Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality

Mouvance « Bio-sémiotique » http://www.ento.vt.edu/~sharov/biosem/ Biosemiotics (bios=life & semion=sign) is an interdisciplinary science that studies communication and signification in living systems. Communication is the essential characteristic of life. An organism is a message to future generations that specifies how to survive and reproduce. Any autocatalytic system transfers information (i.e. initial conditions) to its progeny so that daughter systems will eventually reach the same state as their parent. Self-reproducing systems have a semantic closure (Pattee 1995) because they define themselves in their progeny. A sign (defined in a broadest sense) is an object that is a part of some self-reproducing system. A sign is always useful for the system and its value can be determined by its contribution to the reproductive value of the entire system. The major trend in the evolution of signs is the increase of their complexity via development of new hierarchical levels, i.e., metasystem transitions (Turchin 1977). http://www.zbi.ee/~uexkull/biosemiotics/ ... In the biosemiotic conception the life sphere is permeated by sign processes (semiosis) and signification. Whatever an organism senses also means something to it, food, escape, sexual reproduction etc. and all organisms are thus born into a semiosphere, i.e. a world of meaning and communication: sounds, odours, movements, colours, electric fields, waves of any kind, chemical signals, touch etc. The semiosphere poses constraints or boundary conditions to the Umwelts of populations since these are forced to occupy specific semiotic niches i.e. they will have to master a set of signs of visual, acoustic, olfactory, tactile and chemical origin in order to survive in the semiosphere. And it is entirely possible that the semiotic demands to populations are often a decisive challenge to success. Probably more than anything else organic evolution has to do with the development of ever more sophisticated means for surviving in the semiosphere. (http://www.zbi.ee/~uexkull/biosemiotics/jespintr.htm)