Biosemiotics and the shift from reduction to emergence.

1. Biosemiotics and the shift from reduction to emergence.

2. 1. What shift? 2. What is biosemiotics ? 3. So what?

3. 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)

4. Meaning points both ways.

5. Meaning Meaning MEMORY ATTENTION THOUGHT Mental world of experience PERCEPTION PLANNING THOUGHT SENSATION ACTION Physical world of objects and events

6. 1. What shift?

7. 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

8. Western origins of science: Thales: Beyond myths Plato: Underlying principles Aristotle: Systematic observation A recurring issue: types and domains of causality

9. The pre-modern Universe was organic

10. The modern universe was mechanistic

11. 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.

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. Mechanism was not enough for Whitehead: Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe. Alfred North Whitehead 1861 - 1947

16. Science is the New Religion

18. Period Years ago Technology Logos Prehistoric 50000 Tools Dream Ancient 5000 Structures Myth Modern 500 Energy Law Postmodern 50 Information Code

19. Codes and signs can be reflexive.

20. 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

21. 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.

22. … 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/

23. … 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.

24. 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.

25. Evolution passes from Sentience to Signification. Signification is what make human consciousness reflexive.

26. Semiotics is the science of signification

27. 2. What is Biosemiotics?

28. Traditions of semiotics. European American Saussure Peirce Barthes Mead Derrida Morris

29. Ferdinand deSaussure 1857 – 1913

30. Saussure’s synchronic approach. Signification is arbitrary

31. Peirce's diachronic approach: Mental life is chained signification.

32. Biosemiotics is the natural history of signification Peirce Von Uexküll Hoffmeyer 1839 - 1914 + 1864-1944 = Alive & well Semiotics Biology Biosemiotics

33. 3. So what?

34. Biosemiotics is about types and domains of causality. For Peirce, a Monist, there was only one domain.

35. 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

36. 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.

37. 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’

38. Objects are predictable while subjects are not, because thought is a property of experiencing subjects.

39. 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.

40. 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

41. 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.

42. 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

43. Biosemiotics provides a conceptual vocabulary for discussing the mutuality of the knower and the known, and the continuity of biology and culture.

44. Biosemiotics transcends dualism by suggesting that intentionality is universal: Meaning points both ways

45. Is Biosemiotics a science? Who cares? Be Pragmatic. If it’s helpful, use it.

46. Thanks for your attention!