Towards a Biosemiotic Epistemology Don Favareau National University of Singapore International Society for Biosemiotic Studies

Towards a BiosemioticEpistemology

Don FavareauNational University of SingaporeInternational Society for Biosemiotic Studies

www.biosemiotics.org/favareau/papers.html

BIO SEMIOTICSLife Processes Sign Processes

FIRSTNESSRelations of:Potentia, possibility

SECONDNESSRelations of:Brute force, actuality

THIRDNESSRelations of:Regularity, law

FIRSTNESSRelations of:Immediate sensation

SECONDNESSRelations of:Sensory association

THIRDNESSRelations of:Pragmatic knowledge

FIRSTNESSImmediate sensationREPRESENTATION

SECONDNESSSensory associationSIGNIFICATION

THIRDNESSPragmatic knowledgeMEANING

FIRSTNESSImmediate sensationREPRESENTATION ICONIC RELATIONS

SECONDNESSSensory associationSIGNIFICATION INDEXICAL RELATIONS

THIRDNESSPragmatic knowledgeMEANING SYMBOLIC RELATIONS

Dynamic SystemsTheoryUmweltEcologyPeirceanSemiotic

BIOSEMIOTICS IS GROUNDED IN THE NATURALISTIC ASSUMPTION THAT ALL FORMS OF ORGANIZATION IN THE UNIVERSE EMERGE FROM INTERACTIONS WITHIN THE SYSTEM. THE DIVERSITY OF ENTITIES ARISE AS PRODUCED, TRANSIENT, CAUSAL POINTS OF ORDER.

NATURAL FORMS ARE THE PRODUCT OF IRREVERSIBILE, CONSEQUENTIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IN THE ABSENCE OF TELEOLOGICAL PURPOSES OR CENTRALLY ORGANIZED CONTROL

The Adjacent Possible:

Those possibilities that have just been actualized - and the substrate upon which immediate next actualization must take place

IRREVERSIBILITY

INTERACTION

EMERGENCE

DOWNWARD CAUSATION

AUTOPOESIS

FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZATION:

Emergence Interaction among constituents results in a property of the whole not found in any of the properties of the partsC

Downward Causation Systemic Pressure increases downwards with each meta-system transition upwardsCD

Autopoesis:The measure of functional autonomy in a systems ability to self-organize as a result of the recursivity of its own top-down and bottom-up interactions in coupling itself to itsenvironment

With this introduction of system agency, the bidirectionalcausality that organized biotic forms and their abiotic surrounds co-evolved exponentially.

Subjective experience is an organizing principle in nature

Dynamic SystemsTheoryUmweltEcology

Perceptual capacities develop as organisms mediate external and internal survival demands. The sign relations constituting an organisms perceptual domain comprise the umwelt in which it chooses action.

The smallest unit of information is a difference that makes a difference to an organism

Gregory Bateson

Apprehension of mind independent relations constituting being or entity;made present to an organismdirectly and iconically REPRESENTATIONIMMEDIATE SENSATION

ICONIC RELATIONS the objects of experience perceived as self-evident; internally experienced distinctions that carve the world up into things and states whose externally existing relations genuinely do share some trait, thus allowing an organism to veridically (if only partially) KNOW the world through the suprasubjective order of those distinctions and their resemblances

The smallest unit of information is a difference that makes a difference to an organismis also the ground of similarity relations

ICONIC RELATIONS the objects of experience perceived as self-evident; internally experienced distinctions that carve the world up into things and states whose externally existing relations genuinely do share some trait, thus allowing an organism to veridically (if only partially) KNOW the world through the suprasubjective order of those distinctions and their resemblancesthe relata of indexes

INDEXICAL RELATIONSApprehension of those consistently conjoined mind-independent regularities having proven to obtain between the iconic objects of experience. Signs that connect, or point to, iconic relations consistently connected to, but other than their own (e.g., smoke to fire; sounds to danger). The relations involved in associative learning and unlearning, both in ontogenetic and in evolutionary time.relations between icons;relata for symbols

Apprehension of mind independent relations between being or entities made present to an organism via internally generated indexical mediationSIGNIFICATIONSYSTEM-MEDIATED ASSOCIATION

FOODTRAILNESTINTERPRETANTSIGNOBJECT

IOSSSSOOOIIIEOIKnowledge has a history and is built

Autopoesis The measure of functional autonomy in a systems ability to self-organize as a result of the recursivity of its own top-down and bottom-up interactions in coupling itself to itsenvironment

