Biosemiotics

Our path in this search to understand the life processes has led us, as biologists, to a semiotic view. Life processes are not only significant for the organisms they involve. Signification, meaning, interpretation and information are not just concepts used and constructed by humans for describing such processes. We conclude that life processes themselves, by their very nature, are meaning-making, informational processes, that is, sign processes (semioses), and thus can be fruitfully understood within a semiotic perspective.

Biosemiotics is an interdisciplinary research agenda investigating the myriad forms of communication and signification found in and between living systems. It is thus the study of representation, meaning, sense, and the biological significance of codes and sign processes, from genetic code sequences to intercellular signaling processes to animal display behavior to human semiotic artifacts such as language and abstract symbolic thought.

Such sign processes appear ubiquitously in the literature on biological systems. Up until very recently, however, it had been implicitly assumed that the use of such terms as “message” “signal” “code” and “sign” was ultimately metaphoric, and that such terms could someday effectively be reduced to the mere chemical and physical interactions underlying such processes. As the prospects for such a reduction become increasingly untenable, even in theory, the interdisciplinary research project of biosemiotics is attempting to re-open the dialogue across the life sciences – as well as between the life sciences and the humanities – regarding what, precisely, such ineliminable terms as “meaning” and “significance” might refer to in the context of living, complex adaptive systems.

... What all schools of biosemiotics have in common is the idea that semiosis is fundamental to life, that all living systems are semiotic systems.

Today, there are at least two basic principles, or postulates, that are accepted by most biosemioticians and that represent a sort of 'minimal unity' in biosemiotics.

(1) The first postulate is the idea that semiosis is unique to life, i.e. that it does not exist in inanimate matter. This sharply differentiates biosemiotics from pansemiotics, the doctrine that accepts the existence of semiosis even in the physical world. And it also differentiates it from physicalism, the doctrine that denies the existence of semiosis both in the physical world and in the organic world.

(2) The second postulate is the idea that semiosis and meaning are natural entities. This sharply divides biosemiotics from the doctrine of 'intelligent design', and from all other doctrines that maintain that the origin of life on Earth was necessarily the product of a supernatural agency.

Life is Semiosis

The basic thesis of biosemiotics, the basis for a turning-point in contemporary biology, may seem very simple – semiotics or semiosis, the processes of signs coding, interpreting of the meaning, is another fundamental principle of life (Sebeok 1968, Barbieri 2002, 2008a, 2008d). Semiosis is not a process containing a narrow range of phenomena such as human communication, human language. It is a universal principle underlying the basic processes of life: “Semiotics is a science of signs, and biological semiotics, or biosemiotics, is a new field of research which originated as a study of semiotic phenomena in animals and then it spread on all living organisms. The aim of biosemiotics is an idea that all living organisms are semiotic systems and that semiosis is not a side effect, but the fundamental process of life” (Barbieri 2006). This means that it is not sufficient to define living systems, living organisms in terms of reproduction and metabolism (or, alternatively, as autopoietic systems). Processes of signs interpretation, information coding and decoding appear on every level of the life organization. Human or animal communication or information coding on the genes level are just specific cases of semiosis in living organisms. The development of the organism, or the process of epigenesis, is a process of information interpretation, and we can not understand what the life is if we do not understand this process. This is why semiosis (because this is the process of semiosis) is the crucial principle of life.

Any biological system is a web of linked recognition processes. The cell, often considered a basic unit of life, has to rely upon energy from its surroundings to keep its metabolism going, and useful energy, substances containing useful energy, has to be distinguished from detrimental substances or influences which are too energetic and may destroy the internal workings of the cell. Conceptually, the fundamental border between cell and non-cell, or self and non-self, is a border that physically is (as if) realized by the membrane of the cell, but that is functionally dependent upon recognition processes and thus structured as a simple code or system of categorization, where the cell recognizes some substrates as “relevant”, some as dangerous and should be avoided, and some as simply neutral. This borderline between cell and surroundings is the original informational “difference that makes a difference to the organism”, and an elaborate system of macromolecules work as semiotic mechanisms supporting this boundary work, via continuous effort, to maintain the difference between inside and outside. Since creation of organic functions, sign relations begin.

Biosemiotics claims, in other words, that intrepretation and eo ipso sign use, or semiosis, cannot, for logical as well as historical (or evolutionary) reasons, be understood as activities exclusive to that single species to which we belong. Nor is semiosic activity exclusive to the animal kingdom, because all living creatures need to adjust their activities to changing conditions around them and are utterly dependent on the ability to interpret important cues in their surroundings (their local semiosphere) no matter how primitive this interpretative capacity is. ...

