Claus Emmeche

What is life? Is it just the biologically familiar--birds, trees, snails, people--or is it an infinitely complex set of patterns that a computer could simulate? What role does intelligence play in separating the organic from the inorganic, the living from the inert? Does life evolve along a predestined path, or does it suddenly emerge from what appeared lifeless and programmatic?In this easily accessible and wide-ranging survey, Claus Emmeche outlines many of the challenges and controversies involved in the dynamic and curious science of artificial life. Emmeche describes the work being done by an international network of biologists, computer scientists, and physicists who are using computers to study life as it could be, or as it might evolve under conditions different from those on earth.Many artificial-life researchers believe that they can create new life in the computer by simulating the processes observed in traditional, biological life-forms. The flight of a flock of birds, for example, can be reproduced faithfully and in all its complexity by a relatively simple computer program that is designed to generate electronic "boids." Are these "boids" then alive? The central problem, Emmeche notes, lies in defining the salient differences between biological life and computer simulations of its processes. And yet, if we can breathe life into a computer, what might this mean for our other assumptions about what it means to be alive?The Garden in the Machine touches on every aspect of this complex and rapidly developing discipline, including its connections to artificial intelligence, chaos theory, computational theory, and studies of emergence. Drawing on the most current work in the field, this book is a major overview of artificial life. Professionals and nonscientists alike will find it an invaluable guide to concepts and technologies that may forever change our definition of life.

For countless organisms, we know their genomes as long sequences of A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s. But what does this information – if it is information – mean? This is a question of semantics, while information theory, as introduced by Shannon (1948), explicitly is not concerned with meaning. This has led many scholars within theoretical biology and biosemiotics to disregard information theory as irrelevant. By discussing the case of molecular motifs from the points of view of bioinformatics and biosemiotics, we offer an interpretation of biological information that emphasizes the usefulness of Shannon’s theory of information to understand aspects of the generation and interpretation of meaning in living cells. Though the semantic aspects of information were not dealt with by Shannon, contributions to bioinformatics including the work of Thomas D. Schneider and colleagues have shown how the information content of a site, defined as the decrease in uncertainty upon binding, is often just enough to locate the sites in the genome. This provides a better understanding of the biosemiotics of sequence information and the interdependency of information transfer, memory, biochemical specificity, biofunction, and meaning. Thus, we argue that the quantitative approach to information by Schneider is compatible with biosemiotics and Bateson’s definition of information as “a difference that makes a difference”.

Terms loaded with informational connotations are often employed to refer to genes and their dynamics. Indeed, genes are usually perceived by biologists as basically ‘the carriers of hereditary information.’ Nevertheless, a number of researchers consider such talk as inadequate and ‘just metaphorical,’ thus expressing a skepticism about the use of the term ‘information’ and its derivatives in biology as a natural science. First, because the meaning of that term in biology is not as precise as it is, for instance, in the mathematical theory of communication. Second, because it seems to refer to a purported semantic property of genes without theoretically clarifying if any genuinely intrinsic semantics is involved. Biosemiotics, a field that attempts to analyze biological systems as semiotic systems, makes it possible to advance in the understanding of the concept of information in biology. From the perspective of Peircean biosemiotics, we develop here an account of genes as signs, including a detailed analysis of two fundamental processes in the genetic information system (transcription and protein synthesis) that have not been made so far in this field of research. Furthermore, we propose here an account of information based on Peircean semiotics and apply it to our analysis of transcription and protein synthesis.

A central aspect of the relation between biosemiotics and biology is investigated by asking: Is a biological concept of function intrinsically related to a biosemiotic concept of sign action, and vice versa? A biological notion of function (as some process or part that serves some purpose in the context of maintenance and reproduction of the whole organism) is discussed in the light of the attempt to provide an understanding of life processes as being of a semiotic nature, i.e., constituted by sign actions. Does signification and communication in biology (e.g., intracellular communication) always presuppose an organism with distinct semiotic or quasi-semiotic functions? And, symmetrically, is it the case that functional relations are simply not conceivable without living sign action? The present note is just an introduction to a project aiming at elucidating the relations between biofunction and biosemiosis.

