Jesper Hoffmeyer

Contents:

Introduction: Bateson the precursor; J. Hoffmeyer: Introduction.pdf  (draft version)
1.    Angels fear revisited; M.C. Bateson
2.    From thing to relation. On Bateson's bioanthropology; J. Hoffmeyer
3.    What connects the map to the territory; T. Cashman
4.    The pattern which connects pleroma to creature; T. Deacon, J. Sherman
5.    Bateson’s method: double description; J. Hui, T. Cashman, and T. Deacon:
6.    Gregory Bateson's relevance to current molecular biology; L. Bruni
7.    Process ecology: Creatura in an open universe; R.E. Ulanowicz:
8.    Connections in action – bridging implicit and explicit domains;
      T. Shilhab, C. Gerlach
9.    Bateson: biology with meaning; B. Goodwin.
10.  Gregory Bateson's 'uncovery' of ecological aesthetics; P. Harries-Jones:
11.  Collapsing the wave function of meaning: the epistemological matrix of talk-in
      interaction; D. Favareau:
12.  Re-enchanting evolution: transcending fundamentalisms through a mythopoetic
      epistemology; G. Mengel
13.  Bateson and Peirce on the pattern that connects and the sacred; S. Brier
14.  Bateson, Peirce and the sign of the sacred; D. Eicher-Catt.

Molecules and information have long been considered the major conceptual players at the core of scientific biology. In the present book it is suggested that both these concepts fail to fully specify what life-processes are all about, namely semiosis – i.e.,  the sign processes by which living organisms must organize their internal and external relations. A sign is not the same thing as a piece of information. It is related to information but only becomes “information” through an act of interpretation. Only when an interpretant is formed (in a cell, in a tissue and, of course, in a brain) does “information” acquire biological meaning. Bio-molecules are always carriers of signs in this sense, and their function in the organism cannot be understood simply through an analysis of their chemistry. The Greek word for ‘sign’ is ‘semeion’ and biosemiotics literally means “the study of living systems from a semiotic (i.e., sign-theoretical) perspective.”
It is the aim of the present book to give a comprehensive account of the state of the art of this new approach to biology, and to explore the scientific landscapes brought to life through a broader application of its core idea. It should be emphasized here that biosemiotics does not imply any denial of the anchoring of biological processes in well-established physical and chemical lawfulness. Rather, it is claimed that life-processes are both part of – and are organized in obedience to –  a semiotic dynamic, and that this fact cannot be omitted from a true science of life.
The book consists of three parts and a postscript. Part one contains a general discussion of the biosemiotic project as a strategy in life science and Part two contains a detailed exposition of biosemiotics as it may be employed in the understanding of life processes at different levels of animate nature. Part 3 addresses the radical consequences that the biosemiotic perspective will have on our thinking in a range of other areas: i.e., the origin of language, ethics, aesthetics, biomedicine, environmental understanding, health, cognitive science and biotechnology.  In the Postscript is given a brief account of the historical development of the discipline, as well as a prognosis for its future growth.

I shall do no attempt at ridding myself of any trace of intentionality in the process (Hoffmeyer 1996 a). Natural translation is not a macro-level process but a process, which is played out by individual entities at many levels from single cells to organisms or even populations and perhaps ecosystems. To this day Darwinists have claimed that natural selection rests on purely hypothetical-deductive principles: Suppose a population of organisms reproduce to exceed its resource base. Suppose furthermore that heritable variants exist among individuals of the population. Then competition necessarily ensues and results in better adapted variants leaving more surviving offspring, i.e. in differential survival.

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ABSTRACT The fact that agency is an essential aspect of life introduces new explanatory avenues into the map of evolutionary thought. There is hardly any process in animate nature that is not, in one way or another, regulated communicatively, i.e., through the ability of living systems to read and interpret relevant signs in their environment. Semiotics – the science of signs – therefore ought to become a key tool for the “life sciences” in general and biology in particular. The paper analyzes the ways semiotic interactions in nature have been developed to scaffold the web of physiological, developmental, and ecological pathways. Semiotic scaffolding is only very indirectly based on genetic scaffolding. The gene products, the proteins, are not just molecules, but are always also semiotic tools, and what the genes really do is to specify the efficiency of semiotic modulators. In addition to the concept of the genome we need in biology a concept of the semiome: the entirety of an organism's semiotic tool set: i.e., the means by which the organisms of this species may extract significantly meaningful content from their surroundings and engage in intraor interspecific communicative behavior. The semiome thus defines the scope of the organism's cognitive and communicative activity. The theoretical question raised in this paper is the question of the interconnectedness between genomic and semiomic changes.

