#biosemiotics

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Umwelt: What Matters Most in the World

(Originally posted at my blog at https://rebeccalexa.com/umwelt-what-matters-most-in-the-world/)

I will be the first to admit that a lot of philosophy tends to bend my brain in ways that I’m really not prepared for. I’m a very earthy creature, and I am more comfortable in physical, solid spaces than in abstract conceptualizations. Even the modalities of psychology I gravitated toward in grad school tended to be based in our interactions with physical nature, and measurable effects thereof. But it was a casual discussion on philosophy with regards to the awareness of animals that introduced me to the concept of umwelt.

Originally coined by biologist Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll, umwelt describes the unique way in which a given animal experiences the world around it. Uexküll looked at how various beings take in information through their senses; the way that a blind, deaf worm engages with their environment through taste and touch is very different from how we with our hearing and color vision connect with our world. Even when I am walking with my dog out in the woods, her interpretation of what’s going on around us is going to be much more heavily influenced by hearing, and especially smell, than my sight-heavy approach. (And when we engage with each other, our respective umwelten create a semiosphere!)

So umwelt is essentially the sum total of all the ways in which an animal takes in that sensory information and attaches meaning to each fragment thereof. It’s how they tell the story of the world around them, and understand their place in it. And they rank the signs according to importance; umwelt is more strongly formed by things that are of particular interest to the animal.

That means that umwelt, rather than being constant throughout life, is always shifting according to new sensory input, or changes in how the senses work; as my dog gets older, her hearing and vision may not be as good as they were, but if her nose stays sharp then smells may become an even more important part of how she navigates her world.

Or look at a Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), which is born as a blind, deaf little hairless being with two front legs that they use to crawl to the mother’s abdominal pouch. At that time their umwelt centers on seeking and retaining the warmth of their mother’s pouch, and the sensation of the constant flow of warm, nourishing milk. After about ten weeks they leave the pouch as a miniature furry little possum and travel on their mother’s back while learning to walk; their umwelt has expanded quite a bit to include the sight and smell of their mother, the visual and scent cues that tell them how close they are to known food sources, and visual, sound, and audio information warning of various dangers. At around five months, the opossum becomes independent, and their mother fades from their umwelt while being replaced by an even larger network of food, danger, and perhaps even potential mates. Over a lifetime, as the opossum’s senses develop (and, with age, decline) and their priorities shift, so does their umwelt evolve with them.

This then led me into a bit of a rabbit hole with biosemiotics. Semiotics is the study of symbols and the communication of meaning, to include communication with the self. Biosemiotics, then, is how non-human beings assign meaning to various things in their lives, and interpret the world they live in. Zoosemiotics specifically refers to the semiotics of animals, like the examples I’ve given so far, while endosemiotics (aka phytosemiotics or vegetative semiotics) is semiotics at a cellular or even molecular level.

One example of endosemiotics can be found in our immune systems. A B lymphocyte can recognize an invader such as a virus or bacteria, and it sends out a signal (an antigen) to T lymphocytes that then attack the invader. The B lymphocyte’s umwelt consists of information received through surface receptors that can detect certain proteins and other molecules, and the response it’s programmed to have as a result of detecting an invader. The T lymphocyte’s umwelt, on the other hand, centers on the B lymphocyte’s antigen signal, as well as the invader itself.

Biosemiotics is important because it moves meaning-making beyond humans, demonstrating that we are not the only beings who assign more importance to one part of our world than another. It promotes the idea that human language is not necessary for an organism to be able to find meaning in their environment. I’m cautious about anthropomorphization–assigning human traits to non-human beings–but biosemiotics allows each being to be its own unique self, rather than being gauged by human standards.

It’s all too easy for me to get overwhelmed by just how technical some of the discussion over biosemiotics can get (especially when delving into the “semotics” part of it!) But my takeaway is that it’s nice to have a term–umwelt–that encapsulates the unique experience that every animal, plant, fungus, slime mold, and other being has, no matter how large or small its world may be.

