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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!