The Joy of Semiotics
Semiotics is about meaning, being one of the three great -ics of human understanding: physics, ethics, and semiotics. Semiotics says the world is constructed by messages conveying meaning between living beings. And that construction is constitutive — it is what life is — there can be no understanding of life without a semiotic description. As such, it goes directly against the drift of science into physics: in a description of the world as physics there is no meaning, only mechanism. As you will expect from this blog, we will use this state of affairs as much as a metaphor as a simple description.
The touchpoint for semiotics as a discipline is a story we have rehearsed before, that of the humble tick. They cause severe disease so they are not an insignificant part of our world and are doing OK for themselves. Ticks, I suspect, are on the increase. A tick needs to bury itself in the warm body of an animal host for the reproductive part of its lifecycle. Sitting on the ground doesn’t work, so a tick crawls to the top of a long blade of grass and dangles from its tip. It waits until it detects warmth and smell and drops onto whatever is passing by. Baron von Uexküll described this properly a century ago.[1]
How long does a tick have to wait for the number three bus? Well it can wait, apparently, up to eighteen years. Eighteen years doing nothing at all, not feeding, not communicating, hardly breathing. Because of this need to wait, the tick’s entire world, its umwelt, is stripped back to sensing warmth and smell and acting on them. Once on the animal, it is very much more active, burying itself in the fur and then the flesh of its host.
Now, a biochemist and a geneticist will be able to tell you about the mechanisms of this communication. They will be able to tell you, if they can be bothered to study something so humble, about the scent detection and about the warmth detection. They will be able to tell you how the tick evolved into this particular niche and they will think that their description of this world is complete. But life doesn’t work like that. The message that a host is passing by will get to the tick, because tickness depends on it.
Remember Maturana and the frog’s vision system. The frog does not see a fly and decide to catch it with its tongue. It has a reflex that responds, with an accurate tongue flick, to a dark spot with a ring of light around it. Its frogness consists of that reflex response — there cannot be a fly-eating sort of frog that does not do that. And this is the level of semiotic meaning for the frog. The frog’s umwelt has those little rings of light that constitute the message that it needs.
Your DNA
We have been on a fifty year journey of believing that the information in our DNA constitutes a description of who we are and why we act the way we do. If you want the gentlest of escape routes from this wicked and life-denying prison I recommend a small book by Denis Noble, The Music of Life. Life processes have infinitely complex ways of calling on DNA when they need to build a protein or whatever. The processes and their meanings are primary and your DNA is just one of many resources that can be used by them. Science’s infatuation with genetics is a piece of higher-order semiotics that is stunningly revealing about our own, constructed, umwelt.
As a piece of research, someone needs to make the list of signalling mechanisms that our bodies depend on for our own life. The electrical impulses in our nerves, the biochemical signalling of our endocrine system, magnetic resonance systems, and then an essentially infinite set of messaging systems between the microbiota that largely constitute our bodies. We need that list to understand the semiotic nature of our lives and we need to understand some of the impossibly complex interactions between the messages in the myriad systems. We have thirty distinct senses and most of those we do not care to know or to develop. That is who we are, and in our search for a key we forget even to listen.
The central point is this. A message is a message. Life will find a way. Although messages depend on mechanisms for their propagation, there are many mechanisms and, if one tool does not fall to hand, a new one will be built. The so called lowest forms of life, like the bacteria we are largely made of, evolve nauseatingly fast, in hours and days. They pass on their DNA to their offspring, but they also transfer chunks of DNA between themselves. This base layer of our livingness is amazingly plastic, and it is still us. These are the living beings that create the neurochemicals that support our endocrine signalling systems. It is that close, that intertwingled.[2]
Scientific Reproduction
If you care to look at biochemical and especially medical biomedical experiments, their rate of being reproduced in the lab is ever so small. It seems largely impossible to meet the basic criteria for scientific work. Even before we take into account all the corruption and the wishful thinking and the greed, it is not possible to do science the way it is conceived.
But that is precisely the feature of life that we are looking at here. A mechanism can be studied as a mechanism, scientifically: but the presupposition is that there is a mechanism and that it is stable over time.[3] A message is a message, but what it means is always, at least potentially, particular to the situation in which it takes place. Perhaps your heart starts to pound. Undoubtedly it has received one or more messages: but what they are and how it responds is specific.
As an example of this confusion: statins are prescribed to reduce cholesterol levels which are held to lead to heart disease. The rather large side effects of statins mainly relate to muscle weakness. And the heart is a muscle…
To go back to our tick patiently waiting on the tip of a grass stalk, it will get its message. It has been stripped down to seemingly ultimate simplicity, its umwelt consists at this point of warmth and smell alone, but it will find its host even if science says that mechanisms it relies on cannot work in those particular circumstances. Life is primary, science is secondary and life is infinitely, and I mean infinitely, more creative than the dead and deadening alleyways of science.
