What does it take to produce an interpetant

1. Pp35 1 What does it take to produce an interpetant? S�ren Brier, Professor of the semiotic of information, cognition and communication science, Institute of International Culture and Communication Studies, Copenhagen Business School Ed. in chief of Cybernetics & Human Knowing Cybersemiotics: Why Information is not enough,Toronto U.P.

2. Pp35 2 The problem of the name �Code-semiotics� When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.' `The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all. .... Impenetrability! That's what I say!' `Would you tell me please,' said Alice, `what that means?' `Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. `I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.' `That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone. `When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, `I always pay it extra.' `.

3. Pp35 3 Code versus sign semiotics! A new paradigm, by the name of Code-semiotics, has been proposed for the level of the free-living cells, and in particular for the cells that appeared in the first 3 billion years of evolution. The code model develops a natural concept of meaning that avoids using the concept of interpretation in free-living cells and in all systems that do not build internal representations of the world. According to that model, the first semiotic system in the history of life was the apparatus of protein synthesis (the ribotype), and� that apparatus does not need interpretation because the rules of the genetic code are virtually the same in all living systems! A semiotic system is here defined as a set of signs and meanings linked by the conventions of a code.

4. Pp35 4 The codemaker�s nature and role Signs, meanings and conventions, however, do not come into existence of their own. There is always an �agent� that produces them, and that agent can be referred to as a �codemaker� because it is always an act of coding that gives origin to semiosis. The first codemakers were independent of mind and subjectivity, but were nevertheless �creative�, because they created a world of proteins that could not exist without a genetic code! The Code model states that the necessary and sufficient condition for something to be a semiosis is that A provides a conventional association between B and C, where A is a set of adaptors and B and C are the objects of two independent worlds. Thus a semiotic system is a triad of signs, meanings and code that are all produced by the same agent, i.e., by the same codemaker.

5. Pp35 5 The code model and codemaker In the first animals, the connections between sensory inputs and motor outputs (second semiosis?) were probably simple nerve-reflex arches, but these could not evolve much because complex hard-wired circuits were necessarily slow and cumbersome. The animals had to �invent� a new solution to signal-processing, and the only way was the manufacturing of new objects by a new code. This was possible because the neurons of the intermediate brain are natural �adaptors� (they perform two independent recognition processes) so they were already suited to generate a code. The new �objects� that they produced were representations and feelings, and subjectivity was the overall result of this process, because one is a �subject� only when it has access to an internal word of its own making.

6. Pp35 6 Code semiosis before sign semiosis Semiosis appeared therefore at the origin of life, whereas mind and interpretation came much later. The Code model starts with a definition of semiosis that does not depend on mind, and describes an evolution of semiosis that eventually gave origin to mind and interpretation. The emergence of mind was associated with the origin of a third type of semiosis which is called interpretive semiosis (like the Peircean type without the categories), but remained also dependent on the first two types (manufacturing and signalling semiosis). Thus mind did first emerge at a very high hierarchical level, in sharp contrast with the hylozoic ontology of Peirce�s semiotics. Interpretation is regarded as a process that depends primarily on representations, in addition to memory and learning, and its origin is linked to the origin of perceptions and feelings, i.e., to the origin of subjectivity and mind.

7. Pp35 7 Code biology and the artificiality of life There are phenomena in living system, like the relation between T-RNA and the specific amino acids of which we build proteins, that are fairly described as codes. They connect to regimes, that of RNA and that of amino acids in a regular way that is not a universal law. The connection only exist in the context of the cell. It is also an astute observation that living cells are build out of proteins that in a certain way are artificial. Through the coding process amino acids are combined inside the cell in ways that never happen outside the cell. Living systems are then not natural but artificial.

8. Pp35 8 Is code semiotics a theory? Code are usually defined as something a conscious intelligent being with agency designs with a purpose, most often as a part of communication be it by morse code, flags or computer programs. In Barbieri�s theory molecules are the code makers and the human agency is transferred to them!!! New idea!! To make this more reasonable, than it seems at first sight, it is claimed the code can work without conscious interpretation, which normally demands a central nervous system. Cybernetics works with differences and codes in a dualistic system. They do not have a triadic concept of signification.