Résumé/Abstract The strange" forgetfulness of the notion of the sign" that John Deely puts as an emblem for the third of the Four ages of understanding (2001: xxx) may also be seen as an emblem for the so-called modern science that grew to unprecedented victories in ...

In his recent book, Ecology, the Ascendent Perspective, theoretical eco-logist Robert Ulanowicz delves at length into the sophisticated feeding strategy of the bladderwort (genus Utricularid) (Ulanowicz 1997). These humble plants live at the bottoms of lakes but do not feed ...

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... 1999. A new causality for the understanding of the living. Special issue: Biosemiotica. Semiotica , 127(1–4): 497–519. [CrossRef] View all references). ... 1999. Order out of indeterminacy. Special issue: Biosemiotica. Semiotica , 127(1–4): 321–43. [CrossRef] View all references). ...

The concept of individuation has suffered from its being mostly connected with Jungian psychology or nominalist philosophy. In this paper, “individuation” will be understood rather as a process; and in particular, as a series of stages (morphological and/or cognitive) that an organism passes through during its lifespan.

In most species, individuation is restricted to a short period in early life, as when birds acquire their species specific songs; while in humans - and a few other species of birds or mammals (although to a much lesser degree) - individuation is a life-long, open-ended process. In this understanding, individuation becomes narrowly connected to learning. And since learning necessarily depends on what is already learned, the trajectory of learning-based individuation is necessarily indefinite and dependent on the concrete chance events and steps whereby the process has proceeded. Semiotic individuation is a historical process, and this fact explains why systems biology, as established by Ludwig van Bertalanffy, has not been capable of meeting the hope, expressed long ago by Ernst Cassirer, of bridging the mechanicist-vitalist gap in biology. Instead, a semiotic approach is called for.

Human individuation, moreover, is special in a very important sense: language use implies that humans from earliest childhood inescapably become entangled in an 'as-if-world', a virtual reality, a story about who we are and how our life ‘here and now’ belongs within our own life-history, as well as within the greater pattern of the world around us. Human individuation is thus a double-tracked process, consisting in an incessant reconciliation or negotiation between the virtual reality that we have constructed in our minds and mind-independent reality as it impresses itself upon our lives. Human life cannot therefore be defined by its uniqueness as a particular genetic combination, but must be instead be defined by its uniqueness as a temporal outcome of semiotic individuation. Accordingly, this double-tracked character of human semiotic individuation implies that it is cast as just one particular outcome of a combinatorics with an infinite number of possible outcomes. It is suggested here that our ingrained feeling of possessing a free will is buried in this fact.

Life processes at all levels (from the genetic to the behavioral) are coordinated by semiotic interactions between cells, tissues, membranes, organs, or individuals and tuned through evolution to stabilize important functions. A stabilizing dynamics based on a system of semiotic scaffoldings implies that genes do not control the life of organisms, they merely scaffold it. The nature-nurture dynamics is thus far more complex and open than is often claimed. Contrary to physically based interactions, semiotic interactions do not depend on any direct causal connection between the sign vehicle (the representamen) and the effect. Semiotic interaction patterns therefore provide fast and versatile mechanisms for adaptations, mechanisms that depend on communication and “learning” rather than on genetic preformation. Seen as a stabilizing agency supporting the emergence of higher-order structure semiotic scaffolding is not, of course, exclusive for phylogenetic and ontogenetic development, it is also an important dynamical element in cultural evolution.

This special issue aims to investigate the concept of semiotic scaffolding as a unificatory principle pertaining to evolutionary systems at large. Contrary to material scaffoldings semiotic scaffoldings are relational, they operate through the stabilizing effect of sign action or semiosis. Sign processes easily transcend hierarchical borders because the material substrate for the entities united in the triadic sign process is of no relevance for establishing it in action, in semiosis. Sign processes therefore painlessly cross the borders between those domains of reality that in the Cartesian understanding are unbridgeable separate orders, science and humanity, body and mind, nature and culture. A brief introduction is given to each the twelve contributions assembled in this special issue.