"Det biologiske informationsbegreb" er et bidrag til analysen af biologiens grundlagsproblemer. Begrebet om information i levende systemer forstås oftest som den genetiske kodeskrift eller som egenskaber afledt heraf. Dette begreb indgår som kernen i en central forestilling biologien om det levendes natur, og det viser samtidig hen til begreber om skrift og tegn, som de humanistiske videnskaber omhandler. Hele dette idekompleks rejser filosofiske spørgsmål, som behandles i bogen. Selvom der er tale om en afhandling i teoretisk biologi og videnskabsteori, indeholder bogen en række afsnit af mere introducerende art, bl.a. om informations- og sprogteori. Tesen er, at livet alment kan forstås som en proces, hvori naturen på forskellige måder organiseres gennem tegn. Herved aktualiseres den generelle semiotik eller tegnlære, som den amerikanske filosof Charles Sanders Peirce grundlagde. Samtidig fastholdes nødvendigheden af mere specifikke teorier for at skelne mellem sproget som unikt tegnsystem og naturens andre tegntyper. Centrale ideer om organisation, formålsrettethed, kompleksitet og sprog gennemgås og kritiseres, og bogen rummer et udkast til et mere generelt begreb om information i den levende natur. Gennem udviklingen af det almene og det biologiske informationsbegreb – herunder det, der kaldes semiotisk realisme – bidrager afhandlingen til at bygge en bro mellem humaniora og naturvidenslab. --- Cite as: Claus Emmeche (1990): Det biologiske informationsbegreb. En licentiatafhandling i teoretisk biologi og videnskabsteori. [Institut for Biologisk Kemi B, Københavns Universitet, 1989]. Århus: forlaget Kimære. ISBN: 8777110234.

Using friendship studies from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, history, classics, political science, sociology, ethology, neuroscience, semiotics and other disciplines, the volume uses the encyclopedic format to construct both a positive ontology (based on empirical evidence) of friendship, as well as discussing friendship's "negative ontology" (i.e., its uncertainties, ambivalences, unknowns, and ineffable aspects), to outline a multidisciplinary comparative approach to different philosophical models of friendship (e.g., ancient Greek, Indian, Roman, modern), and to explore the inner connection between friendship and philosophy (as a way of life and a friendship with wisdom). Among the emergent categories are 1. Issues (e.g., money, mutuality, satisfaction). 2. Models (e.g., the ancient Greek, the Indian, the modern model of friendship). 3. Kinds or types of friendship (e.g., bad friends, noblest friendship, typologies). 4. Incoherence of theoretical typologies (e.g., complexity, ineffability, thisness). 5. Technical terms (e.g., bestowal, friend-shield effect, homophily). 6. Theories, accounts (e.g. Silver’s thesis, Dunbar’s number, mirror account of friendship). 7. Cases of friendships (e.g., Achilles and Patroclus, Murdoch’s friends, famous friends). 8. Philosophers on friendship (e.g., Aristotle, Kant, Weil). 9. Motifs and themes (e.g., gift, pleasure, social media). 10. Concepts (e.g., eros, presentism, tacit knowledge). 11. Proverbs (e.g., Faroese, Jamaican, Swahili proverbs). 12. Friendship studies (e.g., anthropology, history, semiotics of friendship).

