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Group Discussions in Biosemiotics 2012 Discussion of the paper Organic semiosis and Peircean semiosis Marcello Barbieri <[email protected]> 03 aprile 2012 15:00 A: Alexei Sharov <[email protected]>, Almo Farina <[email protected]>, Angelo Recchia Luciani <[email protected]>, Anton Markos <[email protected]>, Arnellos Argyris <[email protected]>, Catherine Cotton <[email protected]>, Charbel El-Hani <[email protected]>, Claus Emmeche <[email protected]>, Cliff A Joslyn <[email protected]>, Daniel Mayer <[email protected]>, Dario Martinelli <[email protected]>, Dennis Görlich <[email protected]>, Dennis Waters <[email protected]>, DON FAVAREAU <[email protected]>, Eliseo Fernandez <[email protected]>, Franco Giorgi <[email protected]>, Gerald Ostdiek <[email protected]>, Gérard Battail <[email protected]>, Günther Witzany <[email protected]>, Han-liang Chang <[email protected]>, Howard Pattee <[email protected]>, Jana Švorcová <[email protected]>, Jannie Hofmeyr <[email protected]>, Jesper Hoffmeyer <[email protected]>, Joachim De Beule <[email protected]>, Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi <[email protected]>, John Collier <[email protected]>, John Deely <[email protected]>, João Carlos Major <[email protected]>, Kalevi Kull <[email protected]>, Karel Kleisner <[email protected]>, Kevin Stadler <[email protected]>, Liz Swan <[email protected]>, Louis Goldberg <[email protected]>, Luis Emilio Bruni <[email protected]>, Marcel Danesi <[email protected]>, Marcello Barbieri <[email protected]>, Morten Tønnessen <[email protected]>, Myrdene Anderson <[email protected]>, Natalia Abieva <[email protected]>, Paul Cobley <[email protected]>, Peter Dittrich <peter.dittrich@uni- jena.de>, Peter Harries-Jones <[email protected]>, Peter Wills <[email protected]>, Prisca Augustyn <[email protected]>, Richard Gordon <[email protected]>, Sara Cannizzaro <[email protected]>, Sergey Chebanov <[email protected]>, Stanley N Salthe <[email protected]>, Stefan Artmann <[email protected]>, Stephen J Cowley <[email protected]>, Søren Brier <[email protected]>, Terrence Deacon <[email protected]>, Timo Maran <[email protected]>, Tommi Vehkavaara <[email protected]>, "Victoria N. Alexander" <[email protected]>, Vinicius Romanini <[email protected]>, Wendy Wheeler <[email protected]>, Winfried Nöth <[email protected]>, Yagmur Denizhan <[email protected]> Dear Colleagues, In 2009, as you may remember, I asked Søren Brier and Cliff Joslyn to edit a Special Issue on the concept of “Information in Biosemiotics”, and after a long saga, that project has now been completed. The articles will soon appear online and in a few months will also come out on paper. Three of them explicitly claim that the cell is fully capable of interpretation, and criticize my view that organic semiosis is based exclusively on coding and decoding. They have been written by (1) Søren Brier and Cliff Joslyn, (2) Anton Markoš and Fatima Cvrčková and (3) Argyris Arnellos, Luis Emilio Bruni, Charbel Niño El-Hani and John Collier. This surely means that there is pluralism in our field, but that issue is too important and I could not let the criticism go unanswered. I have decided therefore to reply with the article that I am now sending in attachment. This too is pluralism. All the best Marcello 2 Stanley N Salthe <[email protected]> 05 aprile 2012 15:55 A: Marcello Barbieri <[email protected]> Cc: MAILING LIST Musing upon the coding-interpretation controversy as presented by Marcello: We have here a lively dialectic between those that hold interpretive semiosis to be the only kind (Peircean) of semiosis, and Marcello, who denies that biological codings are interpretive. Both sides restrict semiosis to living systems and their social creations. There is a third position -- glancingly acknowledged by Marcello in a nod to Taborsky -- and this is that Peircean semiosis can be found throughout nature, as held by both Peirce and Sebeok, and given a label by Deely -- ‘physiosemiosis’. This latter is my own position as well (laid out in a paper that is awaiting publication in Cybernetics and Human Knowing). The burden of my position is that certain abiotic locales, emergent from local energy flows, have a primitive (proto)semiosis as a result of their form. It would be such locales, in my view, that would have been the sites of the first living systems. My purpose in this is twofold: (1) to bring in evolutionary and materialist perspectives (nothing comes from nothing; everything has a precursor); (2) to urge an expansion of physicochemical discourse toward a more naturalistic and less technologically-oriented purview. Like most scientists, Marcello is dubious of generalizing, and this, I feel, forms the basis of his opposition to attributing Peircean semiotics outside of the productions of nervous systems. He seems here to be saying, in effect, that if we can outline in detail the mechanistic steps involved in what could be