The Sarkar challenge to biosemiotics: Is there any information in a cell?

Hierarchical Categorical Perception in Sensing and Cognitive Processes

“…There is already here an explicit hint for a hierarchical conceptualization of CP in biosemiosis. This view is supported by Emmeche (1994Emmeche ( , 1999, and Hoffmeyer (1996) defines CP in a more general sense in order to make it more relevant to biosemiotics and allow for an extended application of the notion. In Bruni (2003) I developed a framework that stresses the importance of CP in cellular signal transduction networks which accounts for the hierarchical and interrelated nature of CP in the ascending scale of semiotic freedom and making links to physiological and ecological levels.…”

“…Stjernfelt envisaged "a natural history of semiotics, ranging from the most simple categorical perception based on morphological, steric features of matter to more and more complex types of signs, and in the same movement to more and more complex types of subjectivity-that is, functional capacity in the system interpreting the categorically perceived units" (Stjernfelt 1992: 444;Emmeche 1999). There is already here an explicit hint for a hierarchical conceptualization of CP in biosemiosis.…”

The Codes of Life

“…For the case of the genetic code we have proceeded by trial and error to find a unique solution for the set of positional weighting values of a length 6 binary non-power representation system satisfying the distribution of Table 2, which implies also necessarily matching the degeneracies shown in Table 6. The values of the non-power positional weights are: [1,1,2,4,7,8], and this solution, shown in Table 7, is unique up to trivial equivalence classes (Gonzalez and Zanna, 2003;Gonzalez, 2004). It may be remarked that there exists a multiplicative equivalence: all the positional weights can be multiplied by an integer (a scale factor) without affecting the degeneracy distribution (but breaking the contiguity of represented numbers).…”

“…The degeneracy distribution corresponding to this unique solution is shown in Tables 7,8,and 9. It is easy to see on inspection that Tables 8 and 9 are identical, respectively, to Tables 2 and 6.…”

Günther Witzany: Life: The Communicative Structure - a new philosophy of biology, Libri Books on Demand, Hamburg 2000

“…These concepts substitute the final causes Darwinists believed to have discarded 150 years ago, they have become firmly established in molecular biology with specific scientific meanings; and yet the semiotic content or connotations are rarely taken serious by the scientists to the extant that there is a tendency to devaluate their status as being "merely metaphors" when confronted with the question about their implied intentionality or semioticity (cf. Emmeche 1999). This secret language, where "code" seems to be a code for final cause, points to the fact that it might be more honest and productive to attack the problem head-on and to formulate an explicit biological theory taking these recurrent semiotic metaphors serious and discuss them as pointing to real scientific problems.…”