Talk:Biosemiotics
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Hi,
Angela indicated that there might be a copyright problem with the text on biosemiotics I posted yesterday, because it is published at this link:
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/see/pages/biosemioticsdef.html
which is a page of the S.E.E.D. journal.
However, (1) I was the author of that page (with kind cunsulting help from Kalevi Kull), and (2) my entry on biosemiotics was expanded and modified, so the two entries are not identical, and (3) I hope they will diverge even more in wikipedian textual evolution, because my purpose of posting the entry to Wikipedia is that I like the idea of having made only a seed to let other people (biologists, biosemioticians and other interested parties) join and let the text grow. Symbols grow, as Peirce said. Peirce as a major inspiration for biosemiotics, and Peirce would have admired the idea of a truly collective encyclopedia.
Sincerely yours, Claus E.
The problem is that biosemiotics in its end will say just “everything is alive”. Simply because any single movement of any single molecule could be a sign for some system. Therefore despite the good will it will not resolve Cartesian duality but simply deny the existence of physical “dead” world, saying – probably it is true – that there is only “live world”, where “death” means creation of billions of other lives, with their own signal systems. So, as soon as the basic idea could not be falsified (or it can be? Then how?), biosemiotics should not be considered as science per se, but rather as it is defined now – another perspective on the phenomenon of life. Best, D. Poltavets (denis.poltavets@gmail.com)
