Biosemiotic Bottom-Up Emergence in the Key of Teilhard de Chardin
Yogi Hendlin & Daniel Kamp
What are the cultural implications of understanding how evolutionary biological constraints gives rise to them? (Cobley 2016) Biosemiotic constraints through iterated interactions between individuals lead to a ‘pattern of variety-in-unity’ (Teilhard de Chardin 1961, p. 18). Biosemiotics from an evolutionary perspective (Sharov 1991) provides an awareness for how sign systems of species communication develop through certain patterns over time. The work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin describes these patterns in The Phenomenon of Man similarly as a bottom-up emergent phenomena across cultures into what he calls the noosphere. In this domain, Teilhard’s work proves particularly useful for tracking the development of sign systems of cultures, as he accommodates both science and religion. Especially, insofar as he takes the scientific study of biological constraints to explain the emergence of conscious integration beyond what he calls ‘organic individuality’ to account for culture and its immaterial level of ‘co-operative interthinking.’ (For a more recent take on this, see Hovhannisyan and Vervaeke 2022.) This ‘psychosocial’ aspect of the Umwelt arises from a bottom-up emergent pattern with the emergent pattern of stars and atoms alike, for Teilhard, envisioned akin to the cosmos as a ‘global unity of mankind’s noetic organization or systems of awareness, but [with] a high degree of variety within that unity’ (pg. 28).
In contrast to current top-down industry capture through marketing (Hendlin 2019) and polarized politics in the aftermath of the postmodern century, a lens that combines biosemiotics and Teilhard’s work may offer avenues to supersede this attenuation of semiotic sensitivity. Ivar Puura’s notion of semiocide as impairing the other from realizing their semiotic identity (Maran 2013) can be interpreted as the end result of semiotic instrumentalization – which occurs when we do not realize our co-emergence out of a more replete universal biosemiotic pattern. Keeping in mind the greater unifying framework which underpins our existence may allow individuals to disagree on aspects of their perceived realities without undermining their collective goal of cooperation for preserving the semiotic specificity that has emerged through particular traditions of habit and habitat. From an ecosemiotic perspective, denying humans our evolutionary biological need for cooperation and community can be glossed as another form of semiocide. This presentation explores techniques of opening the aperture of awareness of ecosemiotics in humans, including the methodologies of participatory action research and other technologies of entrainment across perceived ideological or species barriers.
References
Cobley, P. (2016). Cultural implications of biosemiotics (Vol. 15). Dordrecht: Springer.
Hendlin, Y.H. I Am a Fake Loop: the Effects of Advertising-Based Artificial Selection. Biosemiotics 12, 131–156 (2019).
Hovhannisyan, G., & Vervaeke, J. (2022). Enactivist Big Five Theory. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 21(2), 341–375.
Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1961). The Phenomenon of Man. (B. Wall, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row.
Maran, T. (2013). Enchantment of the past and semiocide. Remembering Ivar Puura. Sign Systems Studies, 41 (1), 146-149.
Sharov, A. (1991). Biosemiotics: A functional-evolutionary approach to the analysis of the sense of information. In T. A. Sebeok & J. Umiker-Sebeok (Eds.), The Semiotic Web: Biosemiotics (pp. 345–373). De Gruyter.