Steps to a science of biosemiotics

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that we ultimately need to re-ground biosemiotic theory on natural science principles and abandon the analogy with human level semiotics, except as this provides clues for guiding analysis. But, to overcome the implicit dualism still firmly entrenched in the biological sciences requires a third approach that is neither phenomenologically motivated nor based on a code analogy. This approach must preserve the centrality of the concept of interpretation (that is ubiquitous in the phenomenological domain) and yet base it in biophysics and mathematical information theory. To accomplish this, we must undertake a thorough re-examination of information theory to determine how it can be extended to deal with issues of real reference and functional significance. I argue below that this requires showing how the concept of entropy (as it is differently defined in thermodynamics and in the information sciences) can be used to explain the relationship between information, meaning and work. Additionally, I argue that this also requires a radical expansion of dynamical systems theories to explain the physics of intrinsically end-directed processes. Together, these developments are necessary to account for the capacity to interpret immediate physical conditions as representing other displaced or as yet unrealised possible conditions. This is a necessary first step to making biosemiotics compatible with the information theoretic perspective that is currently dominant in physics, chemistry and molecular biology.

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