Semiotic Freedom

Hoffmeyer is known for the term semiosphere, essentially the biosphere seen in terms of semiotics. But a more important neologism is the term "semiotic freedom," which roughly equates to the term "behavioral freedom" as the repertoire of creative behaviors available to an organism, extended to include all the possible thoughts and actions available to humans. It connects also to the idea of freedom as not having been determined by physical laws.

The most pronounced feature of organic evolution is not the creation of a multiplicity of amazing morphological structures, but the general expansion of "semiotic freedom,"that is to say the increase in richness or "depth" of meaning that can be communicated: From pheromones to birdsong and from antibodies to Japanese ceremonies of welcome.

I should be very surprised if the driving force behind evolution did not prove, at the end of the day, to be the self-same creativity and flexibility that are accorded to those systems engaging in ever subtler forms of semiotic interplay. The anatomical aspect of evolution may have controlled the earlier phases of life on Earth but my guess is that little by little, as semiotic freedom grew, the purely anatomical side of development was circumscribed by semiotic development and was thus forced to obey the boundary conditions placed on it by the semiosphere.

I had to think long and hard before choosing to speak of semiotic "freedom" rather than semiotic "depth." It was not an easy decision to make, since freedom is a rather ambiguous term. Semiotic freedom refers not only to the quantitative mass of semiotic processes involved but even more so to the quality of these processes. We could perhaps define it as the "depth of meaning" that an individual or a species is capable of communicating.

Over recent years it has become quite clear that some kind of term along the lines of "depth" is required in the communication sciences, to supplement the term "information."

(Signs of Meaning in the Universe, p.61-62)

Hoffmeyer laments the use of the term "information" as all the physical information in the universe, essentially the information a super-intelligent Laplacian demon needs to know to see the past and future, the positions and momenta, the motion paths, of all the particles in the universe. (It is this physical information that the second law of thermodynamics destroys, but the expansion of the universe creates - as negative entropy.)

Hoffmeyer prefers the definition of a bit of information as Gregory Bateson's "a difference that makes a difference." While this is vague, Hoffmeyer explains that he wants to limit the term information to biological information, to that intentionally created or meaningfully interpreted by an agent.

The essence of this definition is that information is something which is generated by a subject. Information is always information for "someone"; it is not something that is just hanging around "out there" in the world. For instance: If I happen, one evening, to hear a blackbird burst into song, I might look up into the tree to try and catch sight of it. In other words, the variations in sound reaching my ears prompt my brain to produce a piece of information to the effect that there must be a blackbird somewhere close at hand. For the moth clinging to a nearby wall, on the other hand, no information whatsoever is generated.The blackbird s song is a difference that makes absolutely no difference to it. Ergo, no information. And my small son might well contrive to say "bird," but not "blackbird." He has, in other words, produced another piece of information from the same sound.

The annoying thing about Bateson's definition is that it cannot be used to quantify information. Information is associated with an intentional creature of some kind or another, whether it be an amoeba registering a difference in nourishment levels and reacting by extending a pseudopodium toward the spot where the pickings are richest, or a human being seeing a ripe fruit on a tree and stretching out a hand to pluck it. Or—to put it another way—information is based on interpretation and, in this sense, corresponds to signs as defined by Peirce.

(Signs of Meaning in the Universe, p.66)

Hoffmeyer seems to want to identify "meaningful" information, but he also wants a measure (his semiotic freedom) of the complexity of the information.

the saturation degree of nutrient molecules upon bacterial receptors would be a message with a low depth of meaning, whereas the bird that pretends to have a broken wing in an attempt to lure the predator away from its nest might be said to have considerably more depth of meaning. In talking about semiotic freedom rather than semiotic depth, then, I try to avoid being misunderstood to claiming that semiotic freedom should possess a quantitative measurability; It does not. But it should also be noted that the term refers to an activity that is indeed free in the sense of being underdetermined by the constraints of natural lawfulness. Human speech, for instance, has a very high semiotic freedom in this respect, while the semiotic freedom of a bacterium that chooses to swim away from other bacteria of the same species is of course extremely small..

(Biosemiotics, p.187)

... Semiotic freedom is a measure of the depth of meaning communicated or interpreted by living systems, so that organisms exhibiting a high degree of semiotic freedom are capable of dealing with more sophisticated, complicated, “deep” messages.

Organisms have a surprising capacity to take advantage of any regularities they may come upon as vehicles for signification, or signs. This semiogenic capacity leads to the formation of a kind of interactive dynamics that is called semethic interaction (from the Greek semeion = sign + ethos = habit) (Hoffmeyer 1994a, b). In semethic 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.6 The broken-wing trick in birds is an obvious example of semethic interaction involving two different species, but such interactions are widespread in nature and have been at play from the earliest steps of evolution. The “invention” of light sensitivity in heterotroph organisms exemplifies the power of this dynamic pattern at an early stage of evolution:

Photopigments were first used in photosynthesis, and in locating or moving toward or away from places where the wavelength of light was suitable or not suitable for photochemistry. . . . At some point, when (photosynthesizing) cyanobacteria are presumed to have constituted a major portion of the biomass on earth, they themselves represented a field potential on which heterotrophs . . . began to feed. The heterotrophs used the same photopigments for detecting light, but not to photosynthesize; instead the pigments were used to detect light that was specific to where the autotrophs (photosynthesizing cyanobacteria) were feeding (on the light). Light distributions specifying not light as food itself, but information about the location of food, was evolutionarily instantiated in its modern sense. (Swenson and Turvey 1991, 340)

...

The semiogenic capacity of living systems as exhibited by the myriad varied patterns of semethic interaction must have led to an evolutionary trend toward increased semiotic freedom in the sense of an increased capacity of individual organisms to interpret complex signs. Obviously, the ability to foresee important events or behaviors of others would benefit all species that depend for their survival upon a correct situated reading of decisive niche parameters.

From A biosemiotic approach to the question of meaning, by Hoffmeyer.