Principles of constructivism are used here to explore how organisms develop tools, subagents, scaffolds, signs, and adaptations. Here I discuss reasons why organisms have composite nature and include diverse subagents that interact in partially cooperating and partially conflicting ways. Such modularity is necessary for efficient and robust functionality, including mutual construction and adaptability at various time scales. Subagents interact via material and semiotic relations, some of which force or prescribe actions of partners. Other interactions, which I call “guiding”, do not (...) have immediate effects and do not disrupt the evolution and learning capacity of partner agents. However, they modify the extent of learning and evolutionary possibilities of partners via establishment of scaffolds and constraints. As a result, subagents construct reciprocal scaffolding for each other to rebalance their communal evolution and learning. As an example, I discuss guiding interactions between the body and mind of animals, where the pain system adjusts mind-based learning to the physical and physiological constraints of the body. Reciprocal effects of mind and behaviors on the development and evolution of the body includes the effects of Lamarck and Baldwin. (shrink)

Attempts to close the mind-body gap traditionally resort to a priori speculations. Motivated by dissatisfaction with such accounts, neurophenomenology constitutes one of the first attempts to close the mind-body gap non-metaphysically. Nonetheless, it faces significant challenges. Many of these challenges arise from its abandoning of transcendentality and its dim view of bioinformation. In this paper, I propose a superior non-metaphysical alternative: a combination of a reformed biosemiotics and transcendental phenomenology. My approach addresses the difficulties of neurophenomenology, while retaining the merit (...) of mutual constraints. Biosemiotics pays respect to bioinformation while imposing the sign-meaning duality on primitive forms of life, which is a relic of anthropomorphism. To avoid this unjustified commitment, I argue for a sign-free biosemantics which replaces Peirce’s semiotics with Husserl’s theory of meaning and exchanges naturalism for transcendentalism. Meaning, according to the resulting account, is the “intended as such”. The irreality of meaning results from what I term the ‘higher visibility’ of intentionality. I argue that the mind-body gap can be locally closed in a non-metaphysical manner as the result of reflection upon empirical biological investigations. Sign-free biosemantics uncovers the meanings for the organism that are implicit in biological research, while transcendental phenomenology analyses the experiences that biologists undergo when associating the physical with the biological level, while at the same time also analysing the very framework within which they work. Meanwhile, biosemiotics frees phenomenology from its methodological limitations, and the two domains establish mutual constraints in a more radical form than neurophenomenology. (shrink)

New discoveries in the life sciences have affirmed that the virtual script as well as its context-dependent reading and interpretation determine the final living creature. An extended understanding of Darwinian Theory is crucial for understanding life as semiosis in terms of Peirce and Eco’s semiotic models. The semiosis of living systems is potentially unlimited. Genes are not static and unchangeable scripts, but can always be reinterpreted by new interpretants that illuminate them from different points of view, depending on which properties (...) are relevant in a particular context. The encyclopedia is a term, in Umberto Eco’s semiotics, which represents the multidimensional space of semiosis that is governed by a self-sustaining production of interpretants. The paper will present the idea of understanding the Extended Synthesis in terms of a biosemiotic enyclopedia. (shrink)

This chapter presents a detailed explanation of Peirce’s early and late views on semiotic indeterminacy and then considers how those views might be applied within biosemiotics. Peirce distinguished two different forms of semiotic indeterminacy: generality and vagueness. He defined each in terms of the “right” that indeterminate signs extend, either to their interpreters in the case of generality or to their utterers in the case of vagueness, to further determine their meaning. On Peirce’s view, no sign is absolutely determinate, i.e., (...) every sign is indeterminate to at least some degree and so exhibits some degree of generality or vagueness. If Peirce was right about this, then no instance of biosemiosis is completely determinate—every biosign must be general or vague to some degree. I show that on Peirce’s view, whether a sign is general or vague depends on its immediate object, “the idea which the sign is built upon,” and I explain how Peirce would go about identifying the immediate object of a sign lacking both a minded utterer and a minded interpreter—an identification that must be possible if any biosign is indeterminate. (shrink)