True communication, biosemiotics argues, is based on semiosis, or sign processes... a sign is something that refers to something else — with the essential addition that it takes somebody (i.e., a receptive living system) to make the reference. The meaning conferred by a sign is thus acutely dependent on the nature and the context of its receptive system, the sensing body — and that body's relations with externality are mediated continually by the active establishment and disestablishment of such signs. A sign process, then, is more than just a mechanical transfer of information packets because the sign embraces a process of interpretation. And yet, it is precisely the biological phenomena that comprise this interpretative activity that is neglected — or at least not recognized as engendering its own measure of causal efficacy in the world — in both traditionally conceived Information Theory and in most contemporary mainstream Evolutionary Theory.

Yet by making just this slight and empirically well-justified expansion in our basic view of nature (i.e., to accept that semiosis and interpretative processes are essential components in the dynamics of natural systems), biosemiotics, as I hope to show, provides the conceptual tools necessary to explanatorily reintegrate living creatures (including, of course, human beings) into the natural world from which they came — but from which they have since been effectively excluded by a scientific ontology that has, at least since the time of Descartes, consistently encouraged scientists to de-semiotize all the naturally communicative and fundamentally interactive processes of living systems

...Semiosis simply means "sign action", i.e. a process whereby a sign induced a receptive system to make an interpretation. Thus a rat, for instance, quickly learns to lift its left hind leg when approaching a distinct spot in the cage where it has repeatedly received an electric shock through the paw of that leg. The rat's avoidance reaction discloses that touching this spot now signifies pain.

... Modern semiotics consider human language as one, admittedly very peculiar, sign system only, among the millions of sign systems that have evolved in natural systems. Songs of birds, croaking of frogs, flashing of fireflies, or sqawning behavior of fish are other well known cases of sign systems, but millions of less conspicuous semiotic interactions are active as regulators of organismic activity...

We consider life and semiosis to be co-extensive (Kull et al. 2009) implying that semiosis has been essential to life from the very beginning. With the apperance of multicellularity during evolution the former autonomous unicellular eukaryote organisms were challenged by a need for cooperation in the multicellular body, and eventually this need even implied that some cell lines had to give up their own reproductive potential, i.e. they had to become somatic cells (not germ cells). In order for this kind of cooperation to happen, strong semiotic interactions would be necessary in the growing embryo, and we hypthesize that endosemiosis, the semiotic regulation that takes place inside an organism, is as much a part of the great chain of semiosis as is exosemiosis, the semiotic interaction between organisms.

To take an example, if e.g. the membrane of a liver cell is hit by a certain threshold number of epinephrine molecules per millisecond, the cell intitiates a cascade of biochemical reactions in its interior space resulting in the degradation of polysaccharide (glycogen) to monosaccharide (glucose) which is excreted to the blood to assure the availability to energy resources (primarily in the muscles). Since epinephrine is itself excreted from the adrenal medulla as a response to stress (threats, noise, excitement etc.), and the ensuing muscular action reacts regarding the stress source, the communicative function of this loop of endosemiotic processes is obvious. The stress experience is signaled to the rest of the body and, ultimately, to single liver cells that interpret the hormone message by initiating polysaccharide degradation. Other cells in the body interpret the same hormone-message quite differently, pancreatic cells will decrease their excretion of insulin, fat cells will begin degrading lipids, and smooth muscle cells in the airways become relaxed whereas smooth muscles in the arterioles contract, etc.

The overall result of this flurry of bodily activity is to make the body ready to confront the real or anticipated challenges that stressed it in the first place. The endocrine apparatus (the hormone system) involved here should not be seen as an isolated regulatory system, however, but rather as an integral part of both the immune system and the nervous system. Together, these major semiotic systems make the body recognize and respond to whatever situation it happens to meet. Or, to put it differently, the endosemiotic tools are collectively responsible for the interaction of the organism with its social and physical world and constitute the fundament out of which so-called psychological reality, if any, of the organism will emerge.

