Dear Howard, lists, I agree that symbol systems are necessary from the beginning of biological evolution, as Frederik has discussed, but I still have trouble picturing the icons, indices, Dicisigns, and propositions at the level of the cell.
Evolution requires stable storage and reliable communication of information from individual cell to individual cell. This heritability is what is essential for evolution. Explaining cell semiosis is important because all living organisms develop from a single cell, including brains. So I do not understand Peirce's statement: "the organism has not made the mind but only adapted to it . . . it is the mind that has made the organism" (p. 160). This does indeed sound crazy if you take "mind" to meen "psyche", "subject", "soul" or anything like it - then it would be tantamount to subjective idealism. Peirce, however, used "mind" in an idiosyncratic way, meaning thought as performed by a sequence of signs. If you take that interpretation, the statement says nothing more than organisms have had to adapt to using basic principles of logic - like in "if poison, then flee". Heritable and communicable information from the oldest genes to the latest news and all our Internet discussion is stored and communicated by linear sequences of a few discrete symbols. Physics and information theory show that insofar as icons and indices are physically restricted by similarity or connection with their object, they have no heritable information capacity. Peirce agrees, recognizing the basic function of information as distinguishing alternatives. Linear discrete storage is of paramount importance but still only one side of the coin - the other being spatial information, e.g. in visual, continuous icons. One of the early important papers in biosemiotics (by Hoffmeyer and Emmeche, in Semiotica, around 1990) made the point that information inheritance in biology is double. One part is the discrete information in the genes - the other the continuous information incarnated in the structure of the cell. DNA is never alone but always accompanied by the cell whose continuous metabolism it is its task to regulate (not to create). This double character of signification (discrete/ continuous - I think digital/analog was the somewhat dated language of the paper) can not be reduced to one of its halves. The point is that only symbolic information is heritable. The constructions and controls (e.g., cell structures and enzymes) are rarely heritable. All symbols require material symbol vehicles. Can anyone give some material examples of how icons and indices work at the cell level. Do Dicisigns, icons and indices have material vehicles? Are they heritable or are they constructed by heritable information? So here I (with Hoffmeyer and Emmeche) disagree with Howard: the egg cell itself forms part of the inherited information (in gendered organisms) - in simpler organisms, the cell structure is inherited by the simple duplication of it. Best F
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