9. Pp35 9 Codes and formal causality Biosemiotics uses Peirce�s three types of causality: Efficient, Formal and Final. Efficient causality works through the transfer of energy and is quantitatively measurable. (physical) Formal causality works through �pattern fitting and coding�, and with signals of information in a dualistic protosemiotic matter. (Chemical). Final causation is semiotic signification and interpretation. It is dependant on awareness, subjectivity and intentionality. Molecules are coded, and interact through formal causality. Cells interpret the coded molecules as signs through final causation. Cells are the fundamental Peircean biosemiotic subjects. I thus suggest that coding in the way Babieri use it belongs to the cybernetic, information, signal level of stimulus-response formal causality. He is a declared non-Peircean. Thus he needs another frame.

10. Pp35 10 Codes before signs evolutionarily The main idea in �code-semiotics� is that codes are simpler than signs and therefore can be said to be before signs in evolution. Signs demands representation as a prerequisite to function and the main question is if that demands a nervous system because interpretation demands mind and we have no mind s without nervous systems. This is taken for granted as part of the received scientific view that is supporting modern molecular biology and its attempt to explain life. It is taken for granted that the cosmos starts with energy in the form of radiation and later the first atoms (H) is formed. These a drawn towards each other by the law of mass attraction until they create starts where the heavier molecule are crated in fusion reaction. Helium being one of the first iron the latest and heaviest. The rest are created through supernova explosions.

11. Pp35 11 Foundation of molecular explanation of life The explanation could be managed only drawing on mechanical conception of matter and law, but the processes of atoms combining to molecules needed to draw on thermodynamics. Prigogine�s later showed it to be non-equilibrium thermodynamics based on the connection of irreversibility and the arrow of time. Schr�dinger and Wiener then coined the term (cybernetic) information understood as neg-entropy in order to explain how order arise out of chaos and stabilizes in evolution on the cost of greater entropy production. From this an informational science approach has grown, which has been connected to the development of computers, computing and AI, which skips life and living systems as important steps in developing information processing and goes directly to code-based machines made by humans. But we are in biosemiotics interested in how code emerge through evolution, exactly because they are as important for life as Barbieri describes.

12. Pp35 12 The problem of emergence as an explanation We can see that life evolves out of a world that appears to be sufficiently described as physical and chemical without the life that biology has been invented to describe. From living systems consciousness seems to emerge and we invent psychology to describe behavior and contend of mind. Not many wants to deny this description of the world. The problem is that many mistakes it for at theory of how life, signification and consciousness arises in the world and what these phenomena are. But it is only a description! The strange jumps in qualities that lies between radiation and atoms and between atoms and molecules, between molecules and life and between life and consciousness, we usually describe by the word emergence. In dialectical materialism emergence was a theory build on a theoretical concept of matter as containing dialectical forces and consciousness as a reflection of nature. But it is important to acknowledge that dialectical materialism as a combination of nature dialectics and historical materialism was a theory of the evolution of life and mind. Leontjef�s work in activity theory is a witness of that and how far in detail this paradigm came before.. General system theory on the basis of holism endorses emergence as the hole is more than the sum of the parts. True but the theory of this is self-orgnizaton, autocatalysis, hypercycles and autopiesis.

13. Pp35 13 Is code semiotics a theory? Eigen with his hyper-cycles and Kauffmann with his self-organized auto-catalytic loops has both with marginal success attempted to explain how agency could develop from the interaction between molecules that did not have any agency themselves whatsoever.So does Maturana and Vareka with their theory of autpoiesis. Barbieri�s highly critical towards these attempts and claims to solve the problem by giving the molecular codemakers agency.. Here I refer to Alice!! As far as I can see he reasons from that since codes are important in life and codes needs a maker the macro-molecules involved in this must be the code-makers, ergo they must have agency, but an agency that is devoid of any form of mind-representation and interpretation!? I refer to Alice! Again! But such a theory would have to explain from the bottom up how they got agency � else it is just a description. That living systems are not machines created by a more conscious and intelligent being is fundamental in the paradigm of natural sciences. Thus suddenly codes have to be created bottom up for autopoietic system instead of instead as top down from allopoietic systems like computers.. Can code-semiotics do this?

