The Paradigm of Peircean Biosemiotics

The failure of modern science to create a common scientific framework for nature and consciousness makes it necessary to look for broader foundations in a new philosophy. Although controversial for modern science, the Peircean semiotic, evolutionary, pragmatic and triadic philosophy has been the only modern conceptual framework that can support that transdisciplinary change in our view of knowing that bridges the two cultures and transgresses Cartesian dualism. It therefore seems ideal to build on it for modern biosemiotics and can, in combination with Luhmann’s theory of communication, encompass modern information theory, complexity science and thermodynamics. It allows focus on the connection between the concept of codes and signs in living systems, and makes it possible to re-conceptualize both internal and external processes of the human body, mind and communication in models that fit into one framework

Cybersemiotics: A New Foundation for Transdisciplinary Theory of Information, Cognition, Meaning, Communication and Consciousness

We need to realize that a paradigm based on the view of the universe that makes irreversible time and evolution fundamental, forces us to view man as a product of evolution and therefore an observer from inside the universe. This changes the way we conceptualize the problem and role of consciousness in nature compared to what Descartes did with his dualistic paradigm. The theory of evolution forces us theoretically to conceive the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities together in one framework of unrestricted or absolute naturalism, where consciousness is part of nature. This has influenced the exact sciences to produce theories of information and self-organization in order to explain the origin of life and sense experiences, encouraged biological thinking to go into psychology and social science in the form of theories of selfish genes, socio-biology and evolutionary psychology. But these approaches have still not satisfactorily led to an understanding of why and how certain systems have the ability to produce sense experiences, awareness and meaningful communication. The theories of the phenomenological life world and the hermeneutics of communication and understanding seem to defy classical scientific explanations. The humanities therefore send another insight the opposite way down the evolutionary ladder, with questions like: What is the role of consciousness, signs and meaning in evolution? These are matters that the exact sciences are not constructed to answer in their present state. Phenomenology and hermeneutics point out to the sciences that they have prerequisite conditions in embodied living conscious being imbued with meaningful language and a culture. One can see the world view that emerges from the work of the sciences as a reconstruction back into time of our present ecological and evolutionary self-understanding as semiotic intersubjective conscious cultural historical creatures, but unable to handle the aspects of meaning and conscious awareness. How can we integrate these two directions of explanatory efforts? The problem is that the scientific one is without concepts of qualia and meaning, and the phenomenological-hermeneutic “sciences of meaning” do not have a foundation of material evolution. A modern interpretation of C.S. Peirce’s pragmaticistic evolutionary and phaneroscopic semiosis in the form of a biosemiotics is used and integrated with N. Luhmann’s evolutionary autopoietic system theory of social communication. This framework, which integrates cybernetics and semiotics, is called Cybersemiotics

Ficta: remixing generalized symbolic media in the new scientific novel

This article analyzes the use of fictionalization in popular science communication as an answer to changing demands for science communication in the mass media. It concludes that a new genre—Ficta—arose especially with the work of Michael Crichton. The Ficta novel is a fiction novel based on a real scientific problem, often one that can have or already does have serious consequences for our culture or civilization. The Ficta novel is a new way for the entertainment society to reflect on scientific theories, their consequences and meaning. Jurassic Park is chosen for an in-depth analysis in order to bring out the essential characteristics of Ficta, showing how its reflections on complexity, fractals, self-reference, non-linearity and unpredictability in science transform our view of scientific knowledge as being the tool for deterministic control into a second order reflection on complexity and the limits of control and predictability

A Peircean Panentheist Scientific Mysticism

Peirce’s philosophy can be interpreted as an integration of mysticism and science. In Peirce’s philosophy mind is feeling on the inside and on the outside, spontaneity, chance and chaos with a tendency to take habits. Peirce’s philosophy has an emptiness beyond the three worlds of reality (his Categories), which is the source from where the categories spring. He emphasizes that God cannot be conscious in the way humans are, because there is no content in his “mind.” Since there is a transcendental3 nothingness behind and before the categories, it seems that Peirce had a mystical view on reality with a transcendental Godhead. Thus Peirce seems to be a panentheist.4 It seems fair to characterize him as a mystic whose path to enlightenment is science as a social activity

An Evaluation on Wu Kun’s Philosophy of Information

WU Kun’s philosophy of information is the product of Dialectics of Nature coming from Stalin Textbook System and thought liberty movement in 1980s. It is a distinguish philosophy in Chinese style. This philosophical system begins with new founding of the area of objective unreality through re-dividing the field of existence which he called the world of information in itself. Actually, the concept of information in his system is different from information in common sense. So his philosophy of information is not the philosophy about information. A proper theoretical framework of information should be a framework covering objective laws, subjective meaning and intersubjective normativity