Signs Grow

To Be Means to Communicate

“…Sticking with this terminology, they act as interpretants that, in turn, are themselves signs related to objects mediated by further interpretants. This idea is fairly well embedded in semiotics, both in some commentaries on Peirce (for example, Merrell 1996Merrell , 2000 and in discussions of internalization citing Mead (for example, Wiley 1994 andPickering 1999). Yet there is a more profound way in which the human can be seen as a sign, a perspective that has a biological basis but which illuminates the topics of subjectivity, agency and even dialogue without recourse to theoretical leaps or tentative fictions.…”

“…The putative resurgence of interest in biology in the late twentieth century which, at one pole, comprises the excesses of evolutionary psychology and its popular reception (see Cornwell 1998;Herrnstein Smith 1998;Rose and Rose 2000), and, at the other, the advances that have taken place in biosemiotics (Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1991;Hoffmeyer 1993;Hoffmeyer and Emmeche 1999;Merrell 1996;Kull 2001), entails that subjectivity must be recast. Sebeok's notion of the 'semiotic self' provides a programmatic re-visioning of the concept of subjectivity, placing an emphasis on communication as characteristic of life.…”

Does a robot have an Umwelt? Reflections on the qualitative biosemiotics of Jakob von Uexküll

“…Remember the extremely broad scope of semiosis and mind in Peirce's sense. If the very universe anyway is perfused with signs, according to Peircean pansemiotics (as in Merrell 1996), this state of aairs may not help us to decide whether a robot is experiencing anything; whether it has an Umwelt. It might have, we could imagine, if the qualisigns and all its higher forms of semiosis became organized in such a way as to make possible the emergence of that sort of unity and experiential coherence that characterizes`an Umwelt-as-we-know-it' (our own).…”

Reflections Upon the Matrix

“…is no more than a locus of error and ignorance, at the same time that it is a centre of a certain degree of power and control'. [8] Merrell continues:…”