Semiosis and perception should therefore not be confused. Perception, understood as the process of creating internal models of events or things in the surroundings, is a high-level activity based on the integration of hundreds, thousands or, in some cases, even millions of semiotic interactions in the body and between the body and its environment and facilitates, in higher organisms, comprehensive mental maps of relevant aspects of organism surroundings. Signs in simple organisms typically cover a narrow range of important environemntal and inner situations only, and are thus far simpler than full-fledged perception in organisms with central nervous systems (CNS) and the integration of information from various broad-spectered perceptual organs able to perceive a wide range of environment situation. The accusation often levels against biosemiotics that it is just another kind of panpsychism therefore rests on a poor conception not only of semiosis but also of perception. Perception presupposes semiosis but semiosis does not presuppose perception. A web of sign processes, semiosis, is underlying all kinds of cognitive activity in the world from human imagination and down to the lowest level as exhibited by bacteria.

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Once an organism has perception, of course, higher-level signs may appear in its perceived world in the shape of particular perceived qualities, shapes, events, objects carrying a further meaning. Such signs are central for the behavior, cognition, and communication of higher animals with central nervous systems - but they do not exhaust the class of signs in biology. Quite to the contrary, they constitute a higher-level, sophisticated class of signs, made possible only by the integration of simple lower-level signs, most them probably without any mental or conscious qualities, in perception.

On a similar line of thought, most noted authors, and most prominently Maturana and Varela, argue that the understanding of life must also include an understanding of how human knowledge of life (cognition) biologically arises (Maturana and Varela 1980, 1987). Although not stated in these terms, Maturana and Varela initially take two steps simultaneously to understand this problem: One is in line with the phenomenological tradition of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, acknowledging that the mind as embodied and part of the natural, material world (Merleau-Ponty 2001); the other step is made with the semiotics of Charles Peirce and other linguists, acknowledging that all forms of knowledge are socially constructed signs that not only interpret but also constitute or shape reality (Hoffmeyer 2008, 32). Here, knowledge of the world is neither regarded as a form of representation or correspondence of signs and their objects (signifier and signified), nor as a subjective, biological Idealism (Hampe 2007, 112) in which the subject merely projects their ideas and concepts onto reality or the “thing-in-itself”. Instead, the process of knowing is best understood in the terms of Charles Peirce as a relational and interwoven process of differentiation, interpretation and co-creation of the world through signs. This implies that a “thing-in-itself” does not exist independently but is created through its symbolic and material relations with other entities (Hoffmeyer 2008, 33). For Peirce, this process of interpretation consists of a dynamic, triadic relationship between a sign, an object and an interpretant (Kilstrup 2015). This semiotic understanding thus demonstrates the two-sided character of the same reality: The social constitution of the self and the material interconnectedness of the subjective with its objective surroundings. Or, more precisely, humans are understood as biological beings that socially conceive and construct themselves through their symbolic self-referential differentiation from and interpretation of their environment. Therefore, the dualism that is often assumed in Western thought does not exist “in reality” but is created through a process of embodied cognition based on symbolic signs that delineate the separation between mind and matter, individual and society and, finally, between culture and nature.

The generality of Peirce’s semiotics, in turn, lay the foundations we need to broaden the concept of embodied cognition to all living beings. Similarly to humans, all organisms actively constitute themselves as a differentiated unity, interpret the information from their environment through chemical or, in Peirce’s terms, indexical and iconic signs and act accordingly in order to survive.

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In general terms, autopoiesis or self-organization must therefore be understood as a departure from a linear and mechanic conceptualization of life in which natural laws and genes determine the actions of organisms. Instead, through signaling, internal feedback loops provide a “nonlinear interconnectedness of the system’s components” (Capra 1996, 85) which can be understood as a network. As Fritjof Capra explains in his book The Web of Life:

“Since all components of an autopoietic network are produced by other components in the network, the entire system is organizationally closed, even though it is open with regard to the flow of energy and matter. This organizational closure implies that a living system is self-organizing in the sense that its order and behaviour are not imposed by the environment but are established by the system itself. In other words, living systems are autonomous. This does not mean that they are isolated from their environment. On the contrary, they interact with the environment through a continual exchange of energy and matter. But this interaction does not determine their organization – they are self-organizing” (Capra 1996, 167-8; emphasis added)

Both the partial independence from their environment and the internal feedback loops enable organisms to create “new structures and new modes of behaviour in the self- organizing process” (Capra 1996, 85). In the jargon of biosemiotics, this is generally understood as semiotic freedom (Hoffmeyer 1993, 52-67) and is more generally understood as adaptation in the Darwinian theory of evolution. Yet, while adaptation in non-human beings is normally understood as a random and intergenerational phenomenon, it is argued in this line of thought that change can occur in a non-random manner within the lifetime of an organism (Strohman 1997, 195). Or, in simpler terms: “Creatures change their forms without changing their genes” (Strohman 1997, 198).