14. Pp35 14 The emergence of codes from information Information science and cognitive science attempts to start another place than semiotics. In that it postulates that information and coding is before life and semiosis Information and coding is seen as concepts that works on an objective materialistic ontology and do not presume mind, consciousness or Firstness. That life and mind emerges later in evolution we can see through the empirical data on evolution. But that is not a theoretical explanation of how that can be happening.

15. Pp35 15 Information, codes and computation A crucial problem is thus whether life as well as mind is a natural and perhaps necessary outgrowth of first principles in physics and chemistry or do we need to add informational or even semiotic principles and laws to explain life and later the consciousness it produces. The cybernetic computational informative view is based on universal and abstract (un-embodied) conceptions of information and computation that is the foundation of �the information processing paradigm�, which is foundational for much cognitive science and its latest developments into brain function and linguistics comprising also a philosophy of science. It is claiming that �information� is the objective forms of the world. That it can be objectively parted into pieces of �data� and that humans, brains, computers and organizations process them in the basic same way, which is called �computation� and is a basic � not really well-defined concept � of information processing that goes beyond the Turing computer definition.

16. Pp35 16 Descriptions versus theories In my view Barbieri is trying to build a semiotic theory on an informational theoretical framework. It seems to also what Deacon is doing these days but in another way. Codes are signs without interpretation, meaning without interpretants. Defined from a Peircean biosemiotics code and informational signals are quasi-signs as they are nearly clean dualistic phenomena and signs demands all three categories working together. Peirce�s theory does not work without his paradigmatic framework of the three categories and the ontology those imply, but what is exactly what Barbieri want to avoid in order to make biosemiotics scientific. If so he has to offer us a theoretical explanation, not an addition to the received views description of evolution, because that has so far not produced a theory of life and mind that can explain how signification arise in certain systems in our universe or what the qualia of consciousness are and how their existence is related to the chemistry of the nervous system.

17. Pp35 17 Nervous system and qualia Nobody really has a theory of: How individual emotional motivation can enter the system and create (semiotic) interpretations. How �free will� in human subjects can have causal influence on the nervous system. How language can evoke feelings, qualia and images in in our mind through our brain. A new view of knowing and reality seems warranted.

18. Pp35 18 Peirce�s semiotics as epistemology Peirce�s theory of signs is a theory of reasoning and cognition, asserting that all modes of thinking depend on the use of signs. Every thought is a sign. Every act of reasoning consists of the interpretation of signs. Semiosis is a process of cooperation between signs, their objects, and their �interpretants�. Semiosis, both in form of signification and communication, is an important part of what makes living systems transcend pure physical, chemical and even informational explanations.

19. Pp35 19 Peircean semiotics and the life of signs CP 2.274. �A Sign, or Representamen, is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the same Object. The triadic relation is genuine, that is its three members are bound together by it in a way that does not consist in any complexus of dyadic relations.� That is it, no less no more. No understanding of signs without Firstness. It is not representation in a conscious mind that defines the Peircean sign! It is the idea of a collective mind based on firstness and that the inner and out world ar connected because man and the universe are both of sign nature! One is a symbol and one an argument. Finally the theory claims that signs have their own dynamics of attraction, repulsion and evolution.

20. Pp35 20 Peirce�s theory of consciousness CP 7.551. There are no other forms of consciousness except the three that have been mentioned, Feeling, Altersense, and Medisense. They form a sort of system. Feeling is the momentarily present contents of consciousness taken in its pristine simplicity, apart from anything else. It is consciousness in its first state, and might be called primisense. Altersense is the consciousness of a directly present other or second, withstanding us. Medisense is the consciousness of a thirdness, or medium between primisense and altersense, leading from the former to the latter. It is the consciousness of a process of bringing to mind. Feeling, or primisense, is the consciousness of firstness; altersense is consciousness of otherness or secondness; medisense is the consciousness of means or thirdness. Of primisense there is but one fundamental mode. Altersense has two modes, Sensation and Will. Medisense has three modes, Abstraction, Suggestion, Association.

