Tag Archives: empirio schematicsm interscope

03/12/25

Looking at Alexei Sharov and Morten Tonnessen’s Chapter (2021) “Agency In Non-Human Organisms” (Part 1 of 7)

531 The text before me is chapter four of Semiotic Agency (2021).  Details on the text may be found on point 0473.  Chapter four covers pages 95-122.

0532 This chapter is an overview of both hierarchy and the evolution of living systems composed of hierarchies of sub-agents.

0533 Section 4.1 concerns a gradation of competence in semiotic agency.  The gradation arises from the intuitively obvious structure of animals.

0534 The above picture suggests that each level of semiotic competence both encompasses and transforms the adjacent lower level.

0535 Does the adjacent lower level come under the control of the higher level?

It makes me wonder about the term, “control”.

Does “control” assume the functionality of adjacent lower-level subagents?

Does “control” indicate that the higher-level agent uses lower-level subagents in order to achieve its goal?

0536 Well, here is one way to diagram the relation between agent and subagent.

The agent relies on the subagent to behave like its supposed to behave.

Does that accord with the meaning, the presence and the message of the word, “control”?

Yes, the agent uses the subagent and assumes the functionality of the subagent.

But “control”?

0537 Is there any other term that applies to the metasystem transition implied by the above figure?

Take a look at the normal contexts.

The logics of thirdness are exclusion, complement and alignment. 

How do these apply to the above figure?

Obviously, the relation between the agent and subagent is one of alignment.  This implies that the possibility of ‘final causality’1 for the agent3 is included in the possibility of ‘final causality’1 for the subagent3.  Otherwise, the subagent3would be excluded from the agent3.

0538 Well, what about the other two logics?

Surely, exclusion and complement must have roles to play.

They do, in an evolutionary schema.

Recall, biological evolution is a mystery, consisting of the intersection of adaptation and phenotype.  If evolution starts with an agent, and ends up as agent with subagents, then the subagents differentiate (exclusion), specialize (complement) and then align (alignment).  If evolution starts with an independent agent (exclusion), who ends up as a subagent within another agent, then maybe some sort of phenotypic change comes into play (compatibility), leading to incorporation (alignment).

0539 Here is a picture of both routes.

0540 Consider the domestication of the dog.

Can I imagine the logics of exclusion, complement and alignment in play?

The agent is like an Umwelt to the subagent.  The subagent participates in the Innerwelt of the agent.

02/21/25

Biosemiotics and the Origins of Life on Earth (Part 1 of 8)

0271 What does biosemiotics have to say about abiogenesis, the origin of life from non-living matter?

0272 Two texts are before me.

0273 Semiotic Agency: Science Beyond Mechanism is written by biosemioticians Alexei Sharov and Morten Tonnessen.  Semiotic Agency is published in 2021 by Springer and logs in at volume 25 of Springer’s Series in Biosemiotics.  Series editors have Razie Mah’s permission for use of the following disquisition, with attribution of said blogger.

The text is open to chapter five, titled, “Origins of Life”, and is found on pages 123-149.  This chapter closes Part II of Semiotic Agency.  The title of Part II is “Agency in Organisms and Beyond.”

0274 Pathways to the Origin and Evolution of Meaning in the Universe is edited by Alexei Sharov and George Mikhailovsky (2024, Scrivener Press, Beverly MA).

The text is open to chapter nine, titled “Chemical Origins of Life, Agency and Meaning” (pages 189-210).  This chapter opens Part II, titled “Meanings in the Evolution of Life”.  The chapter’s author is Alexei Sharov.

0275 First and foremost, chemistry-based scenarios for the origins of life have proven futile.  Why?  For one, it is difficult to imagine a chemical system constituting a semiotic agent.  Sure, a biological agent can be reduced to a chemical soup, but a chemical soup cannot unreduced to a biological being.

Is this the reason why proposals of life emerging from a primordial soup consistently fail?

0276 The key word in the above paragraph is “emerging”.

0277 So why not turn to Mariusz Tabaczek, who writes two books, titled Emergence (2019) and Divine Action and Emergence (2021) that are reviewed in Razie Mah’s blog for April and May, 2024?  These and other examinations go into Razie Mah’s two-part e-book, Comments on Mariusz Tabaczek’s Arc of Inquiry (2019-2024), available at smashwords and other e-book venues.

