Energy, semiosis and emergence — the place of biosemiotics in … · 2011-06-30 · Eleventh Annual International Gatherings in Biosemiotics Dactyl Foundation, New York City, USA,

Eleventh Annual International Gatherings in BiosemioticsDactyl Foundation, New York City, USA, June 21 - 26,

2011

Energy, semiosis and emergence — the place of biosemiotics in an evolutionary

conception of nature.Eliseo Fernández

Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology5109 Cherry St.

Kansas City, MO 64110, [email protected]

Thursday, June 30, 2011

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

2


Biosemiotics changes the way biology relates to

physics.

Autonomy is a distinctive mark of organisms and living systems. Organisms are parts of the world that segregate themselves from the rest of it (their environment) through membranes that allow selective passage of various forms of matter, energy and information in and out of their complex interior.


Physics & Spontaneity

Processes within an organism’s interior obey the physical laws that govern the environment, but with further restrictions arising from the conjunction of those laws and the peculiar boundary conditions that characterize autonomous systems. By submitting to more exacting constraints, organisms paradoxically enjoy new forms of spontaneity and freedom of action. In contrast to inert objects, they behave as autonomous agents pursuing individual purposes.


Semiosis & Physical Causation

Making intelligible the organization of inert parts into autonomous agents requires supplementing traditional resources of physical sciences with new ones, apt to meet the special explanatory needs of biology. These include novel kinds of causation, notably what Peirce called semiosis: the influence by which signs mediate the determination of interpretants by their objects.


Foundational Status of Biosemiotics

In this regard, biosemiotics far exceeds its role as a biological sub-discipline (re: cellular signaling, organic codes, etc.) in two essential ways:

• If semiosis is an essential component in the constitution of the objects of biological science, biosemiotic ideas should acquire a high foundational and integrative status approaching the one presently assigned to evolutionary conceptions.

• This role should promote a wholesale redefinition of the place of biology within the sciences, especially with respect to the way biology is grounded on the evolving theories, concepts and methods of physics.


Proposal for Modeling Semiotic Causation (Braga 2010)

I advanced a tentative proposal for redefining the roles of ordinary (physical) and semiotic forms of causation partially derived from ideas advanced by Peirce:

Physical causes act by channeling the spontaneous tendency of energy towards its dissipation through the agency of resistive constraints, which are embodiments of habits, i.e. propensities to reproduce similar behavior each time similar triggering circumstances are reproduced.


Spontaneous & Forced Processes

There are two basic kinds of physical processes:

• Spontaneously occurring down a gradient (e.g. ball rolling downhill)

• Proceeding against a gradient (e.g. photosynthesis, the working of a refrigerator). This is always achieved through a link to more energetic spontaneous processes by means of resistive constraints.

spontaneous energy flow

forced energy flow

link


Up-hill & Down-hill: Carnot’s Paddleboat

Imagine a river paddleboat, long moored to the bank while the current turns the paddles...

• Paddles are connected to a generator charging a battery. The reactive (resistive) action of the moorings prevents it from being dragged by the current.

• With a charged battery, the boat can sail upstream for a short time, using the generator in reverse as a motor.

• Similarly, the generator drives electrons against the thermodynamic gradient to charge the battery.

• Using a switch (re-channeling by elimination of resistive constraints) the battery discharges spontaneously through the motor.

• This rotates the paddles against water resistance, pushing the boat upstream until all energy is dissipated irreversibly into heat.


Spontaneity, Constraint & Habit

The boat illustrates a heuristic approach to causal top-down explanations, based on the interplay of three factors:

• A source of free energy moving spontaneously towards its complete dissipation

• Structures that resist, redirect and channel the flow of energy in various ways (boundary conditions and constraints)

• Tendency to reproduce similar effects every time similar energy flows and constraints are reproduced (habit)

These three factors, spontaneity, constraint and habit are instances of the Peircean categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness.


Semiosis as Second-Order Causation

Semiosis causes changes in the causal action itself. It alters the way in which energy is channeled by modifying the habits embodied in the constraints that guide the path of energy toward thermal equilibration.


Example: Semiosis as Second-Order Causation

Beyond a minimal threshold, semiotic causation (unlike ordinary causation) is quantity-independent:When we press a button to “call” an elevator, the signal’s strength is independent of the pressure exerted and uses little energy—enough to produce the desired interpretant (releasing much energy to move the elevator) by altering the switching device configuration (constraints on the flow of electrical current).


Example: Semiosis as Second-Order Causation

• An animal that interprets a peculiar noise as an index of an approaching predator releases abundant energy for speedy flight.

• At the basic cellular level, the organic codes embody systems of genetically preset habits ready to be triggered by physical or chemical signals into releasing energy flows.

• The flows are channeled through biochemical pathways to their specific interpretants, e.g. the opening of an ion channel by the binding of a ligand to a protein receptor.