21. Pp35 21 Lake metaphor of consciousness CP.7.554. Consciousness is rather like a bottomless lake in which ideas are suspended, at different depths. Percepts alone are uncovered by the medium. �those which [are] deeper are discernible only by a greater effort, and controlled only by much greater effort. These ideas suspended in the medium of consciousness, or rather themselves parts of the fluid, are attracted to one another by associational habits and dispositions, -- the former in association by contiguity, the latter in association by resemblance. An idea near the surface will attract an idea that is very deep only so slightly that the action must continue for some time before the latter is brought to a level of easy discernment. Meantime the former is sinking to dimmer consciousness. There seems to be a factor like momentum, so that the idea originally dimmer becomes more vivid than the one which brought it up� the mind has but a finite area at each level; so that the bringing of a mass of ideas up inevitably involves the carrying of other ideas down. �a certain degree of buoyancy or association with whatever idea may be vivid, which belongs to those ideas that we call purposes, by virtue of which they are particularly apt to be brought up and held up near the surface by the inflowing percepts and thus to hold up any ideas with which they may be associated. The control which we exercise over our thoughts in reasoning consists in our purpose holding certain thoughts up where they may be scrutinized. The levels of easily controlled ideas are those that are so near the surface as to be strongly affected by present purposes. The aptness of this metaphor is very great.

22. Pp35 22 A Peircean Embodied Semiotic view No cognition without experience of need in a body. � without experience of feelings of good and bad �inside�. �without individual meaningful ordering of a world. � without inter-subjectively ordering a common world through language and culture, which again affect your cognitive approach to �reality�: a mentality or hermeneutical horizon. Each culture carves out a possible world! All cognition goes through semiosis. Thus there is no information without signification!

23. Pp35 23 There are two transdisciplinary paradigms that compete for laying the foundation for a theory of meaning. It is the informational processing view supported by the idea and technology of computation leading up to cognitive science and linguistics with a formal logical theory of meaning as truth tables and the semiotic theory of embodied signification and meaning.There are two transdisciplinary paradigms that compete for laying the foundation for a theory of meaning. It is the informational processing view supported by the idea and technology of computation leading up to cognitive science and linguistics with a formal logical theory of meaning as truth tables and the semiotic theory of embodied signification and meaning.

24. Pp35 24 Information computational view The cybernetic computational informative view is based on universal and abstract (un-embodied) conceptions of information and computation This is the foundation of �the information processing paradigm�, which is then again foundational for most of cognitive science and its latest developments into brain function and linguistics processing. This pancomptational world view sees the universe as a computer. �sees humans as dynamic infromational systems guided by a computationally functioning brain. Language is seen as a sort of culturally developed program for social information processing.

25. Pp35 25 The informational paradigm and consciousness What is lacking is knowledge of the role of first person experience, qualia, meaning and signification in cognition and communication and how their evolution and historically development in human society and culture shapes consciouness. That consciousness is a natural phenomenon seems hard to dispute as it is arising throughout the human species and very likely in many others as part of the evolution of nature. We have every reason to believe that - as natural phenomena - consciousness is subject to natural laws. But this is not to say that the natural laws concerning consciousness be physical laws or even informational laws or that we have follow the received views of natural laws being some mathematical and absolute.

26. Pp35 26 The experiental embodiment of knowledge We need to know more about human embodied information, and how embodied and un-embodied information differ. � the relation is between human meaningful information and the computers meaningless algorithmic processing of information. � the interaction between culture and embodied knowledge. Knowledge seems to be both in the body, in the mind and in the conscious use of language. � the embodiment of knowledge makes it rooted in our evolution and genetic makeup and our ecological interactions preserving our body and its procreation. A systemic and cybernetic evolutionary view is necessary and it should be combined with theories of the emergence of meaning and consciousness.

