The Semiotics of Life…
Consciousness and Beings relationship to Being
“The progress of science has always been the result of a close interplay between our concepts of the universe and our observations on nature. The former can only evolve out of the latter and yet the latter is also conditioned greatly by the former. Thus in our exploration of nature, the interplay between our concepts and our observations may sometimes lead to totally unexpected aspects among already familiar phenomena” …
— Tsung-Dao Lee
“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning” …
― Werner Heisenberg
“When you look at a picture, you may wonder what is imaginary and what is real. Do we talk about the reality of the phenomena or the phenomenon of reality? What is really inside and what is outside? What do we have here: reality or dream? If a dream is a revelation about life in reality, then life in reality is also a revelation about a dream”…
— Rene Magritte
As outlined in Substance — The Primary Mode of Being and the Medium for Meaning a central idea was the Metaxic role of Semiotics in mediating human consciousness’s phenomenological experience of Being — participating in a Mind Independent Reality — whilst — developing a Mind-Dependent Representation.
In other words, meaning emerges from Being’s relationship to Being.
- Heidegger’s — this Being (Dasein) to Being (Sein) — Being in the World.
- Kant’s distinction between Das-Ding-für-Mich (Subjective — the thing for me) and Das-Ding-an-Sich (Objective — the thing-in-itself).
- Jean Paul Sartre’s ontological distinction between pour soi (being for itself) and en soi (being in itself).
- Peirce’s distinction between the interplay between the Ego and Non-Ego in Human Consciousness (i.e. a double consciousness — Altersense).
Being’s participation in Reality.
Meaning is central to the Conscious Self and reflects the beginning of the process of separating knowing by the conscious-self from entangled being in the world.
One that highlights Husserl’s intentional nature of consciousness (i.e. always engaged with the world and objects therein).
A dynamic process of mediation, differentiation, assimilation, and accommodationin order to bring a sense of coherence and unity of being.
“Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it — either through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed. If the gap between organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives”…
- John Dewey
Consciousness as a continuous, evolving interplay — an oscillation between potentiality and actuality, unity and distinction.
Synthesising meaning from an undivided reality (i.e. everything that is in the act of Being) in which Human Being is entangled.
The mediation of the possibility of actualising meaning by the conscious-self from an interconnected whole.
It is a view that suggests consciousness is not simply observing a world external to it, consciousness is the unfolding process of meaning itself, an ever-active weaving of distinction within the interwoven whole.
In other words, the fabric of mediation is not separate from Being; it is Being’s way of coming to know itself.
A dynamic process that enables the conscious-self to continuously differentiate (negate), assimilate (integrate) and accommodate (modify) new relationships of meaning into a mental schema.
Consciousness, as a structure that mediates between different possible interpretations of reality (i.e. everything that is in the act of Being (e.g. Rosmini — Real Being) or potential of Being (e.g. Rosmini — Ideal Being), much like how Lewis’s counterfactuals assess how different scenarios would play out under various conditions.
It reveals new understandings of Reality in which the Actual World emerges throughHuman Being’s participation in Being, shaping meaning through the relationship between the Observer and the Observed and where ontology (what can we know) & epistemology (what can exist) are mediated via signs.
An understanding of Human psychological development anchored in self-awareness and the development of a relationship understanding of human consciousness beyond the ego-state (ego-centrism).
One that begins to recognise our entanglement and participation in Reality via the inherent relationships between the observer and observed — Human Being’s relationship to Being.
Peirce — Meaning, Being and Knowing
“Well, it’s important to first recognise that the data are not the phenomena. They are a representation of the phenomena. Also, we must recognise that God did not create data; any piece of data you or I have ever encountered was created by a human being. Unable to fully capture this wonderfully complex world, we human beings use our bounded rationality to make “decisions” about what aspects of the phenomena to include, and which to exclude, in our data. These decisions become embedded in the tools we use to create and process data. By definition, these decisions reflect our preexisting ways of thinking about the world. These ways of thinking are sometimes good and reliable — guided by known causal relationships. But often, they are not. No quantity, velocity, or granularity of data can solve this fundamental problem”…
— Clayton Christensen
Charles Sanders Peirce Categories — modes of Being bridge Aristotle’s Ontology (act of Being — What exists?) and Kant’s Epistemology (abstraction to the Mind — What can we know?).