SYMBOLSConventional, Virtual, Autopoetic Signification via a dense web of inter-connected reference; where each sign connects to not a single referent but to a whole system of signs that are understood to be signs by their userrelations taken as signs qua signs

Each subsequent representation in the semiotic chain represents the prior object-sign relation, taken itself as a higher-level semiotic object (Parmentier, 1994:5)The Peircean interpretant is a last context-formed and next context-creating response that can then be embedded into upwardly ascending and downwardly causal chains that we call, colloquially and with good reason, knowing about and acting upon the world, respectively

PERCEPTIONASSOCIATIONIDEATIONICONICRELATIONSINDEXICALRELATIONSSYMBOLICRELATIONS

SINGLE NEURON ACTIVATIONHEBBIAN ASSEMBLIESSEMANTICWEBSICONICRELATIONSINDEXICALRELATIONSSYMBOLICRELATIONS

ICONICRELATIONSINDEXICALRELATIONSSYMBOLICRELATIONS

purely intra-system generated relations;flexible and conventionalrather than determinist and necessary;its object may be either mind independent or mind dependant but is always mediated bya second-order apprehension of the relations between relationsSYMBOLIZATIONLANGUAGE, SYMBOLIC THOUGHT

Three stages of reorganization in the internalization of symbols:

Completing a symbolically initiated action

2. Stabilising an ongoing external activity with symbols

3. Establishing ongoing internal activity regulation with symbols

(v. Clowes 2005, Cowley 2007)

The Adjacent Possible:

Those possibilities that have just been actualized - and the substrate upon which immediate next actualization must take place

The Relevant Next:

What possibilities have just been made available for immediate next action?

Collapsing the Wave Function of Possibility

Collapsing the Wave Function of Meaning

Hhmmm . Eh, well, then, uh you

you cn a::sk Charles caus

maybe well, he has con: NECT:

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Hhmmm . Eh, well, then, uh you

you cn a::sk Charles caus

maybe well, he has con: NECT:

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Fetishism consists of seeing the meaning of things as an inherent part of their physical existence, when in fact, that meaning is only created by their integration into a system of relations

Sut Jhally (1987:27).

www.biosemiotics.org/favareau/papers.html

WE BEGAN BY SPEAKING OF FETISHISM, AND AGAIN MY GOAL HERE IS NOT TO FETISHIZE PEIRCE OR CLAIM THE KIND OF UNQUESTIONABLE ALLEGIANCE TO ALL OF HIS CONJECTURES THAT WE CANNOT EVEN REASONABLY CLAIM FOR SUCH TRUSTWORTHY THINKERS AS EINSTEIN, ARISTOTLE, DESCARTES AND NEWTON. INDEED, SEPARATING OUT THE USEFUL AND VERIDICAL FROM THE INTERESTING BUT INCORRECT IN ANY THEORISTS WORK IS ALWAYS THE JOB OF THOSE WHO COME AFTER. SO AGAIN, LET ME LET ME END ON A NOTE OF ANTI-FETISHISM THAT I BELIEVE YET PAYS TRBUTE TO WHAT I THINK WILL BE MOST HELPFUL TO US IN PEIRCE:

We can think of this idea analogously with our creation of a snowflake example, where we can see how each prior stage of development brings into being the possibilities, biases and constraints for the subsequent stage of development but that if you broke off the newly created pieces of the later stages of development, you could not expect that the snowflake would either return sequentially to its original configuration (retrocausality or the Newtonian belief that processes of A to B to C are sufficiently deterministic that they would, if run backward in time, run C to B to A) OR that the processes of forward change are so invariant and deterministic that the sequence would just continue unabated back to form the exact same configuration that you had just broken off.

For the key to understanding change in a constantly changing and fundamentally interactive universe is that CHANGE - the product of INTERACTION provides the groundwork for any of a number of future POSSIBLE interactions to take place, only SOME of which will become actualized, CHANGING the groundwork, in turn, for the next set of possible interactions to take place.Obviously our old friends of Emergence, Downward CausationObviously our old friends of Emergence, Downward Causationand Autopoesis are at work.

And it turns out that were going to have to keep in mind both out Emergence-Downward Causation Autopoesis triadis critical to the understanding of the dense inter-relations that dynamically organize life on Earth, as well as to a gain a clearer understanding of ourselves as beings that are at ONE time (that is, not separately or in two different ways) physical and psychological (or, if you will: material and symbolic) beings.Because again, not only is it the fact that we do NOT come into a LABELED WORLDTo understand how this massively complex system works, were going to have to start at the beginning.

