Discursivity and semiotic complexity as driving the shape of animal choice and human freedom

[Slides from the presentation]

Biosemiotics, it seems, holds the key not only to understanding life but also to one of the more intractable issues that has been bewildering philosophy for a long while – the question of freedom. If we are to try and reconcile the possibility of free choice with biological facts, we ought to explain how biochemically constructed beings, subject to biological and thus ultimately physical causality, can be capable of choosing between alternatives, not randomly but deliberately, as random choice can hardly qualify as meaningful control of an organism over itself. Moreover, we will have to explain it while taking into consideration both the diversity of life on Earth and its evolutionary development. I will argue that Hoffmeyer, when he attached the name of semiotic freedom to the semiotic complexity that reflects “the depth of meaning communicated or interpreted by living systems,” is hinting at an important dependency: the degree of freedom is determined by the organism’s capacity to communicate and interpret more complex indicators (Hoffmeyer, 2010). In the conception of freedom I will be advocating, the capacity for choice is potentially present in all life and is realized when an organism becomes capable of both acting in the world and representing alternatives to its own consciousness, or achieving a certain level of Hoffmeyer’s semiotic complexity. The scope of freedom here is determined by the organism’s Umwelt. Yet, when discursive meta-cognition appears, the Umwelt becomes vastly more dynamic, subject more to the limits imposed by the human organism’s own intent rather than merely to the boundaries defined by physiology. This is no simple supervenience: the choices we make consciously alter the boundaries of our semiosphere, as do the choices others make. This changes the semiotic dynamics of freedom and makes it a very interesting research subject with implications that go beyond individual and all the way to educational and other policies, as I will try to suggest.

 

References

Hoffmeyer, J. (2010). God and the World of Signs: Semiotics and the Emergence of Life. Zygon, 45(2), 367-390.