0278 Tabaczek criticizes Terrence Deacon, even as he translates Deacon’s conceptual apparatus into a classical Aristotelian framework.  Why?  If Deacon borrows ideas from Aristotle and re-tools them for his own approach to emergent systems, then why not articulate Deacon’s approach using Aristotle’s terms?

0279 The answer turns out to be more than academic.

Recall the Positivist’s judgment for the natural sciences?

The noumenon (the thing itself) and the model (what ought to be for the empirio-schematic judgment) are two contending sources of illumination.  Deacon stands with the model, then uses modified versions of Aristotle’s vocabulary in order to project his model onto the noumenon.  In contrast, Tabaczek stands with the noumenon, where Aristotle’s terminology is at home.  He sees Deacon’s projection from the model back onto the noumenon and does not think too highly of the imposition.

02/13/25

Biosemiotics and the Origins of Life on Earth (Part 8 of 8)

0316 Oxygen gas is a byproduct of photosynthesis.  Over billions of years, the continual release of oxygen transforms the atmosphere of the Earth.

The ubiquity of oxygen gas in today’s atmosphere makes experimental research into the chemistry of the early Earthdifficult.  Today, the reaction that Sharov suggests, the oxidation of an alkane to a fatty acid, would require elaborate precautions.  Why?  Even a trace amount of oxygen would directly react with the light-absorbing pigment.

0317  So, what am I saying?

Well, research is difficult.

0318 Also, as soon as one gets to the earliest forms of life on Earth, such as photosynthetic prokaryotes, the “genomic complexity” (nominally, the length of DNA that belongs to only functional genes) is already high.  If one plots the genomic complexity of (1) prokaryotes, such as bacteria, (2) single-celled eukaryotes, such as amoebas, (3) multicellular water animals, such as fish (4) invertebrate land animals, such as worms, and (5) vertebrate land animals, such as mammals, versus time for first fossil evidence, one gets the following graph.

 0319 On one hand, Sharov concludes that the genomic complexity doubles every 340 million years since the start of the Earth.

On the other hand, Sharov points out that, if one projects the line down to zero genomic complexity, the intersection occurs a little over 9 billion years ago.  But, the Earth is only 4.5Byr.

Fortunately, the universe is around 15 billion years old.

0320 If the early Earth is seeded, then biologists already have a label, “panspermia”.

All other planets and moons in the solar system should be similarly seeded.

So, future space exploration may provide an answer.

If it turns out that the early Earth is seeded through panspermia, then research into the origins of life (in general) becomes even more difficult.

0321 Now, I conclude.

Sharov and Tonnessen’s noumenal overlay characterizes biosemiotics.

The Deacon-Tabaczek interscope characterizes emergence.

Both relational structures apply to inquiry into the origin of life on Earth.

This examination demonstrates how the two relational structures relate to one another and constitute complementary approaches for further inquiries into the origins of life.

0322 But, what I have learned concerns more than the topic of the origin of life.

This is significant.

Sharov and Tonnessen’s noumenal overlay may “expand” to include the entire D-T interscope, which includes both the specifying and the exemplar sign-relations.

0322 By extension, the S&T noumenal overlay associates to any three-level interscope, containing two sign-relations,according to the comparison in the following figure.

0323 The topic of the origin of life on Earth turns into a valuable insight into biosemiotics, emergence, and two sign-relations.

02/12/25

Looking at Gustavo Caetano-Anolles’ Chapter (2024) “Evolution of Biomolecular Communication” (Part 1 of 10)

0324 The text before me is chapter ten in Pathways to the Origin and Evolution of Meanings in the Universe (2024, edited by Alexei Sharov and George E. Mikhailovsky, pages 217-243).  The author hails from the Evolutionary Bioinformatics Laboratory at the Department of Crop Sciences and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, USA.  The author and editors have permission to use and reprint this commentary.

From prior examinations, I propose that Alexei Sharov’s and Morten Tonnessen’s 2021 book, Semiotic Agency, formulates a noumenal overlay for the diverse field of biosemiotics.  All manifestations of semiotic agency are unique.  Each is a subject of inquiry on its own.  Yet, they have one relational structure in common.  Here is a picture of that dyadic actuality.

