. You instinctively try to get away; your hands go to your ears. Unable to shut out the piercing sound, you jump up and seek to make your escape by the door. But the instant you open the door the whistle ceases. Much relieved, you shut the door. No sooner, however, have you done so than the whistle recommences. You ask yourself whether the shutting of the door had anything to do with it; and once more open the mysterious portal. As you open it, the sound ceases.
"Now you are thinking. That is, you are aware of learning, or of going through a process by which a phenomenon is found to be governed by a rule, or has a general knowable way of behaving. You find that one action is the means, or middle, for bringing about another result. The very word “means” signifies something which is in the middle between two others. Moreover, this state of mind, or thought, is a sense of learning, and learning is the means by which we pass from ignorance to knowledge."
For comparison, Pavlov's experiments demonstrated classical conditioning, which involves involuntary behavior. At the sound of the bell, Pavlov's dogs salivated involuntarily. The example above seems more like operant conditioning, which involves a voluntary choice. This is also described in "Semiotics of Animals in Culture: Zoosemiotics 2.0" (2018) Indeed, when you ask why any phenomena occurs in a particular way, you are thinking. You can also ask how it is possible that you are even able to discern such a causal relation to begin with.
Winfried Nöth: “[W]hat pedagogy can learn from biosemiotics is that learning is an essentially semiotic process, a process of semiosis, as Peirce says it, omnipresent not only in human culture but also in nature, in animals, organisms of any kind, and even in plants. This insight can help to find a way out of the dilemmas of anthropocentrism in education, helping humans find their place in the universe during times of ecological crises.” Education has the ability to "rearrange the jigsaw puzzle" of views and attitudes. As Peirce noted, "learning is the means by which we pass from ignorance to knowledge". Peirce suggested the term “fallibilism” so that we remain open to the possibility of new interpretations. It can be overwhelming at times, but for those who fearlessly persevere, the journey is rewarding.
"Only recently has a formal amalgamation of semiotics learning theory and education occurred, this has been called edusemiotics. A semiotic view of education sees it as a process of continuous inquiry, exploration, with interactions and relationships between students, teachers, and environments. Semiotics hasn't worked its way into mainstream education yet and it's still a relatively new branch of semiotics however a small but dedicated group of researchers is working really hard to bring the practical and philosophical implications of edusemiotics into the light."
Edusemiotics: Living and learning with signs (2016)
29. Semioethics and activism in Alaska
The coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the birthing and calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou Herd, the main source of sustenance for the Gwich’in Nation that stretches between Northeastern Alaska and into Canada. In Gwich’in it is called ‘Iizhik gwats’an gwandaii goodlit’ or the ‘Sacred Place Where Life Begins’. You can describe something as sacred when it is regarded as too important to be changed or interfered with. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone, fertility is important to survival. And yet the coastal plain remains vulnerable to development and has been proposed for oil drilling, threatening the sustainability of an entire way of living.
Alaska is just one corner of the planet. Globally, the relationship humans have with the Earth and all life is undergoing a period of rapid change, and as a species we do not fully appreciate the consequences this will have for ourselves and future generations. In response, a global alliance that takes the name “Defend the Sacred” has formed to draw attention to these issues and spur a response that is commensurate to the threat. The Defend the Sacred Alaska chapter has been working tirelessly in this regard for the ecosystem and the people who call the coastal plain their home.
I see a connection here between the work of groups like Defend the Sacred, that engage with these issues of social and environmental justice, and what Susan Petrilli calls “semioethics.” Ethical movements place significant attention on the quality of relationships, communication, and interaction, and these are the same considerations that Petrilli takes up in describing how we are “structured interrelationally with other bodies” and therefore have a radical responsibility toward life.
Wilson Justin often remarked on the important role that language plays in addressing contemporary problems. I was reminded of this when I read Petrilli's paper, where she echoes this understanding: “The sign network involves what we know as the semiosphere constructed by humankind, in other words, culture with its signs, symbols, artifacts, etc.; but global semiotics teaches us that the semiosphere is far broader than the sphere of human culture, and in fact coincides with the great biosphere… semioethics pushes this awareness even farther by relating semiosis to values and focusing on the question of responsibility, of radical, inescapable responsibility inscribed in our bodies insofar as we are ‘semiotic animals’, the human capacity for responsibility for life over the entire planet.”
Source: Susan Petrilli, Semioethics, subjectivity and communication (2004)
30. A relationship to a relationship; an ontology of metarelations, or biosemiotic ontology
Semiosis is about bringing oneself "in relation to a relation." Organisms base their survival on the capacity for anticipation – i.e. for interpreting events or structural configurations as signs for one thing or another. This "relative being" is what evolution persistently optimizes. (Sign processes - or semiosis - are processes whereby something refers to something else, involving interpretation, as when an animal is seized by alarm upon the smell of smoke. The smoke in this case acts as a sign vehicle that provokes a sense of danger causing the animal to flee.) Relative being is also another name for relational ontology, regarding it's importance, Peirce wrote "Intuition is the regarding of the abstract in a concrete form, by the realistic hypostatization of relations; that is the one sole method of valuable thought... The true precept is not to abstain from hypostatization, but to do it intelligently." Relational ontologies are an important part of many indigenous worldviews.
Hoffmeyer identifies the implications: "By accepting the reality of relative being – and thus of semiotic causation – we not only open up an explanatory space for a reconciliation of human semiotic existence with that of organic existence in general, but we are also immediately brought to see the semiosphere as an emergent process nourished by the interpretative interaction of countless organisms and cells – or in other words, by biosemiosis." This makes me wonder: if thinking about thinking is metacognition, then is relating to relating a metarelation? Peirce called it the interpretant. For Deely, suprasubjectivity was the term for this feature that is essential to and constitutive of the purely relative. It is this sort of relation, within an ontology of relationships, that in many ways defines life.