I can envision millions upon millions of overlapping umwelten in every ecosystem, becoming semiospheres whenever two or more of those umwelten nudge, slide, or crash into each other. I’m already delighted by knowing that I myself contain several ecosystems, with microbiomes in my organs and on my skin and more. But I can now also consider the umwelten and semiospheres of the lymphocytes in my immune system, along with all the other cells that are carrying on their existences within my various tissues, fluids, and so forth.

Of course, this gets into discussions of whether umwelt requires some level of consciousness, the nature of consciousness, sentience vs. sapience, etc., etc., all of which are the sort of headache-inducing philosophical discussions that I try to avoid at this stage of my life. So I can understand that this whole umwelt-biosemiotics thing is still being hammered out and explored and critiqued, but also use it to augment my own personal model of my world, internal and external (my innenwelt!) And for now, umwelt is a perfectly good shorthand for “the unique way in which an organism experiences its environment.”

Did you enjoy this post? Consider taking one of my online foraging and natural history classes, checking out my other articles, or picking up a paperback or ebook I’ve written! You can even buy me a coffee here!

[kamanori]

昨年、Biosemioticsで一番盛り上がった（？）Denis Nobleによる論文。

Noble, D. The Illusions of the Modern Synthesis. Biosemiotics 14, 5–24 (2021).  https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-021-09405-3

[honesteas]

the last three books ive read have been knockouts like me on the floor blood trickling out of my nose tko how am i supposed to keep this up

[horsesource]

We need a biosemiotic account of autism because watching the ping pong match between “biologically determined medical disorder” and “socially constructed identity” makes me grind my teeth

Plus many neurodiversity advocates seem more devoted to the idea of an autistic neurological essence than the neuroscientists wearyingly scanning brains

[coldcanyon]

Reading about ecology, psychoanalysis, biosemiotics has given me such a better outlook on Life and also "my" life..... and made me so much more comfortable in my body as well...... i cant express how much I enjoy being an organism and thinking very carefully about new information in my environment and feeling my "self" grow with that. And being deliberate with how I nourish myself and move my body as well. But it does get awful dark these days .... Tough luck for my diurnal ass

[lesbianboyfriend]

trying to have a really interesting conversation about humanity, anthropocentrism, biosemiotics, sentience etc. in disability class but there’s this one person who’s just really against ai art who keeps making these stupid reductive statements like shut uppp

[perkwunos]

The concepts of function and semiosis (sign processes) are intertwined. Both are teleological concepts in the sense of being determined with respect to an end (or other than itself)—a specifically correlated absent content. Although it is unclear whether these two properties of living processes (function and semiosis) are exactly coextensive, it is clear that although time-asymmetrical, irreversible physical processes are found in the prebiotic physicochemical world; teleological processes that are specially organized with respect to specific ends or referents are unique to living processes.

If we think of a function as a process organized around an implicitly represented end, then these two classes of phenomena must be considered entirely coextensive. …

…

Neo-Darwinian biology as practiced all over the world has prescinded (i.e., abstracted from necessary contextual support) an asemiotic conception of life as mere molecular chemistry, and yet at the same time it is dependent on unanalyzed semiotic assumptions. The reason why this is not felt as a problem is that biology compensates for the excluded semiosis by introducing a plethora of implicitly semiotic terms like “information,” “adaptation,” “signal,” “cue,” “code,” “messenger,” “fidelity,” and “cross talk.” These uses are seldom well defined and are often applied in an allegedly metaphoric way, with the implicit assumption that they can be reduced to mere chemical accounts if necessary.

…

It is the aim of biosemiotics to make explicit those assumptions that are imported into biology by such unanalyzed teleological concepts as “function,” “information,” “code,” “signal,” and “cue” and to provide a theoretical grounding for these concepts. …

…

Functions are not only the output of evolutionary history; rather, functionality is the prerequisite for organic evolution. For instance, autocells do not in all cases have an evolutionary history, but they do have functions. Evolution presupposes function rather than vice versa. Natural selection cannot be defined except with respect to a bounded, self-maintaining, and self-reproducing dynamical unit system. A discrete system with these properties must therefore be constituted by component materials and dynamical processes that reciprocally generate each other as well as their collective organization. The critical features and dynamical actions of these components exemplify Kant’s criteria for possessing intrinsic telos and are thus functional. The possibility of evolution derives from the fact that functions, because they can be realized multiple number of times, can coopt any incidental physicochemical properties of the substrates they utilize. Likewise, semiosis can coopt any incidental feature exhibited by functional processes or their properties.