viewed by a Peircean as interpretive semiosis, then we will have ‘explained away’ interpretation, which is then no longer needed in a purely naturalistic perspective. This is the traditional perspective of scientific reductionism. Well, then, if interpretive semiosis mediated by nervous systems in animals could be given a step-by-step microscopic description, I suppose we would have disposed of interpretation here as well! STAN 3 Peter Harries-Jones <[email protected]> 07 marzo 2012 16:48 A: Stanley N Salthe <[email protected]> Cc: MAILING LIST Dear Stan, Yes of course thermodynamic entropy creates patterned gradients which create specific sites in ecosystems. But does this have the same pattern characteristics as the affordance that the site gives to living organisms? Let us take a clear example of cyanobacteria which is site specific but whose evolutionary integration with other living organisms who become aerobic-dependent follows a very different pattern than that of the initial thermodynamic biochemical soup in which cyanobacteria arose. That pattern can be derived from a study of bioentropy rather than thermodynamic entropy, bioentropy characteristics originally identified by Norbert Wiener and called (in a not very satisfactory term) "islands of order." What he meant was to point to characteristically different feedback patterns. Now I suppose that it is possible -for a while at least- to engage in a double description of thermodynamic and bioentropic entropy, or even, as Taborsky does, create a functional equation for the two, but eventually one simply has to go to the optician to buy a new set of spectacles to register the consequences of feedback divergence. This might even lead to a search for new equations registering divergence in fractal dimensions some sort of equation that ladders fractals "upwards" rather than "downwards" as a result of ecosystem interaction . All the best, Peter. 4 Stanley N Salthe <[email protected]> 05 aprile 2012 22:25 A: Peter Harries-Jones <[email protected]> Cc: MAILING LIST Peter -- Thanks for this feedback! Thermodynamics must indeed be 'up front' here, though I did not signal that. I think my main response to you is that the organization of a locale is indeed more detailed and persistent when it is a living one, and this difference was the result of evolution. But from the point of view of physical organization, I see no difference thermodynamically. Both -- for the abiotic, a tornado is a convenient example -- utilize the energy gradients that they destabilize to build and enhance their own form. Both dissipate the gradients as fast as possible given the constraints of form that must be maintained and not destroyed by the energy flows. What the living have contributed to this perspective is their relative stability, which, importantly, implies also detailed organization modifiable into different forms aimed at different energy gradients. This means that living systems participate in the grand Big Bang scenario by becoming specialized for energy gradients that are not susceptible to spontaneous conduction (diffusion and mass wasting) or susceptible to abiotic dissipative structures (like tornadoes). Indeed, the presence of such unused gradients on a planet would have to have been an important pre-condition for the origin of life. 'Bioentropy', if I understand you aright, would be a form of informational entropy, not the physical entropy I discuss above. But it IS quite important in my proposal here, in the sense that informational entropy (information carrying capacity, or variety) is what has been produced by the evolution of living things, as we picture it as a tree of life. Thermodynamically, this reflects the different energy gradients each kind is dependent upon for its continuance. STAN 5 Howard Pattee <[email protected]> 05 aprile 2012 21:40 A: Marcello Barbieri <[email protected]> Cc: MAILING LIST Dear Marcello and colleagues, I agree with you in the usage of code as a syntactic mapping that is independent of interpretation, because that is the case for the genetic code and all cryptographic codes. Of course there are other meanings, as in dress codes or legal codes. However, I define interpretation more broadly as any dynamical actions that are constrained by symbols to execute a function or other meaningful symbolic expressions. The most primitive case is the symbolically constrained dynamic folding that results in a functioning protein. Attached is a brief explanation of why I use this broader definition. Regards to all, Howard Attachment – Pattee’s Answer to Marcello- Interpretation H. H .Pattee : The Dynamics of Interpretation—a Brief Response to Barbieri (5 April 2012) I have not read the papers that use “code” and “interpretation” in ways with which Barbieri disagrees, so I cannot address what was said. Barbieri is of course correct that we should recognize the differences between genetic symbols and human symbols.
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