0325 Biosemiotics is not divorced from science.  Scientists observe and measure phenomena, then build models based on those observations and measurements.  The real elements in the above figure support phenomena.  The contiguities (in brackets) call for models.

0326 So, what about communication mediated by biomolecules?

0327 In the introduction (section 10.1), the author reminds the reader of two premodern views of biological behaviorsand how they change over time.  One is the force of life (in French, le pouvoir de vie), which tends to increase complexity.  The other is the influence of circumstances (in French, l’influence des circonstances), which tends to select for… um… survivors.

These premodern views fit nicely into the contiguities in the above relational structure.  Each dyad can be compared to Aristotle’s hylomorphe of matter [substance] form, allowing the following comparison.

0328 The force of life tends towards the many.

The influence of circumstances tends toward the few.. or rather… one goal.

Surely, my assignments are confusing, because the force of life is singular and circumstances tend to vary.  Also, real initiating events can vary.  But, goals tend to rule out alternatives.

0329 The author then draws upon a recently translated papyrus scroll, attributed to Empedocles.  Empedocles speaks of two opposing forces, one capable of growing things together from the many and one capable of growing things apart.  The former is labeled, “love”, the latter, “strife”.

0330 I wonder, “How does this ancient distinction fit into the schema pictured above?”

Here is my suggestion.

I have a 50:50 chance of being correct.

0331 Strife goes with the force of life, tending towards the many.  Love goes with the influence of circumstances and tends towards a singular goal.

Both are substances and reflect (however distantly) Aristotle’s exemplar: matter [substance] form.

In the above figure, the real initiating event is like an form that conjures matter (information). At the same time, that matter (information) substantiates another form (goal).  This conjured matter (information [love]goal) encompasses the presence that accounts for semiotic agency as a thing.  

0332 What does that imply?

As [strife] acquires information, [love] moves closer to its goal. 

02/1/25

Looking at Gustavo Caetano-Anolles’ Chapter (2024) “Evolution of Biomolecular Communication” (Part 10 of 10)

0388 I conclude this examination of Gustavo Caetano-Anolles’ chapter with a brief discussion on the third item appearing in section 10.3, titled, “Communication”.

0389 The first item that the author mentions is Peirce’s tradition of inquiry.  Peirce’s three categories offer a variety of ways to portray triadic relations.

Biosemiotics is all about triadic relations.  This examination has shown that secondness tends to associate to phenomena.  Thirdness and firstness tends to associate to what models need to explain.

0390 The second item that the author mentions is Shannon’s information theory.

I wonder about the implications of the virtual nested form in the realm of secondness that Shannon’s information theory generates.

What if the associations are more than mere analogy?

What if my neighbor, getting that new-fangled lumber treatment and all, is not sending me a message through a channel2b that conducts wood-eating insects that are not happy, and frankly, fed up with the wooden food-fare that my neighbor’s shed now offers?

How weird and disturbing is that?

0391 The third item that the author mentions is Chomsky’s hierarchy of formal languages.  Formal language consists of operations within a finite symbolic order.

0392 Finite symbolic order?

Think of how Charles Peirce might rebrand Ferdinand de Saussures’s key term, system of differences.

0393 Ultimately, symbols enter into a picture of the evolution of biomolecular communication.

And, when they do, they seem to associate to “a receiver2c” in Shannon’s virtual nested form in secondness.

0392 Here is a picture.

0393 But that is not all, in the evolution of biomolecular communication, symbols overflow destination2c and cascade down into the bucket that the transmitter2a works from.

The author spends sections 10.4 through 10.8 discussing the implications of this imaginary overflowing, which reminds me of a Tarot card, the ace of cups, where a hand appears out of cloud overhanging an idyllic landscape.

The hand holds a water-filled cup that overflows, in a very biomolecular-cascading fashion, from a perspective-level that associates to love.  Is love an empedoclement?  Only after the empedoclements (which are the inverse of impediments) come together, in the right sort of way, does strife arrive to both hone and diversify the new creation.

0394 Here is the cup of organic biosemiosis.