Archetypes and code biology

Codes across (life)sciences

The concept of "code" connotes different meanings, intentions, and formalizations. From mathematics and computer sciences to psychology and culture, the term becomes less formal, more diverse, and sometimes appears ambiguous. In biology a growing number of codes ignite a debate about their role in evolution, biocomplexity, and agency, to name just a few. Here, a transdisciplinary group of code scientists attempts to capture the big picture of code research across their fields of interest. In this cross-sectional overview commonalities emerge that may pave the way towards a unified theory of life-based-on-codes. Codes underly cellular processes, perception, cognition, and communication. From ecosystems to human language, codes influence how individuals behave in groups, memorize, learn, and take part in cultural practices. Emotions like aggression, fear, anger, frustration, are important motivators of behaviour modulating mutual communication and sculpting individual experience. The inheritance of experience in form of innate release mechanisms, stereotyped behaviour, or archetypes may have phylogenetic and ontogenetic roots that rely on codes and impact our conscious decision making. Unconsciously, even our dreams draw on codes. In the future, conflation of different coding systems, e.g., from synthetic biology and generative artificial intelligence, will merge biological codes with machine logic and computer language to promote next-level transhumanism. Codes emerge as a currency converter between systems of life and between different scientific disciplines.

The concepts of code biology

Today there are two dominant paradigms in Biology: the idea that 'Life is Chemistry' and the idea that 'Life is Chemistry plus Information'. There is also a third paradigm, the idea that 'Life is Chemistry, Information and Meaning' but today this is a minority view, despite the fact that meaning is produced by codes and there is ample experimental evidence that hundreds of codes exist in living systems. This is because that evidence has not yet reached the university books, but what exists in nature is bound to exist, one day, also in our books and at that point the codes will become an integral part of biology. This paper is a brief description of the key concepts of that third paradigm that has become known as Code Biology.

The innate story code

Code biology reveals a great many codes beyond the genetic code as integral to biological functioning. Recent scholars have linked the growing field of code biology to analytical psychology, confirming that the encoded information inherited by the human organism is indeed massive and capable of great sophistication. In this discussion, I will expand on this project by showing how developments in embodied cognition reveal a code that links the world of universal emotional responses to common experiences to the world of embodied visuospatial narratives--i.e., the "archetypes" of analytical psychology. Viewed in this manner, archetypes become spontaneous symbolic narratives that symbolize universal emotional responses to typical human environments. Such symbolic narratives aim toward adaptation, and use a universal code that maps such situations to visuospatial narratives, with the adaptor being the human body itself.

Understanding Spontaneous Symbolism in Psychotherapy Using Embodied Thought

Spontaneous, unwilled subjective imagery and symbols (including dreams) often emerge in psychotherapy that can appear baffling and confound interpretation. Early psychoanalytic theories seemed to diverge as often as they agreed on the meaning of such content. Nevertheless, after reviewing key findings in the empirical science of spontaneous thought as well as insights gleaned from neuroscience and especially embodied cognition, it is now possible to construct a more coherent theory of interpretation that is clinically useful. Given that thought is so thoroughly embodied, it is possible to demonstrate that universalities in human physiology yield universalities in thought. Such universalities can then be demonstrated to form a kind of biologically directed universal "code" for understanding spontaneous symbolic expressions that emerge in psychotherapy. An example is given that illustrates how this can be applied to clinical encounters.

Code biology and aesthetics

This paper lays the foundations for an investigation of aesthetics in the light of the theories proposed in the field of Code Biology. Starting from the research objectives that aesthetics has set since its origins, a comparison is made with those aesthetic theories that have been most concerned with the sensory approach to the environment, with the attempt to unite human sciences and the main biological discoveries. Thanks to the scientifically grounded insights offered by Code Biology, we will first outline the field of interest of aesthetics and its foundations, and then delineate certain boundaries - such as those between sensations and perceptions, the aesthetic process and the work of art - that characterise such a field of research. Particular attention will be paid to locating the aesthetic process within the more general cognitive processes, i.e. the three cognitive macrosystems that enable the modelling of the world.

Revisiting Carl Jung's archetype theory a psychobiological approach

This paper delves into the concept of archetypes, universal patterns of behavior and cognition, and proposes a novel tripartite model distinguishing between structural, regulatory, and representational archetypes. Drawing on insights from code biology, neuroscience, genetics, and epigenetics, the model provides a nuanced framework for understanding archetypes and their role in shaping cognition and behavior. The paper also explores the interplay between these elements to express representational archetypes. Furthermore, it addresses the informational capacity of the genome and its influence on post-natal development and the psyche. The paper concludes by discussing the future trajectory of psychology, emphasizing the need for an integrative approach that combines our understanding of social constructs with insights into our inherent organizational propensities or archetypes. This exploration holds the potential to advance our understanding of the human condition.

The flower of the desert and a migrant experience: Two examples of personal codes

The concept of personal code is inspired by Peirce and Coseriu but is compatible with Code Biology. Persons can build their cultural code out of the codes available among their communities. Personal codes are social i.e., they are constructed by a population of interacting human code-makers, yet the interacting population is made of different states of the same human mind. The rules of personal codes are a set that can be partitioned into two subsets: the subset of rules that are shared with other human beings and the subset of rules that are followed by just one person. In a personal code, some of the meanings of a pre-existing cultural code are connected either with new cultural meanings or with meanings coming from a different pre-existing cultural code. The attachment of a new meaning to a previous one will be exemplified by analyzing Giacomo Leopardi's poem La Ginestra, while the personal connection between two different cultural codes will be shown in a text written by a young migrant. These two case studies employ Hjelmslev's connotative analysis of sign systems.

Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of code biology

This article highlights the potential contribution of biological codes to the course and dynamics of evolution. The concept of organic codes, developed by Marcello Barbieri, has fundamentally changed our view of how living systems function. The notion that molecular interactions built on adaptors that arbitrarily link molecules from different "worlds" in a conventional, i.e., rule-based way, departs significantly from the law-based constraints imposed on livening things by physical and chemical mechanisms. In other words, living and non-living things behave like rules and laws, respectively, but this important distinction is rarely considered in current evolutionary theory. The many known codes allow quantification of codes that relate to a cell, or comparisons between different biological systems and may pave the way to a quantitative and empirical research agenda in code biology. A starting point for such an endeavour is the introduction of a simple dichotomous classification of structural and regulatory codes. This classification can be used as a tool to analyse and quantify key organising principles of the living world, such as modularity, hierarchy, and robustness, based on organic codes. The implications for evolutionary research are related to the unique dynamics of codes, or ´Eigendynamics´ (self-momentum) and how they determine the behaviour of biological systems from within, whereas physical constraints are imposed mainly from without. A speculation on the drivers of macroevolution in light of codes is followed by the conclusion that a meaningful and comprehensive understanding of evolution depends including codes into the equation of life.