CYBERNETICS & HUMAN KNOWING

Some time ago, my little daughter, of four years old, told me that she was at school learning about animals. I asked her: "What animals?", and she replied: "All animals!". Of course, I could not resist doing a small "Piagetian" experiment in asking her whether we, human beings, are also animals. "Well, sure!", she said without any hesitation. As a philosopher, I was astonished. Is it then so evident that we humans are animals? What made my daughter so naturally and deeply convinced of it? Is it a "fact" that we are animals, something to be taken "at face value"? Or was my astonishment rather an indication of the distance that separates philosophical reflection from those things to be taken "at face value"?

At the moment, I don't have any straightforward answers to these questions, but I can say that Jesper Hoffmeyer's book, Signs of Meaning in the Universe, provoked a quite similar effect in me. Natural agreement - of course, we are animals! - was on my part accompanied by a typical philosophical astonishment precisely about that agreement itself - why "of course"?. In a sense, that is what the present book is all about: about our being animals and about the ways of agreement and disagreement that accompany the living. Ultimately, the book is about a new understanding of biology. But I think that just saying this would be too much of a short-cut here, so I will attempt to explain in some more detail how Jesper Hoffmeyer leads us from the fact of being alive towards our specifically human ways of agreement and disagreement.

I am not sure that an overview of the contents of the book will be of much clarification for the reader. What can be the use of a conventional presentation of a clearly non-conventional, even poetic book? The choice of chapter headings already indicates this. The first chapter is called "Signifying. On lumps in nothingness", and is followed by chapters on "Forgetting", "Repeating", "Inventing", "Opening Up", "Defining", "Connecting", "Sharing", "Uniting", and "Healing". With these headings, the author draws conceptual contours of a universe populated by living, actively striving beings, which are, as living beings, inevitably making sense of their surroundings. Understanding the living, including our own place in the universe, means to Hoffmeyer understanding the multiple ways of signifying, remembering, forgetting, repeating and inventing, ... characteristic of living systems. It means, in the first place, taking account of the implications of the code-like organization of the living. If there were no code, there would be no "lumps in nothingness", no "nature taking habits", no possibility of remembering nor of forgetting. But in the second place, it means asking the question of the origins of these "lumps in nothingness", the "someone" behind it: "(...) in a sense what or who this 'someone' might be is exactly the question posed in this book. Who is capable of making 'lumps in nothingness'? When did it start? And to what did it lead?" (p. 10).

So, Signs of Meaning in the Universe finds its starting point in our being alive - a biological evolutionary viewpoint -, and it highlights the important questions in that regard: What is it to be a living being? What is implied in the acknowledgment of being alive? What is the role of codification in the organization of the living? How did we, humans, evolve from other types of living systems? In what sense are we similar and/or different from other animals?

In addition, however, the book questions the particular types of "meaningful" relationships living systems, qua living systems, can entertain with their environments. The semiotic viewpoint brings the author to investigate the sources and types of interaction we call meaningful: is there meaning "in the universe", or do we construct, through our interactions, a meaningful relationship with it?

In answering those questions, the author associates with Peirce's semiotic viewpoint, commonly called relational or triadic: if there are signs of meaning in the universe, they are always signs for someone, never signs as such: "A sign (...) is something which stands for something to somebody in some respect or capacity" (Peirce, cited p. 19). Signs do stand for something, but only if they also stand for something to somebody. In other words, the sign-function has to be, implicitly or explicitly, recognized by someone; some system has in some sense to "realize" the sign-function. The Peircean sign-conception is committed to a universe populated by dynamical, even subjective systems, actively taking part or engaged in something.

Of course, it is not sufficient to state, abstractly, the necessity of a triadic sign-conception. Various questions remain unanswered, among which are: What exactly makes a relational account relational? What makes systems able to act relationally or interactively, so as to recognize the sign-function? Or in other words: what are the (systemic) conditions for the emergence of the sign-function? Is it a matter of inheritance - vertical semiosis, as Hoffmeyer calls it -, or rather a question of genesis and learning - horizontal semiosis? What is the difference between systems subjected to the "sign-logic" - those systems merely "determined" by the genetic code, for instance - and those able to (consciously) recognize the sign-function? Where does that difference come from and what are its implications?

These questions have in a certain way already been formulated, but too abstractly again, by second order cyberneticians, by Maturana, Varela, Pask and Von Foerster in particular. And we encounter them in constructivist circles, with well-known sociological and ethical conclusions. But time and again, they leave us unsatisfied, basically because they do not provide us with sufficient empirical or practical evidence, leaving that type of project languishing in major part on wishful thinking.