The threshold from unicellularity to multicellularity has been crossed only in three major living domains in evolution with any lasting success. The hard problem was to create a multicellular self. Such a self is vulnerable to breakdown due to the unavoidable appearance of mutant anarchistic cells, and stringent semiotic scaffoldings had to emerge to prevent this. While a unicellular self may go on to live practically forever, the multicellular self most often must run through an individuation process ending in the death of the individual. Due to basic differences in cells of plants, fungi and animals this
individuation process poses very different challenges in the three kingdoms of plants, fungi and animals, and the solutions found to these differences are discussed. In the same time as multicellularity ushered life into the epoch of mortality it logically also led to the appearance of fertilization and thereby the need for a whole new set of elaborate semiotic scaffoldings. Multicellularity also opened the door to the formation symbiotic relations where cells with different genomes might collaborate or at least coexist inside the same body.
All in all multicellularity led to an enormous diversification both of morphology space and the space of sensomotoric elaborations. New means for scaffolding of this expansion and diversification of possible life forms into functional patterns called for a corresponding growth in the space of semiotic tools (chemical processes, heat, light, sound, volatile chemicals, magnetism, radiation of many sorts, etc.) and initiated a growth in semiotic freedom, that has continued to our days.

A sign is something that refers to something else. Signs, whether of natural or cultural origin, act by provoking a receptive system, human or nonhuman, to form an interpretant (a movement or a brain activity) that somehow relates the system to this “something else.” Semiotics sees meaning as connected to the formation of interpretants. In a biosemiotic understanding living systems are basically engaged in semiotic interactions, that is, interpretative processes, and organic evolution exhibits an inherent tendency toward an increase in semiotic freedom. Mammals generally are equipped with more semiotic freedom than are their reptilian ancestor species, and fishes are more semiotically sophisticated than are invertebrates. The evolutionary trend toward the production of life forms with an increasing interpretative capacity or semiotic freedom implies that the production of meaning has become an essential survival parameter in later stages of evolution.

Our lives cannot but implant the knowledge in our souls that the mind is one thing and the world is another. Out of this separation arises the problem of intentionality, that our minds necesarily occupy themselves with things in the world, or that mind processes are always 'about' something. In the scholastic tradition from Thomas Aquinas this 'aboutness' is still seen as an immaterial or intentional direct union between the knower and the known. To know about things, e.g. a storm or a flower, implies that these things exist in the mind of the knower as intentional beings, and the nature of this kind of being is that of a relation or interface.
The idea of intentional being was taken up once again by Franz Brentano. To Brentano - and the phenomenological tradition he thus initiated - mind should be seen as real, irreducibly intentional, and inexplicable naturalistically. Philosphers of the analytic tradition rejected this whole notion claiming that whatever is real is nonintentional and explicable naturalistically. Unnoticed by most thinkers a third position was suggested by Charles Peirce, who agreed with Brentano that mind is real and irreducibly intentional but in the same time maintained, contra Brentano, that mind is explicable naturalistically.
This chapter takes the semiotic realism of Charles Peirce as a starting point and discusses a biosemiotic approach to the problem of intentionality. Intentionality is seen as implicit to semiosis (sign processes) and semiosis and life is seen as co-existant. The needs of all living beings for expressing a degree of anticipatory capacity is seen as an evolutionary lever for the development of species with increased semiotic freedom. Human intentionlity is not therefore unique in the world but must be understood as a peculiar and highly sophisticated instantiation of a general semiotics of nature. Biosemiotics offers a way to explicate intentionality naturalistically.

For three and a half billion years the living crea-tures of the natural world have been engaged in an increasingly complex and extensive conversa-tion. Cells, tissue, organs, plants, animals, entire populations and ecosystems buzz with communi-cation, incessantly ...

... In Viggo Mortensen and RC Sorensen (eds.). Free Will and Determinism. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 188-200. Hoffmeyer, Jesper (1992). ... In Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok (eds.). Biosemiotics: The Semiotic Web 1991. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 101-...