Biosemiotics and the shift from reduction to emergence.

1.What shift?

2.What is biosemiotics ?

3.So what?

A Spectre is haunting science – the spectre of Meaning. All the powers of old style reductionism have been exerted for centuries to exorcise this Spectre but have failed. The

time is right for those who believe that Meaning is a primordial feature of nature to openly publish their views.

Pickering (2007)

Meaning points both ways.

THOUGHTTHOUGHT

MeaningMeaningMeaningMeaningMental world of Mental world of

experience experience

Physical world of

objects and events

SENSATION ACTION

PERCEPTION PLANNING

ATTENTION

MEMORY

THOUGHT

1.

What shift?

What is leading when we approach consciousness by means of the non-linear dynamics of interconnectivity and strange attractors?

Has the dynamic, open flow of consciousness been explained in quantitative, physical terms?

Or has there perhaps been an intriguing sea-change in much of contemporary science, such that, after several hundred years of specific concentration on the

linear and the inanimate, we are now beginning to seek out those physical properties of nature that actually mirror the form of our own existence?

Harry Hunt (1995)On the Nature of Consciousness

Western origins of science:

Thales: Beyond myths

Plato: Underlying principles

Aristotle: Systematic observation

A recurring issue: types and domains of causality

The pre-modern Universe was organic

The modern universe was mechanistic

Mechanism was enough for Haeckel:

The great abstract law of mechanical causalitynow rules the entire universe, as it does the mind of man.

Ernst Haeckel (1899) The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century.

Mechanism was not enough for James:

The spiritualistic reader may nevertheless believe in the soul if he will; whilst the positivistic one who wishes to give a tinge of mystery to the expression of his positivism can continue to say that nature in her unfathomable designs has mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's

being, but how or why, no mortal may ever know.

William James (1890)Principles of Psychology

Albert Einstein. 1879 - 1955

Mechanism was enough for Albert Einstein

On March 21, 1955, he knew he was dying and wrote to the children of his lifelong friend Michele Besso, who had just died:

And now he has preceded me briefly in bidding farewell to this strange world. This signifies nothing. For us believing physicists,

the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.

Bertrand Russell1872 - 1970

Mechanism was enough for Russell

Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow sure doom falls,pitiless and dark.

Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way ....

Alfred North Whitehead1861 - 1947

Mechanism was not enough for Whitehead:

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Science is the New Religion

Period Years ago Technology Logos

Prehistoric 50000 Tools DreamAncient 5000 Structures MythModern 500 Energy LawPostmodern 50 Information Code

Codes and signs can be reflexive.

I have a hunch that the universe is built like an enormous feedback loop, a loop in which we contribute to the ongoing creation of not just

the present and the future but the past as well. J.A. Wheeler

The postmodern universe is reflexive

The transition from reduction to emergence is a postmodern shift in science.

The shift allows human beings to see themselves as creative organisms rather than as alienated mechanisms.

… human beings are much more like the cosmos than we thought when we conceived it as a dead, inert, materialistic thing. 

In other words, the cosmos becomes much more like us.

Charles Jencks (2003)Attributed here: http://www.naturalgenesis.net/

… the conception of psychological science commonly shared within the discipline is historically frozen, and is endangered by its isolation

from the major intellectual and global transformations of the last half century.

Kenneth Gergen (2001) Psychological science in a postmodern context.

A revolution is in process in our view of the cosmos. Rather than expiring as mandated by the second law of thermodynamics, the scientists represented here, Harold Morowitz, Paul Davies, Stuart Kauffman, Ian Stewart and many others, find a natural tendency to organize

into nested orders of sentience.

Gregersen (2003) From Complexity to Life: On the Emergence of Life and Meaning.

Evolution passes from Sentience to Signification.

Signification is what make human consciousness reflexive.

Semiotics is the science of signification

2.

What is Biosemiotics?

Traditions of semiotics.

European American

Saussure Peirce

Barthes Mead

Derrida Morris

Ferdinand deSaussure 1857 – 1913

Saussure’s synchronic approach.

Signification is arbitrary

Peirce's diachronic approach:

Mental life is chained signification.

Biosemiotics is the natural history of signification

Peirce Von Uexküll Hoffmeyer

1839 - 1914 + 1864-1944 = Alive & well

Semiotics Biology Biosemiotics

3.

So what?

Biosemiotics is about types and domains of causality.

For Peirce, a Monist, there was only one domain.

Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and

throughout the purely physical world …

Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there.

Peirce

For Peirce, mental continuity is semiotic:

To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in another,

or that all thought is in signs.

James and Peirce, the founders of Pragmatism, proposed that knowledge appears in unpredictable, evolutionary interaction.

Dewey: pragmatism releases science from the grip of Plato.

Rorty: ‘Truths are Made, not Found’

Objects are predictable while subjects are not,

because

thought is a property of experiencing subjects.

Merleau-Ponty began with experience:

To return to things themselves is to return to that world that precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematisation is an

abstract and derivative sign-language.

Merleau-Ponty (1945)Phenomenology of Perception, preface.

Merleau-Ponty ended, guided by Whitehead, with a process ontology:

“ … process is what is given … there is no Nature at an instant

… Life is not Substance.”

Merleau-Ponty (1995)La Nature

Peirce, Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead, suggest the philosophical foundations for the shift to emergence:

Knower and known are mutually constituitive.

The ultimate constituents of Nature are subjects, not objects.

The world is full of subjects and something must have created them. But latent within that ‘something’ there must, inevitably, be ‘someone’. Subjectivity has its roots in the cosmos and, at the end of the day, the repression of this aspect of our

world is not a viable proposition.

Hoffmeyer (1996)Signs of Meaning in the Universe, page 57

Biosemiotics provides a conceptual vocabulary for

discussing the mutuality of the knower and the known,

and the continuity of biology and culture.

Biosemiotics transcends dualism by suggesting that intentionality is universal:

Meaning points both ways

Is Biosemiotics a science?

Who cares?

Be Pragmatic.

If it’s helpful, use it.

Thanks for your attention!