Semiosis stems from logical incompatibility in organic nature: Why biophysics does not see meaning, while biosemiotics does

Biophysical and biological perspective in biosemiotics

The cell and its basic constituents are introduced here through a biophysical and information communication theoretic approach in biology and biosemiotics. With this purpose, the requirements of primordial cellular structures, single binding events, and signalling cascades are first mentioned stepwise, in relation to the model of the cellular sensing mechanism. This is followed by the concepts of cross reactions in sensing and pattern recognitions, wherein an information theoretic approach is addressed and the features of multicellularity are discussed along. Multicellularity is introduced as the path that leads to the loss of the direct causal relations. The loss of true causal relation is considered as a form of translation that enables meaning-encoded communication over the informative processes. In this sense, semiosis may not be exclusive. Synthetic biology is exemplified as a form of artificial selection mechanisms for the generation of 'self-reproducing' systems with information coding and processing machineries. These discussions are summarised at the end.

Creation of the relevant next: How living systems capture the power of the adjacent possible through sign use

Stuart Kauffman's revolutionary notion of the Adjacent Possible as an organizing principle in nature shares much in common with logician Charles S. Peirce's understanding of the universe as an ever-unfolding 'process ontology' of possibility space that is brought about through the recursive interaction of genuine possibility, transiently actualized order, and emergent (but never fully deterministic) lawfulness. Proceeding from these three fundamental categories of becoming-as-being, Peirce developed a complimentary logic of sign relations that, along with Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll's action-as-meaning-imprinting Umwelt theory, informs the work that is currently being undertaken under the aegis of Biosemiotics. In this paper, I will highlight the deep affinities between Kauffman's notion of the Adjacent Possible and Biosemiotics' hybrid Peircean/Uexküllian "sign" concept, by which living systems - both as individuals and in the aggregate (i.e., as co-actors, communities and lineages) - "capture" relevant aspects of their relations with the immediately given Adjacent Possible and preserve those recipes for future interaction possibilities as biologically instantiated signs. By so doing, living systems move into the Adjacent Possible by "collapsing the wave function" of possibility not just probabilistically, but guided by system-internal values arising from previously captured sign relations that are biologically instantiated as replicable system biases and generative constraints. The influence of such valenced and end-directed action in the world introduces into the universe the phenomenon of the Relevant (and not just deterministic, or even stochastic) Next. My argument in this paper is that organisms live out their lives perpetually confronted with negotiating the omnipresent Relevant Next, and are informed by the biological capture of their (and their lineage's) previous engagements in doing so. And because that "capture" of previous agent-object-action relationships are instantiated as biological signs for the guidance of the organism, not only are "successful survival strategies" within a given possibility space captured (as in traditional accounts of Natural Selection), but captured as well within those signs are the entire complement of previously untaken but still veridical real-world possibility spaces that are inseparably 'entangled' with that sign, and just awaiting exploration by the organism. Thus, while all action in the universe is both current-context dependant and next-context creating, the emergence of ever-more complex semiotic capabilities in organisms has expanded the possibility space of immediate-next-action in the world exponentially, and has brought into being not a pre-given, singly end-directed ordered world, but an emergent, many ends-directed world of promiscuous, unforeseeable and interacting telos. The goal of Biosemiotics is to understand and to explore this world.