Kalevi Kull et al., Theses on Biosemiotics: Prolegomena to a Theoretical Biology

[great-and-small]

You can read a bit more about altruism behavior in turtles in the paper “Turtles Are Not Just Walking Stones: Conspicuous Coloration and Sexual Selection in Freshwater Turtles”, Biosemiotics

“Turtles helping each other in times of need”

(via)

[simongadbois]

Congratulations to Laura Kiiroja that successfully defended her interdisciplinary PhD thesis today ("Assistance dogs for PTSD: A study of canine detection accuracy, therapeutic potential, and ethical dimensions"), with Dr. Riin Magnus (biosemiotics), Dr. Andrew Fenton (philosophy/ethics), Dr. Sherry Stewart (psychology/psychiatry), myself (supervisor), and Dr. Karen Overall (external examiner).

[kamanori]

“The key to biosemiotics’ possible contribution to phenomenology is related to the way in which applied phenomenology can take the form of applied Umwelt theory. This would make phenomenological analysis, in form of Biosemiotic Phenomenology, available not only for studies of human experience, but furthermore for studies of animal experience, and human–animal relations. From a theoretical point of view, Umwelt theory challenges central dogmas in current phenomenology, starting with the misguided idea that all phenomena are human phenomena.” 

Tønnessen, M., Maran, T. & Sharov, A. Phenomenology and Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics 11, 323–330 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-018-9345-8

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-018-9345-8

[linguistlist-blog]

Books: The Complexity of Social-Cultural Emergence: Marais, Meylaerts, Gonne (eds.) (2024)

Based on previous work that linked biosemiotics, semiotics and translation studies, this book further explores a variety of factors that play a role in social-cultural emergence. The volume, which presents a selection of papers read at a conference in 2022 with the same title as the book, engages the systems of matter-energy, biology, and significance from which and in relation to which society-culture emerges. The volume entails an interdisciplinary complex of perspectives, drawing on quantum p http://dlvr.it/T87j9H

[penghusound]

2017 : "How Corals Think 珊瑚如何思考", exhibition

"How Corals Think" is an exhibition combining an essay and underwater recordings related to the project Penghu Experimental Sound Studio. The photo above was taken in 2023 during its last incarnation (Tokyo, Japan).

This video retraces my first successful audio recordings in the coral reefs in Penghu archipelago and the sharing of ideas which came to my mind, related to readings in anthropology and biosemiotics.

The original mixed-media installation entitled "How Corals Think", was an invitation by curator Hsu Manray for the exhibition "The South", at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, in 2017, and which was soon shown in Prizren for the Kosovo Biennale 2017, at TheCube Space Project, in Taipei, for the exhibition "Ocean after Nature" curated by Alaina Claire Feldman and adapted into a sound piece for YNK/SAVVY radio program curated by Nicolas Perret and Silvia Ploner during Documenta #14. It was also part of the exhibition "Under the Surface, the Dreaming and Lingering Ones" with Wan-Shuen Tsai and Gaël Le Friec, at the Penghu Reclamation Hall, Makong in 2019. It was shown again in 2023 in Taichung at Galerie Pierre (exhibition "The Collaboration Ground" curated by Eric Chen) and in Za Koenji Theatre, Tokyo, Japan (exhibition "Do Corals Dream of Mountain").

Since then, I pursued the audio documentation and survey of the coral reefs in Penghu, witnessing the climate changes that let them to bleaching and dying in 2020-2023.

While the perspective of this project dramatically changed, the work is still in progress...

More information about Penghu Experimental Sound Studio can be found at www.kalerne.net

-- Y.D. 29.10.2023

[coldcanyon]

the great central valley: california's heartland

the matrixial borderspace

expecting the earth: life/culture/biosemiotics

I <3 ebay forever

[santacoppelia]

Never thought I'd comment on a Scooby Doo post, but they mentioned "semiotics" and here I am.