27. Pp35 27 How can scientific explanation get inside life and consciousness? It seems that the inside of our reality is sensing, feeling, living, meaning, thinking, wanting, understanding and consciousness. But science only deals with the outside. Science is not about us as sentient beings living in meaning. It is an enigma that our detailed understandings of the nervous system has not brought us closer to an understanding of the experience of the qualities of meaningful cognition and communication.

28. Pp35 28 What is a code and coding? Informational view In communications, a code is a rule for converting a piece of information (for example, a letter, word, phrase, or gesture) into another form or representation (one sign into another sign), not necessarily of the same type. In communications and information processing, encoding is the process by which information from a source is converted into symbols to be communicated. Decoding is the reverse process, converting these code symbols back into information understandable by a receiver. One reason for coding is to enable communication in places where ordinary spoken or written language is difficult or impossible. For example, semaphore, where the configuration of flags held by a signaller or the arms of a semaphore tower encodes parts of the message, typically individual letters and numbers. Another person standing a great distance away can interpret the flags and reproduce the words sent. Encoding is the process of transforming information from one format into another. The opposite operation is called decoding. This is often used in many digital devices. In Biology and Genetics, genes are said to encode RNA transcripts or proteins. Neural encoding is the way in which information is represented in neurons.

29. Pp35 29 Semiotic view: A code is an organized system of signs. Codes are the rules and conventions about how you combine signs, how signs relate to each other Language is a code. So is the system of highway signage, the system for classifying plants, computer algorithms, and etiquette. Humans organize life in nested codes: small codes that fit into larger and larger ones. For example, Alphabet letters are arranged using codes to form words, which are arranged by grammatical codes into sentences, which are arranged by semantic codes into paragraphs, which are arranged by rhetoric codes into essays, which are arranged by performance codes into a presentation. A code provides the frame, the rules for how one understands and behaves in a particular environment. Action chains (culturally defined sequences of actions) are also codes.

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32. Pp35 32 A sign is what an object presupposes! Semiotics develops a general theory of all possible kinds of signs, their modes of signification and information, and whole behavior and properties. Semiotics is the study of semiosis and is an inquiry into the conditions, which are necessary in order for representations of objects to function as meaningful signs. Differences that makes a difference becomes part of semiosis. They are seen as signs! If not, they are not seen at all. Logic as semiotic is the theory of the conditions, which determine the truth of signs. Logic presupposes semiotics! Knowledge is a social construction constantly tested on reality. Truth is a social ideal!

33. Pp35 33 �there is no element whatever of man's consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign� man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the words homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought. It is hard for man to understand this, because he persists in identifying himself with his will, his power over the animal organism, with brute force. Now the organism is only an instrument of thought. But the identity of a man consists in the consistency of what he does and thinks, and consistency is the intellectual character of a thing; that is, is its expressing something. Finally, as what anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to be in the ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the community.� (Peirce: CP 5.315�18)

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35. Pp35 35 Peirce on thinking and thoughts CP 4.551. Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. Consistently adhere to that unwarrantable denial, and you will be driven to some form of idealistic nominalism akin to Fichte's. Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there. But as there cannot be a General without Instances embodying it, so there cannot be thought without Signs. We must here give "Sign" a very wide sense, no doubt, but not too wide a sense to come within our definition. Admitting that connected Signs must have a Quasi-mind, it may further be declared that there can be no isolated sign. Moreover, signs require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-interpreter; and although these two are at one (i.e., are one mind) in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct. In the Sign they are, so to say, welded.

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37. Pp35 37 Merleau-Ponty phenomenological view Science has not and never will have, by its nature, the same significance qua form of being as the world which we perceive, for the simple reason that it is a rationale or explanation of that world. I am, not a �living creature� nor even a �man�, nor again even �a consciousness� endowed with all the characteristics which zoology, social anatomy or inductive psychology recognize in these various products of the natural or historical process � I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself (and therefore into being in the only sense that the word can have for me) the tradition which I elect to carry on, or the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished � since that distance is not one of its properties � if I were not there to scan it with my gaze.