John Deely provides a basis for re-conceptualizing how humans exist within their environment. Understanding relation in the reality of its suprasubjective character is the conditio sine qua non for achieving an understanding of semiosis, which occurs in both plants (‘phytosemiosis’) and physical nature (‘physiosemiosis’), as well as among all animals (generically ‘zoösemiosis’) and human animals (species-specifically ‘anthroposemiosis’). The concept of suprasubjectivity was a means by which Charles Sanders Peirce attempted to resolve (and transcend) an on-going philosophical dispute between those who characterize existence as mind-dependent (ens rationis) and those who characterize it as mind-independent being (ens reale), i.e., between idealist and realist schools of thought. Such an approach tries to reconcile “scientific” (realist/objective) knowledge with humanities subjects (idealist/subjective) interpretations of the world. From a suprasubjective position the concept of a sign is “neither strictly subjective, neither strictly objective.”
As Paul Bains wrote, "We are semiotic, existential territories rather than brains in vats, and these territories or ecologies are not contained within our physical anatomy, nor are they known only as immanent representations. The question becomes this: Where does your cognition or subjectivity terminate if it is a suprasubjective process and not a stable substance? The “self” becomes a sign relation or interpretant rather than an unrelated ontological entity."
John Deely: "Any such network of relations by which an animal finds its way is, precisely, a “semiotic web”, as Sebeok famously termed the phenomenon, without which the animal could not survive. A physical stimulus, a sound, let us say the howl of a wolf, to another wolf may be a sign of lust, while to a sheep that same howl is a signal of danger. What takes place inside the respective animals serves to relate them respectively, the one positively, the other negatively, to the source of the sound which is emphatically external to and independent of them both. Inside and outside are correlated, so far as the animal’s orientation is involved. In other words, we confront here one of the irreducible situations of relation in its contrast to the subjectivity of all that separates a given individual organism from the rest of the environment, as well as the various components of the environment from one another in their individual physical being. We confront here relation in what is distinctive of it as it enters into and forms the fabric of experience."
Deely, John, Objective reality and the physical world: relation as key to understanding semiosis (2015)
Deely, John, The Semiotic Animal (2003)
Tredinnick-Rowe, John, "Can semiotics be used to drive paradigm changes in medical education?" (2018)
Selected Books:
Hoffmeyer, Jesper "Signs of Meaning in the Universe," (1996)
Deely, John "Four Ages of Understanding" (2001)
Wheeler, Wendy, "The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics, and the evolution of Culture" (2006)
Favareau, Donald (ed.), Essential Readings in Biosemiotics (2010)
Deacon, Terrence, "Incomplete Nature" (2011)
Kohn, Eduardo, How Forests Think (2013)
Wheeler, Wendy, Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics (2016)
Jeremy Sherman, "Neither Ghost Nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves" (2017)
References:
1 Hoffmeyer, Jesper "Signs of Meaning in the Universe," p90 (1996)
2 Braidotti, Rosi, Posthuman, All Too Human: The Memoirs and Aspirations of a Posthumanist (2017)
3 Ginsburg, Daniel, https://twitter.com/nemaveze/status/998649863813332992 (2018)
4 Deacon, Terrence, Terrence Deacon: Incomplete Nature, How Mind Emerged From Matter (2018)
5 Hoffmeyer, Jesper, A Biosemiotic Approach to the Question of Meaning and Semiotic Scaffolding of living systems (2010 and 2008)
6 Hoffmeyer, Jesper, Epilogue: Biology is immature biosemiotics (2008)
7 Hoffmeyer, Jesper, Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs (2013)
8 Hayles, N. Katherine, Unthought Meets The Assemblage Brain (2018)
9 Deacon, Terrence, Steps to a Science of Biosemiotics (2015)
0 Favareau, Donald (ed.), Essential Readings in Biosemiotics (2010) [pdf]
0 Trifonas, Peter Pericles (ed.), International Handbook of Semiotics (2015) [pdf]
0 Emmeche, Claus A biosemiotic note on organisms, animals, machines, cyborgs, and the quasi-autonomy of robots (2007)
0 Coyne, Richard What is Pansemiotics? (2018)
0 Puumeister, Ott and Andreas Ventsel, Biopolitics Meets Biosemiotics (2017)
0 Doyle, Bob, Review of Incomplete Nature in Bioscience (March 2012)
0 Dennett, Daniel, Aching Voids and Making Voids (2014)
0 Gryder, Berkley, Chase Nelson, and Samuel Shepard, Biosemiotic Entropy of the Genome (2013)
0 Nöth, Winfried, Semiotic Machines (2002)
0 Wheeler, Wendy, Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics (2016)
0 Wheeler, Wendy, Interview on Biosemiotic Ethics with Wendy Wheeler (2017)
0 Wheeler, Wendy, John Deely, Donald Favareau, Kalevi Kull, Terrence Deacon, Jesper Hoffmeyer, and Søren Brier. University of Oregon Conference on Biosemiotics and Culture (2013)
0 Deely, John, A Sign is What? (2004)
0 Deely, John "Four Ages of Understanding" (2001)
0 Nature, Natural Born Hustlers (Disguise, illusion, duplicity and mimicry in nature.)
0 Borges, Priscila, The Sign Tree, see also video and blog (2007)
0 Hendlin, Yogi, I Am A Fake Loop (2018)
"Eighteenth Annual Biosemiotics Gathering Abstract Booklet" (2018) [videos]
"Gatherings in Biosemiotics 2017" (2017)
"I want to live where soul meets body, And let the sun wrap its arms around me,
Bathe my skin in water cool and cleansing, And feel what it's like to be new."
Song: "Soul Meets Body" by Death Cab for Cutie
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