Biosemiotics: A Place I'm Living for a While 


Jim begins to explore a new field, biosemiotics, that may help him in his quest to characterize the phenomenon of meaning. 

I'm reading what I can find on biosemiotics, which I encountered from reading up on semiotics. Wikipedia says "Biosemiotics (bios=life & semion=sign) is a growing field that studies the production, action and interpretation of signs in the physical and biologic realms in an attempt to integrate the findings of scientific biology and semiotics to form a new view of life and meaning as immanent features of the natural world." Today I found an article by Claus Emmeche, a theoretical biologist who heads the Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies at the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen. The article is The Agents of Biomass, and it is a challenge to sift and distill its many ideas.

Emmeche immediately establishes himself as other than a reductionist in a couple of ways. First, he states that the basic philosophy of biology is not mechanism but organicism. Explanations involving part-whole relationships play a part in modern biology. Indeed, the concept of biomass, the total quantity of matter in organisms, is reduced to flows of matter and energy among different levels in an ecosystem.

It is these words from the article, however, that have so resonated with me:

"If we are to offer some sort of physically intuitive notion of the biological phenomenology (of cells, DNA, proteins, indeed organs and organisms) as mass phenomena compared with the atomic and subatomic levels, we must say something like this: while it is true that an organism - from a particle physics point of view - is only a set of interacting particles, these are still so highly and complexly organized[14] that these macroscopic levels constitute independent constraining boundary conditions for the dynamics of the lower particle levels, and that these boundary conditions themselves have a profound historical (and thus also biofunctional and biosemiotic) character, which is why the particle description can never be adequate.[15] This may sound rather "physical", and so it is, but this new physical view (which is widespread in `the physics of complex systems', chaos theory, artificial life etc.), also has a more metaphysical, or one could say biosemiotic interpretation: it is the meaning in nature as an emergent phenomenon - that is, something genuinely new created through the history of evolution, which is yet continuously (synechistically) connected with the old - which constitutes the true constraining conditions which ensure that the habits nature has acquired at the level in question remain relatively stable."

So there you have it, clear as crystal. Meaning is an emergent phenomenon, in the sense that at almost every level of the biosphere, components stand in relation to each other as sign, and that it is these signifying relationships that create a more complex kind of causality than the efficient causality of classical physics. Emmeche specifically points out, too, that it was the quantum theoretical account of the physical microworld which led to the breakdown of the dyadic causal relationship as the basis for explanation.

I am going to be studying this and other similar articles carefully. I think I have found a disciplinary connection for my study of human freedom. 

Posted: Sat - July 1, 2006 at 11:36 AM          

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