Explanations & Forms of Causation

The addition of semiosis to the usual forms of causation allows the deployment of explanatory schemes in which semiosis and traditional causation become related in new ways. This can be shown by considering the principal ways in which physics makes sense of the world in the absence of semiotic transactions, and later considering new explanatory patterns arising from the introduction of semiotic causation.


Einstein(1919)- Constructive Theories & Theories of Principle

Constructive theories postulate basic singular parts with simple properties and interactions, explaining complex phenomena by constructing models out of those elements. These mechanisms often figure prominently in physical and biological explanations, e.g. the molecular underpinnings of genetic replication processes, transcription and translation.


Theories of Principle Theories of principle generate

explanations of lower level laws and regularities, starting from high-level principles of great generality, e.g., the symmetries of space and time, or highly confirmed empirical generalizations (impossibility of perpetual motion machines). In physics, phenomenological thermodynamics and relativity theory are good examples. In biology examples are harder to find. The theory of evolution through natural selection seems a combination of both types of theory.


Constructive Theories: Bottom-up Explanations

Classes of individual facts & events

Mechanisms & constructive models

Individual entities & interactions


Theories of Principle: Top-Down Explanations

Higher order principles

Lower order laws and regularities

Processes & events


Systems BiologyIn complex self-organized systems there is no privileged level of functionality. Parts act on the wholes they integrate and those wholes in turn act through circular loops upon their parts. Explanations must start in medias res, and bottom-up and top-down explanations may be simultaneously invoked in complementary fashion.


Complementarity of Upward & Downward Causation

My proposal for a triadic view of causation integrates both forms of explanation:

•The spontaneous flow of energy towards dissipation is a top-down consequence of the laws of thermodynamics.

•The channeling of that flow through resistive constraints is embodied in the mechanisms typically featured in bottom-up explanations.


Evolutionary PhysicsAfter presenting an ahistorical portrait of nature for 200+ years, physics is evolving into an evolutionary science able to develop new points of contact with biology. Today’s evolutionary cosmology is intimately linked to an evolutionary Standard Model of particle physics, rooted in conceptions of symmetry and spontaneous symmetry breaking. The fundamental forces and concomitant varieties of particles arise progressively through successive breakings of original all-encompassing symmetries, as the universe “cools” throughout its continuous expansion.


Differences among differences

Frank Wilczec (The Lightness of Being, 2008): Symmetry is a difference that makes no

difference. Gregory Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972): Information is a difference that makes a

difference. This asymmetry between differences is not

accidental. Information (and therefore semiosis) is closely related to symmetry breaking, the process by which a difference no longer makes no difference.


Semiosis as Creation & Transmission of Semiotic Information

Semiosis is a kind of formal causation, different from efficient and final causation.

It consists in the transfer of a form embodied in an energetic process and upon reception it sparks a special effect (interpretant). Above a minimal threshold it is independent of the quality and quantity of its embodiment.


Semiosis & Symmetry Breaking

In an organism, reception is a triggering. In the simplest example, a metastable configuration acting as a switch (posed symmetrically between two divergent courses of action), the symmetry is broken upon reception of a form. This makes a difference between symmetrically divided courses of action, or between quiescence and action.

Numerous examples: firing a retinal photoreceptor neuron upon reception of information-carrying photons; explosion of a terrorist’s bomb with a mobile phone detonator, upon reception of a well-defined string of bits, etc.


Semiosis, Emergence & Evolution

“Emergence” as the rise of new properties, relations or causes, is frequently characterized in terms of wholes that display new features not found in the parts that make them up. These totalities are usually complex systems, and their emergent novelties are attributed to processes of self-organization, characteristic of many complex dynamic wholes, e.g. tornados, organisms and ecosystems.


Emergence as Creation of New Information

Information is related to novelty. A message delivering no new information delivers no information. This suggests generalizing the idea to account for emergence as the generation of new information. Three kinds of information with respect to novelty:

• Local novelty: information that conveys novelty to individual systems in relation to their internal representation of the environment (semiosis).

• Mereological novelty: information as the rise of novel features of a whole; new in relation to the properties of its parts (emergence).

• Cosmic novelty: formation of structures which are radically new with respect to the previous history of the universe, e.g., stars, life, new species, new organs, new theories (evolution).


Conclusion If this proposal proves viable, it opens

an avenue for relating biosemiotics to emergent trends in physics, based on the evolutionary emergence of laws and entities through symmetry and symmetry breaking. It would also disclose an unsuspected connection between Peircean semiotics and Peircean cosmology. It would link semiosis to the cosmic generation of novelty, as two manifestations of the universal habit of habit acquisition (symmetry breaking).


Documents

Energy, semiosis and emergence — the place of biosemiotics in … · 2011-06-30 · Eleventh Annual International Gatherings in Biosemiotics Dactyl Foundation, New York City, USA,