Relationships where the meaning of the abstract concept (knowledge) can be reconciled against its practical effect (ontology — act of Being).
Peirce’s categories are not just modes of knowing, or alternatively, purely ontological categories — they are both, because in Peirce’s view, knowing andbeing are inseparable in practice (i.e. Pragmaticism & Monism).
- Experience is always mediated: There’s no pure object divorced from interpretation (epistemology), nor is there a pure concept without some grounding in actuality (ontology).
- Meaning arises in relation: Through our being and action in the world (Secondness), we come to develop and refine generalisations & habits (Thirdness), which abstract from but still rely upon lived potential (Firstness).
- Pragmatic Maxim and Semiotic Triadic: Peirce’s doctrine of meaning (i.e closely tied to his pragmaticism) states the meaning of a concept lies in its conceivable practical effects.
This directly connects abstraction (epistemology) with consequences in the real world (ontology).
In Peirce’s system, Being and Knowing are co-constitutive — they emerge together through the triadic conscious (Primisense-Altersense-Medisense) and categorical relationships (Firstness–Secondness–Thirdness).
This goes beyond mere dualism, offering a richer ontological-epistemological synthesis grounded in semiotics, logic, and practice.
“The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason”…
― Charles Sanders Peirce
We derive meaning through interaction — through a subject encountering resistance (Secondness) and seeking to mediate that tension via interpretation and sign-formation (Thirdness).
Abstraction**** doesn’t float freely — it must reconcile with lived experience, practical consequences, and the potentiality from which it emerged.
**** Refer — Gödel’s Legacy — Limits of Logic [ LINK ]
Peirce bridges ontology and epistemology by showing that knowledge (abstraction) always eminates from Being and is refined through practical mediation.
His categories do not just describe how we think, but how the world reveals itself through thought and action (i.e. ideas have consequences).
In a world where meaning emerges through interaction, the abstract (epistemological) must always be tested against the concrete (ontological).
In this way, Peirce reconciles concept & consequence, thought & being, the logical & biological and metaphysical & physical.
Semiotics, Relationships of Being and Consciousness — Revisiting the Natural Order of Things
“All the actual character of consciousness is merely the sense of shock of the non-ego upon us”…
- Charles Sanders Peirce
As outlined in various earlier posts, it is through semiotics and consciousness as the fabric of mediation that Being comes to know itself.
Recognising this and given the inherent relationship between Being, Consciousness and Semiotics, our understanding of the natural order of things needs to be urgently reconsidered.
“The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs”…
— Charles Sanders Peirce
Just like how Aristotle’s idea of Substance consisting of matter, form and essence provided the elementary building blocks for the emergence of a deeper understanding of the natural world, do Peirce’s idea’s of Semiotics provide the metaphysical building blocks for a higher order understanding of Reality?
Beyond Modern Science’s empirical & mechanistic models — materialism, brute forces and horizontal metaphysics.
Beyond Abstraction — Apart from the World.
The emergence of the Age of Meaning.
The relationship of this Being to Being (Heidegger), the nature and role of Consciousness ( Peirce’s Categories (Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness) and Triadic structure of Consciousness (Primisense — Altersense — Medisense), the categorical relationship between Being (Aristotle), Meaning (Peirce) and Knowing (Kant) and the Triadic nature of Reason (Abduction (Aristotle), Induction (Bacon) and Abduction (Peirce)).
If we accept that all human knowledge and experience are mediated via our Being in the World and Consciousness — a mediation of meaning ( the understanding of Being by the Mind) through signs — then semiotics could be seen as the foundational discipline, with Philosophy, Science, Physics etc… as all subsets of Semiotics.
“Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages… all forms of communication — visual, tactile, and so on… There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics”…
— Umberto Eco
Note — Rene Descartes Cartesianism Philosophy was central to the emergence of the Age of Reason. Descartes viewed Reality as a mechanical system and this world view extended to the Human Body. Sensory mechanics where Human Being engaged with the World through the mechanical actions of a sensory system. Through the application of Liebniz Law ( Identity of Indiscernibles) Descartes distinguished between Res Cogitans (Mind — for example — Idealism and Phenomenology ) and Res Extensa (Matter — for example — Materialism and Body). Cartesian Dualism reflects this distinction (i.e. Difference — A is not B — Mind is not Body), however, how these two different types of Being interact remained unclear. How are human mechanical sensations transformed into Human Thought? Cartesian Philosophy was certain of Human Consciousness and Cognition (i.e. “I think, therefore I am” ) and how ideas & concepts and systems of logic provided the abstract tools of the Human Mind, however, it was less clear has to how these ideas and concepts reflected an external Reality if they are produced within ourselves?
In contrast, Charles Sanders Peirce — Semiotic Triadic & Pragmatic Maxim — answers Descartes unanswered question through a different prism of viewing Reality. Rather than embrace a mechanistic world view, instead Peirce viewed the World in a Monistic way (i.e. in contrast to dualism). Our Minds & Bodies are entangled and Human Being is entangled with Being. It is through the interplay between Presence (i.e. Human Being participates in Reality — Human Beings participation in Being — A is in B and B is in A — Mother Nature & Hegel’s Second Nature — a Unity — a Continuum) and Difference (i.e. Mind Dependent Representation of a Mind Independent Reality — A is not B — Liebniz Law — a Distinction) that Human’s can bring an understanding of Being to the Human Mind. It does this through replacing Descarte’s Sensory Machines with Peirce’s Sensory Semiotics. We can know about the world because it assumes signification. In other words, the world in which we are entangled within is inherently meaningful and intelligible. It is through Meaning (mediated via signs) that Human Being’s have the capacity to couple the Subject (Observer) with the Object(Observed) — noting this coupling of res cogitans and res extensa mediated by signs is not some mysterious internal conceptual representation (e.g. a little man in our heads watching our eyes see — homunculus trap — homunculus fallacy) but rather a coupling of Being (Ontology) and Knowing (Epistemology).
Peirce’s ideas represent a Copernicus 2.0 moment in how we understand Reality. It was a further breakthrough in the Meaning of Being understood by the Human Mind- Being’s way of coming to know itself.
The illumination of a new pathway of understanding that enables humanity to transcend the crisis of modernity and escape the cul de sac of post-modernity.
“Now subjectivism reduces all science to the knowledge of one individual, the Ego — which, as just shown, is no science at all. If its fundamental definition of knowledge means anything, or is faithfully adhered to, subjectivism teaches that the intelligent subject has no intelligence save for itself — has no warrant for believing in the existence of anything save itself — knows nothing but the inexplicable order of its own sensations and thoughts. It reduces all existence to an unrelated One, while of an unrelated One no science is possible. In a word, subjectivism if logical, annihilates science at a blow”…
— Francis Ellingwood Abbot
Overcoming the egocentrism, nietzschean perspectivism, subjectivism, nominalism, marxism, dialectical materialism (idealism & materialism), and cartesian dualism that is now endemic.
The ramifications of reordering of this hierarchy (Order of Things) — the pivotal role of Semiotics & Being and disciplines of Knowledge — are profound.
“Within a Metaphysics of quality, Science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this Reality, but the patterns are not the Reality they describe”…
— Robert Pirsig
For example, Science tends to take an ontic (i.e. ontological — what exists)) approach, analysing Being from an external, detached perspective (i.e. apart from the World — viewing Reality from the balcony of Cartesianism abstraction) rather than recognising the embodied entangled nature of Being (i.e. semiotic — lived embodied experience — being in the world) that allows such analysis to emerge in the first place.
Being in the world represents a unity of being; it does not primarily function through detached observation (i.e. a Cartesian Balcony of Abstraction) but through embodiment, participation and meaning-making.