Creativity and innovation
There is a whole branch of semiotics that studies language and languaging, of course. We all already know the points I am making here in this domain of language. If I invent a word or use lingo from a tribe you do not know, the chances are you will follow my meaning. My meaning may even be more vivid to you than if I used the language you are expecting with its stale associations. If I am a poet I can write nonsense like:
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
—Lewis Carroll
In our obsession with our own intelligence at the pinnacle of evolution, we forget the fluidity that makes any of our achievements possible. We cannot conceive that the civilisations of the past did things, social things, engineering things, that we cannot. We cannot conceive that there are already solutions to problems we can hardly conceive of, precisely because we have forgotten that life is innovative by default, whether we try to stop it or not. One example: a strawberry tastes sweet as though it is full of sugar, but it is one of the lower sugar fruits you can eat. It is a miracle of deception of our senses. Food science is the odd light year from being able to do that, still further from being able to do that safely.
In fact there is a circular truth here. No two situations/contexts can ever be exactly the same. So messages that flow in different situations and at different times have subtly or grossly different meanings even for the “same” message. Because the meanings and the responses to those meanings are different, no two situations are ever the same. The implication of the whole field of semiotics is that reproducibility of mechanism and experiment on mechanism belong to physics and not to semiotics. These are somewhat orthogonal descriptions of the world that have very different properties and implications. What, after all, is the physics of a message? Physics does not deal with meaning and in semiotics everything is meaningful.
Think for a moment of all the medical experiments that use placebos. The effect of a placebo is certainly affected by what the person taking it think it will do. Different people, different cultures, different expectations, different effects. Of course, what they think it will do changes with general knowledge levels about placebos, and specific experiences of them. They cannot possibly ever be what experimenters say they are.
Doing the average medical experiment is a bit like insisting that words mean what the dictionary says they mean.[4] You won’t get funding unless you use the words as defined in the dictionary, but all the interest and innovation is in the new meanings that emerge when you allow them to. The innovation is inherent to life and life processes and to insist on experiments that don’t show life innovating is actually to study slow death. It is that simple.
Biopoetics
The poet of biosemiotics is Andreas Weber. His book Biopoetics has a hefty price tag and is still worth buying and studying closely. He has an ability to connect our romantic instincts for nature and the natural world with solid semiotics, buttressed by science where necessary. And he is a lovely man too.
One story sticks in my mind from one of his books. It concerns a marine prawn that has no less than five consecutive larval stages. A conventional biologist would insist that there must be an evolutionary advantage to this life cycle or it would not exist. Andreas Weber observes rather that in the marine environment all sorts of fertilisation takes place and may result in genetic accidents on a large scale, accidents which may express themselves as larval stages with their own viability. [5] The reason this story sticks with me and maybe why it is told is that the conventional evolutionary biology view is so mean-spirited, even anal. It wants to insist that there is no room for play in a nature red in tooth and claw.
By contrast, we know from language and the way we use it that play is everything. The whole point of poetry is the playful association of ideas to allow the imagination to expand, to see that there is more to the world by far than meets the eye, especially the eye of science.[6] Semiotics allows messages to mean what they mean, especially if that is not what the mechanisms expect. Everything in the living world can be and is turned to uses that were never imagined. We should require the way we know things to have the same playful flexibility or it will not be adequate to what is.
What Andreas communicates in his books is joy. Joy at the endless innovation of life is a better watchword for our studies than the clinical and rather grim statistics of corporate science. We should know from the emotional baggage of bad science that it is bad, because that is precisely the message it carries. Rigour is the word these puritanical priests worship but their rigour excludes the truth.
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[1] Excerpted in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_von_Uexküll#Umwelt
[2] Intertwingled, of course, comes from the same Ted Nelson who coined the word ‘hypertext’ that underpins the world wide web. He says that there are no subjects, only knowledge, “since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly”.
[3] Famously, insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. An equal and opposite insanity is doing “the same thing” and expecting the same results.
[4] There are horror stories about getting permission to conduct even the simplest medical study, such that merely adhering to a dictionary definition would be a welcome respite. My recollection is that often the risk and ethics committees want data and evidence that effectively demonstrate that you won’t learn anything…
[5] Indeed, it must be minimally viable, or it would not exist. That’s not the same as evolutionarily advantageous. What’s more, there are creatures with lengthy ‘larval’ stages and brief ‘adult’ stages, making a mockery of the labels.
[6] We also know from linguistics that the complexity of thought will find a way to be expressed. I first heard this as the ‘waterbed’ theory of complexity, in which if the words are simple, complexity emerges in the grammar or elsewhere, just as when you press down on a waterbed the volume is just shifted around, not eliminated. A double plus good mental model.