Where, then, lie the originality and the specific coherence of Hoffmeyer's approach, as anchored in the biosemiotic program? Generally, biosemioticians attempt to link the fact that we are open, living beings with our "meaningful" ways of behaving and acting. If we are able to entertain meaningful interactions with an environment, it is because we are living systems. In other words: if we are able to interpret our surroundings, it is because of our capacity to arrive at a requisite closure - that protects us from being invaded by irrelevant stimuli all the time-, as well as because of our essential openness for new potentially meaningful stimuli that arise from our contacts with the world. There is something robust, as well as something creative in the universe. Living and systems, these two words cannot be stressed enough in any biosemiotic program. To analyze their intricate and tricky linkages, to describe the multiple manifestations of openness and closure, to analyze their ingredients at various levels, to account for their evolution in terms of general principles and mechanisms, and, last but not least, to always take into account the implications of ourselves being living systems in describing the living, ... all these are important subparts of the biosemiotic program. Not an easy task to fulfill, but a most fascinating one...

What then gives coherence and originality to Hoffmeyer's contribution in this debate? I would call it the post-modern core in it, even if, as I can guess, the author would not agree with the use of that term here. By post-modern, I mean that in analyzing the ingredients of the living, in looking at its diverse modalities of being, and in taking into account our multiple ways of describing it, there is, always, something that escapes control - the very openness referred to above. There is a gap in any description; something escapes in any codification; nothing can be totally or absolutely grasped. The author argues for this idea in two basic ways, of which the first is to me much more convincing than the second.

Firstly, Hoffmeyer states that the nature of a code itself implies the impossibility to "code for everything". A particular code-duality creates a space within which evolution and history can take place. Precisely because it is based on exclusion, the code can create semiotic freedom. Robert Rosen (and even Jacques Lacan, quoted in this book) arrived at very similar conclusions in characterizing the modelling relation. Rosen for instance writes: "(...) a modelling relation (...) is to be established through an encoding of qualities or observables of S into formal or mathematical objects in M (...) any encoding of a natural system S into a formal system M involved an act of abstraction, in which non-encoded qualities are necessarily ignored. Such an abstraction is not peculiar to theory; indeed, any act of observation (on which any kind of encoding must be based) is already an abstraction in this sense." (R. Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, pp. 339-340, original italics).

However, there is a second gap that comes to redouble the previous one, and that arises once we introduce the idea of system or of closure. The gap here refers to the impossibility of adequately describing the internal dynamics of living systems, and the necessity, faute de mieux, to adopt an external, however partially totalizing, viewpoint to account for it. It is a gap that, in the field of evolutionary biology, leads to the difference between internalist and externalist viewpoints (or the endo-exo discussions, cf. Matsuno, Kampis, Atmanspacher). For human beings, this issue becomes: how to know fellow human beings, or even fellow living beings, when considering the fact that they are systems, so that it is impossible to break them apart without destroying them as systems? An additional question is: How can we arrive at a knowledge or an understanding even of ourselves? For Hoffmeyer, empathy, identification and ethics seem to be the main answers here. After citing Arne Naess: "An identification process can be defined as a process whereby another being's interests are instinctively responded to as though they were one's own interests", he writes "One might even say that we banish the loneliness engendered by this awareness of our mortality by instinctively taking responsibility for one another" (p. 133, italics added). And ethics quite logically finds a place as follows: "Ethics is not about values that we opt for, or that are imposed on us from outside (...) it is about self-knowledge, i.e., the recognition of our ability to empathize as the very life-line that can help us overcome alienation and fear of death" (p. 133).

It certainly is a challenge to introduce these gaps in a field that has its roots in biology and biochemistry, where they have not played a role. The present book is on this point quite amazing. However, a challenge that remains intact, even after this book, is the one that consists in addressing the relation between the different kinds of gap. The author does stress some of the difficulties in this regard, but clearly many questions are left unanswered, and are, in my opinion, too hastily solved on the basis of ethics and empathy. For instance, it is important, for any biosemiotician, to grasp the emergence of closure in various contexts, and the way in which a codification, i.e. the material form of inscription, as well as the interactive context, are important in this process of emergence. This problem is crucial for biological systems in general, but it is likely that it takes on a different form when dealing with psychic closure. Isn't this a very important issue when dealing with the implications of our, typically human, ways of describing the living? Why would the biological closure, typical for the living in general, be in any sense comparable to the psychical closure? Shouldn't we seek to differentiate the principles and mechanisms at work in different contexts? Clearly, our means to acquire semiotic freedom throughout our own particular histories are radically different from those of other animals. Clearly, the relational context in which humans (and some other animals too) are born, due to their initial helplessness, as Freud calls it, creates a different setting from the one of other animals. Precisely on this point, instead of hastily filling the gap with empathy and ethics, instead of calling for instincts - which is, in my opinion, the most anti-biosemiotic move that could possibly be made - detailed empirical and clinical investigations need to be undertaken. Perhaps then we would see that humans are materially, and not only meaningfully determined by language; we would have to acknowledge that empathy is based on different forms of identification, that precisely the mechanism of identification didn't work in all situations, and that our way of manipulating language, i.e. of entering meaningful interactions, is intimately linked to that capacity of identification.