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.
MEMORY
ATTENTION
Meaning
PERCEPTION
THOUGHT
Mental world of
experience
Meaning
PLANNING
THOUGHT
SENSATION
ACTION
Physical world of
objects and events
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 causality
now 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
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.
Albert Einstein.
1879 - 1955
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 ....
Bertrand Russell
1872 - 1970
Mechanism was not enough for Whitehead:
Life is an offensive,
directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
Alfred North Whitehead
1861 - 1947
Science is the New Religion
Period
Years agoTechnology
Prehistoric
Ancient
Modern
Postmodern
50000
5000
500
50
Logos
Tools
Structures
Energy
Information
Dream
Myth
Law
Code
Codes and signs can be reflexive.
The postmodern universe is 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 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
1839 - 1914
Semiotics
Von Uexküll
+
1864-1944
Biology
Hoffmeyer
=
Alive & well
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!