Semiotics and Life — From Cartesian Mechanical Machines to Semiotic Meaning-Making Living Organisms
“We can look at different levels. One is actually to question authority. One would no longer look up what Aristotle said in order to find out how the world works. Let’s investigate it ourselves. The second is, obviously, the focus on observation. The third, I guess, is to put forward a hypothesis that were tested. Galileo was testing Hypotheses for much of his life, particularly in relation to mechanics. And the fourth was a suspicion that ultimately the World was a “kind of machine” or nature was a Machine. When Galileo said the “book of nature” was written in the language of mathematics, that’s very close to a mechanical idea of nature which was developed enormously by Descartes. As far as Descartes was concerned, all of nature was mechanism including animals and including our body’s, and we were “ghosts in these machines”. And of course, that climaxed in Newton, the whole idea of the Universe being a great huge clock of intermeshing parts”…
— Raymond Tallis
“Both ignorance and the old metaphysics tend to produce these undesirable nervous effects of reverse order and so non-survival evaluation. If we use the nervous system in a way which is against its survival structure, we must expect non-survival. Human history is short, but already we have astonishing records of extinction”….
— Alfred Korzybski
”To ask for the origin of life is to ask for the origin of the environment. Living organisms are inscribed in their environments much like patterns woven into a carpet. The two cannot get apart, and yet there seems to be a distinct asymmetry in their relation”…
- Jesper Hoffmeyer
“All living things must move and act in space to survive. When motion ceases, life ends” …
- Barbara Tversky
If Human Being’s are living organisms could the concept of Semiotics eminating from Charles Sanders Peirce be extended more broadly across Biology to other living organisms thereby providing a fresh perspective as to the nature of life and Being?
Furthermore, is Semiotics contained to the Human Mind or is Semiotics a more fundamental metaphysical property of Being?
Biosemiotics — Greek word bios (life) and semeion (sign) — represents such a shift in our interpretation of biology where all life is involved in meaning-making.
Beyond Aristotles Substances (matter — form — essence) — Beyond materialism and material forces (physics) — Beyond molecules, chemical reactions, atoms and quantum wave-particles.
A shift to metaphysics and the representation of natural entities and phenomena as signs and sign processes.
A new world view that moves from a Cartesian balcony of abstraction & Cartesian Mechanical Machines view of Life to an analog World where the Observer and Observed are entangled — Being in the World (Heidegger).
“Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer”…
— Heinz von Foerster
[ LINK ]
Jesper Hoffmeyer’s ideas — a leading foundational figure in biosemiotics — connects the fields of biology, semiotics and philosophy.
A perspective where life is fundamentally a semiotic phenomenon, meaning that living systems are engaged in continuous processes of sign interpretation (semiosis).
Building upon conventional biology, which often contemplates life from a materialistic perspective &/or chemical or physical processes, Hoffmeyer emphasises that meaning plays a central role in the organisation and behavior of living beings.
From the simplest cell to complex organisms, life involves the use of signs to guide interactions in the context with the environment, ensuring survival and reproduction.
A key concept in Hoffmeyer’s thinking is semiotic scaffolding, the idea that biological evolution has constructed layered systems of meaning that support and constrain each other.
[ LINK ]
These scaffolds allow organisms to respond flexibly to their environments based on internalised signs and codes, such as genetic information, sensory perceptions, and behavioral patterns.
Evolution is not just a selection of adaptive physical traits, but also a selection of meaningful sign-relations that organisms use to interpret and act in the world.
This semiotic complexity increases over evolutionary time, contributing to the emergence of higher-order cognition and culture.
Hoffmeyer also introduced the term semiome to describe the tool set of signs available to an organism. It is the means by which the organisms may garner meaningful content from their surroundings and engage in interactive communicative behavior.
This concept parallels the genome but focuses on the semiotic capacity (semiome) rather than the genetic code.
The semiome defines the scope of the organism’s cognitive and communicative activity including all the communicative, interpretive, and responsive systems that an organism possesses, ranging from instinctual behaviors to learned cultural signals.
By framing life in terms of the semiome, Hoffmeyer provided a new lens through which to understand development, adaptation, and the co-evolution of organismsand their environments.
Ultimately, Hoffmeyer’s biosemiotic approach bridges the gap between biology and the humanities, inviting a more holistic understanding of life that accounts for meaning, interpretation, and communication.
He contends that life cannot be fully grasped through mechanistic explanations alone because organisms are not just machines but meaning-making entities.
His work challenged reductionist science and contributed to a growing interdisciplinary perspective, where biology is seen not just as a physical science but also as a relational semiotic process of interpretation of being in the world.
“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”…
— Jesper Hoffmeyer
.