Yeah, I ADORE semiotics, and what I found fascinating is the mix of "semiotics" with "molecular neurobiology". Because… you see… there are a lot of different specializations of semiotics (for example, I'm specialized in cultural semiotics, the way culture creates significance and how that changes over time). The mix of those two disciplines implies that Daphne is working in one of two really cool fields:

Biosemiotics, the field that studies the crossings between biology and semiotics. For example, we are talking about people who are obsessed with the way trees communicate and how they do it and if they recognize and communicate changes in the environment (those things are not only studied by biosemioticians, but they are on that field)

Neurosemiotics, a field that mixes what we know about neurosciences and every sliver of comprehension we have about how we create symbolic systems and process them in the mind (and the mind as a symbolic system). Charles Sanders Peirce, the American philosopher who started the studies on pragmatism and semiotics, was sort of obsessed with that… but he lived on the XIX century. I could never, but to think that Peirce would have loved to live in this exact time, just to know neuroscience and mix that with his studies on logic and "semiosis" (the process through our minds process and build significance)…

I just felt the need to infodump, sorry. I was always more of a Velma fan, but this idea makes Daphne 1'000,000 x times cooler to my eyes 😅🤓

[weasel-reads-house-of-leaves]

Schools of thought

Zampano’s weird lists, Chapter 1, p. 4

In fact a few eager intellectuals have already begun to treat the film as a warning in and of itself, perfectly suited for hanging whole above the gates of such schools as Architectonics, Popomo, Consequentialism, Neo-Plasticism, Phenomenology, Information Theory, Marxism, Biosemiotics, to say nothing of psychology, medicine, New Age spirituality, art and even Neo-Minimalism.

Nothing comes up with the acrostics type code.

The words

Architectonics is apparently just the normal word for the science of architecture, a little disappointing tbh I thought it was going to be related to tectonic plates

Popomo seems to be an abbreviation of post-postmodernism. Borges’ Labyrinths mentioned in HoL are a good example of postmodernism, idk what post-postmodernism means and the wikipedia page sounds like it’s disputed.

Consequentialism is “a theory that says whether something is good or bad depends on its outcomes” (from The Ethics Centre). Sounds like what most ppl believe but don’t directly say/realize is what it’s called, I feel like.

Neo-Plasticism means “new art” and was a thing in like the 1910s. Looks like lots of blocky color things, basically what comes to my mind when someone says modern art.

Phenomenology seems to be some abstract philosophical concept about the structure of experience and consciousness. The wikipedia page opens with this helpful quote:

A unique and final definition of phenomenology is dangerous and perhaps even paradoxical as it lacks a thematic focus. In fact, it is not a doctrine, nor a philosophical school, but rather a style of thought, a method, an open and ever-renewed experience having different results, and this may disorient anyone wishing to define the meaning of phenomenology.[3]

Information theory is the same “IT” as the IT guy at the office. It’s something I technically study (bioinformatics) and is mostly about probability and computer science. No clue what it has to do with House of Leaves, unless this is a joke about how much time we’re spending trying to crack codes in this text.

Marxism. You know what this means. It is unrelated.

Biosemiotics. I cannot parse the wikipedia page for this one like at all. Here, you try:

...studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, biological interpretation processes, production of signs and codes and communication processes in the biological realm.

Please for the love of god just use an Oxford comma.

psychology, medicine, New Age spirituality, art... He’s basically just saying every realm of academia and culture at this point.

Neo-Minimalism is another relatively obscure art movement that I’m confused why he’d use this word instead of a more common equivalent. Looks like the kind of clipart and boring graphic design that I associate with the shittification of the internet:

Well, this is definitely making me feel insane so well done you, MZD.

[perkwunos]

Peirce goes against the logical tradition of erecting a linguistic standard norm for logical analysis of propositions built on Latin and other Indo-European grammars, as he underlines. Here, Peirce’s scope of examples goes to show that the too swift assumption of such canonical forms overlooks a large number of empirically found signs satisfying his theoretical predictions.

…

This arduous task is the reason behind the interest of the present author to analyze examples from mathematics, logic, linguistics, biosemiotics, poetry, arts, and more.

Frederik Stjernfelt, Sheets, Diagrams, and Realism in Peirce