Now remember that we mentioned that the majority of ways we humans think of as knowing ways such as sight and sound and smell, much less ways such as thoughts and concepts and ideas are NOT part of the original furniture of the universe and that literally billions upon billions of living, environment-navigating and contingency-sensitive and manipulating living organisms know their world and act accordingly within it WITHOUT recourse to the affordances of thought and sound and logical reasoning and sight.

Maturana and Varelas discussion of the sensorimotor correlation of the amoeba, the protozoa and the bacteria (p. 149) are helpful here. There, as in this diagram of the motile cell of a primitive sponge, changes and perturbations in the sensory surface (black) causes direct changes in the motor surface (white) so that interaction at point A results in a reciprocal wave of contraction at points B and C. Because these two surfaces constitute the entire structure of the organism, sensing, being in a particular configuration and responding are unmediated at the level of the organism: that is, the entirety of the organism is always in all three states at once and its interactions with the environment are determined accordingly. Thus, touch or perturbation always either is or isnt fully present to the organism at any given moment and from thus a semiotic standpoint, we may say that only ICONIC relations with the environment are possible here.Now, in the more complex and later evolved sea anemone, the exact same contractile function has now been segregated into two specialized elements: (r) is a non-contractile sensory neuron that is acted upon directly by forces in the environment (B), but that is wholly incapable of acting upon that environment and its forces in return. (m), conversely, is a non-sensory contractile motor neuron that can and does act upon the environment but lacks the capacity to directly sense it. Mediation occurs as stimulation of the external environment B on sensory neuron (r) triggers the muscle contractile stimulation of motor neuron (m), allowing motor (m) to act directly upon an environment that it is incapable of directly receiving input from.

Sensory neuron (rs) movement, change, or perturbation functions thus as an INDEX of sensory sheet activation for motor neuron (m). In that it is ONLY through the mediation of (r) that (B) is, in fact, a causal agent or indeed not nothing, a THING, to (m) that we see in the clearest possible example how THIS type of relation is fundamentally a SIGN relation and how SIGN RELATIONS are first and foremost RELATIONS OF ACTION in the world, and NOT fundamentally relations of ideas thoughts or words.To understand how this massively complex system works, were going to have to start at the beginning.

Now remember that we mentioned that the majority of ways we humans think of as knowing ways such as sight and sound and smell, much less ways such as thoughts and concepts and ideas are NOT part of the original furniture of the universe and that literally billions upon billions of living, environment-navigating and contingency-sensitive and manipulating living organisms know their world and act accordingly within it WITHOUT recourse to the affordances of thought and sound and logical reasoning and sight.

Maturana and Varelas discussion of the sensorimotor correlation of the amoeba, the protozoa and the bacteria (p. 149) are helpful here. There, as in this diagram of the motile cell of a primitive sponge, changes and perturbations in the sensory surface (black) causes direct changes in the motor surface (white) so that interaction at point A results in a reciprocal wave of contraction at points B and C. Because these two surfaces constitute the entire structure of the organism, sensing, being in a particular configuration and responding are unmediated at the level of the organism: that is, the entirety of the organism is always in all three states at once and its interactions with the environment are determined accordingly. Thus, touch or perturbation always either is or isnt fully present to the organism at any given moment and from thus a semiotic standpoint, we may say that only ICONIC relations with the environment are possible here.Now, in the more complex and later evolved sea anemone, the exact same contractile function has now been segregated into two specialized elements: (r) is a non-contractile sensory neuron that is acted upon directly by forces in the environment (B), but that is wholly incapable of acting upon that environment and its forces in return. (m), conversely, is a non-sensory contractile motor neuron that can and does act upon the environment but lacks the capacity to directly sense it. Mediation occurs as stimulation of the external environment B on sensory neuron (r) triggers the muscle contractile stimulation of motor neuron (m), allowing motor (m) to act directly upon an environment that it is incapable of directly receiving input from.

Sensory neuron (rs) movement, change, or perturbation functions thus as an INDEX of sensory sheet activation for motor neuron (m). In that it is ONLY through the mediation of (r) that (B) is, in fact, a causal agent or indeed not nothing, a THING, to (m) that we see in the clearest possible example how THIS type of relation is fundamentally a SIGN relation and how SIGN RELATIONS are first and foremost RELATIONS OF ACTION in the world, and NOT fundamentally relations of ideas thoughts or words.Further mediation occurs in the sea anemone as an INTERNEURON neuron (g) is interposed between the non-contractile sensory cell (r) and the non-(externally) sensory muscle activating motor neuron (m). This inter-neuron neither acts upon the external environment nor is acted upon it. Rather, its relation with that environment is wholly mediated by the polar elements of the network of which it is a part.

The semiotic coupling here, then, works like this: motor neuron (m)s relations with sensory neuron (r) are wholly mediated by inter-neuron (g). Thus, inter-neuron (g) only insofar as it is responded to by the ACTIONS (interpretant) of motor neuron (m) functions as a SIGN of its OBJECT, sensory neuron (r) for motor neuron (m). At the same time, however, motor neuron (m)s OBJECT, sensory neuron (r) is itself simultaneously functioning as a SIGN in that it mediates all possible interaction between the OBJECT in the environment (C) and the stimulation of inter-neuron (g). At no point, then, does the OBJECT of the outside environment (C) become in any way an object of possible interaction with the inside environment that is going to ultimately respond to it i.e., motor neuron (m), except through its intermediate objectification in the secondary triad of (m) to (g) to (r).

Then the take-away lesson of THIS half of the lecture before we even BEGIN going into either the GROSS ANATOMICAL FUNCTIONAL STRUCTURES OF THE BRAIN which John will be talking to you all about on Wednesday or the MICROPROCESES of synaptic transmission that we MAY be getting today later today is that

{CLICK}

KNOWLEDGE HAS A HISTORY AND IS BUILTand Autopoesis are at work.

And it turns out that were going to have to keep in mind both out Emergence-Downward Causation Autopoesis triadWell, as we saw before, PERTURBATIONS in the stream of speech, SOUND STRETCHES, SELF-REPAIRS, RUSH THROUGHS, HESITATION MARKERS< PITCH PEAKS all these things that USED TO BE CONSIDERED EXTRANEOUS TO MEANING MAKING [CLICK]

Now are found to be the VERY LOCUSES OF MEANING-MAKING THAT PARTICIPANTS ARE CREATING FOR EACH OTHER AND ATTENDING TOWhat Id like to do today is to present a brief overview of most of the major mirror neuron research to date and then to challenge one of the prevailing assumptions in the field that assumption being that the cognitive transposition between "self" and "other" made possible by the mirror system is the result of "convergence" (CLICK)(agents matching others' external display with their own internal representations and reasoning syllogistically to arrive at a similarity relation), arguing instead for a biosemiotic hypothesis whereby such transposition is the result of "emergence" (CLICK) i.e., a process whereby neurally primitive motor representations that are mutual to agents' representations of self-action and other-action provide an identity relation upon which later self- and other- representations arise. WE BEGAN BY SPEAKING OF FETISHISM, AND AGAIN MY GOAL HERE IS NOT TO FETISHIZE PEIRCE OR CLAIM THE KIND OF UNQUESTIONABLE ALLEGIANCE TO ALL OF HIS CONJECTURES THAT WE CANNOT EVEN REASONABLY CLAIM FOR SUCH TRUSTWORTHY THINKERS AS EINSTEIN, ARISTOTLE, DESCARTES AND NEWTON. INDEED, SEPARATING OUT THE USEFUL AND VERIDICAL FROM THE INTERESTING BUT INCORRECT IN ANY THEORISTS WORK IS ALWAYS THE JOB OF THOSE WHO COME AFTER. SO AGAIN, LET ME LET ME END ON A NOTE OF ANTI-FETISHISM THAT I BELIEVE YET PAYS TRBUTE TO WHAT I THINK WILL BE MOST HELPFUL TO US IN PEIRCE:

WE BEGAN BY SPEAKING OF FETISHISM, AND AGAIN MY GOAL HERE IS NOT TO FETISHIZE PEIRCE OR CLAIM THE KIND OF UNQUESTIONABLE ALLEGIANCE TO ALL OF HIS CONJECTURES THAT WE CANNOT EVEN REASONABLY CLAIM FOR SUCH TRUSTWORTHY THINKERS AS EINSTEIN, ARISTOTLE, DESCARTES AND NEWTON. INDEED, SEPARATING OUT THE USEFUL AND VERIDICAL FROM THE INTERESTING BUT INCORRECT IN ANY THEORISTS WORK IS ALWAYS THE JOB OF THOSE WHO COME AFTER. SO AGAIN, LET ME LET ME END ON A NOTE OF ANTI-FETISHISM THAT I BELIEVE YET PAYS TRBUTE TO WHAT I THINK WILL BE MOST HELPFUL TO US IN PEIRCE:

Documents

Towards a Biosemiotic Epistemology Don Favareau National University of Singapore International Society for Biosemiotic Studies