Narrative desire, according to philosopher Adriana Cavarero, is the desire for one’s own history. What can semiotics of literature say about friendship as a dialogic phenomenon and the narrative desire for personal-historical knowledge in friendship, and how is this kind of knowledge semiotically different from knowledge achieved by science and scholarship? As an interpersonal relation, friendship is discussed here from the perspective of semiotics and precarious knowledge, i.e., as a historically contingent relation that can be semiotically modelled (represented by mappings that are to some degree cognitively adequate and emotionally convincing) both within fiction literature and academic disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology and history. Friendship as a complex phenomenon has recently received increased attention from many distinct theoretical perspectives and disciplines. There are forms of “hidden interdisciplinarity” in friendship studies, as well as mono- and multidisciplinary approaches. A good case in point is recent discussions on how well a novel can model friendship. The opposite claims of philosopher Alexander Nehamas and literary critic Gregory Jusdanis on the adequacy of the novel for describing friendship will be discussed. By considering ‘The Neapolitan Novels’ by Elena Ferrante, depicting a close, difficult, life-long friendship between two women and its concerns with precarious dialogues and knowledge (like what the two very different persons really know about each other), as well as recent scholarship on Ferrante’s work, I show how her novels are not just inspired by, but also indirectly a critical comment upon the work on narrative friendship by Cavarero. Friends differ, and some of their differences constitute a challenge for universal models of friendship and narrative desire. Furthermore, Ferrante’s novels add a challenging complexity to a central insight analysed by Santaella as Peirce’s dialogism – that the action of signs is not merely individual but social, and that this applies as well to the person, whose thoughts are what she is “saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time” (CP 5.421; Santaella 2004: 132). The novels can be seen as modelling the very genesis of that dialogic self in the precarious process of finding a balance between dependency and autonomy between the friends.

Using the phenomenon of friendship as a case, the possibilities of a neurosemiotics of friendship is investigated by analysing ongoing research in cognitive social neuroscience on friendship. Neurosemiotics, both as a field dealing with particular semiosic processes that are neurobiologically based, and as an approach to the knowledge gained in neuroscience interpreting its semiosis of inquiry and dissemination, can help us better understand the construct of friendship having a neural basis. Thus, the claim that neural similarity predict friendship, analysed as an instance of a propositional dicisign, can be true or false, depending on how prediction and friendship is interpreted.

Traditional notions of translation (TN or ‘narrow translation’) have had a primary focus on text translation and how meaning can be preserved. This chapter employs an alternative semiotic understanding of translation (TS or ‘semiotic translation’), as suggested by Kobus Marais, to demonstrate how it can be used to study inter-epoch changes in norm-directed practices and their conceptualizations, cross-cultural developments and interdisciplinary translations of concepts used to describe them. Friendship practices and their theoretical descriptions are used as a case to show the need for alternative understandings of translation processes. TS occurs not only when texts are taken as signs of complex phenomena but also when a mode of life and the sociolinguistic practice of one generation or culture is interpreted and changed by its inheritors. To develop TS as a general and theoretically more satisfying model, we investigate some of the processes involved in the inter-epoch conceptualizations and cross-cultural developments of friendship. Claiming that different friendship studies all contribute to knowledge of some aspects of ‘the same’ phenomenon demands the possibility of translations of ‘friendship’ as a word, concept, practice, interpersonal relationship, social bond, ideal, form of love, normative constraint, power relation or any other terms that have been used to characterize its phenomenology and dynamics. Analysing TS translations of friendship across epochs (from Confucius and Aristotle through the following eras, up to modernity), cultures (worldwide) and languages demonstrates how the perspective of TS helps us grasp ancient texts, their translations and cross-cultural friendship performances better without forcing upon the material our late-modern perspectives and norms. It is suggested that frames (from artificial intelligence and philosophy of science) can be an analytic tool for studying TS processes. Finally, some challenges to be resolved in further research are outlined.

Research in general, and research on friendship in particular, uses metaphors and analogies, and research itself can be seen in analogy with map making. This chapter takes us on a meandering walk along mono- and multidisciplinary inquiries into friendship as seen from many perspectives, like that of history and philosophy of science (that has analogical modelling as a canonical style of reasoning) and semiotics, to reflect on the uses of metaphor and analogy. Semiotics as founded by C. S. Peirce is the science of representations, how representational devises relate to their objects and how the meaning generated depends upon context and interpretation. Metaphor and analogy are such representational tools, at once cognitive and common as we all use them to think with, but also specialized within the sciences and humanities where they can be used in effective and misleading ways. It is shown how the general map analogy can be semiotically analysed as a diagram and how its general form can be applied to the aspects of friendship that concern the friends’ knowledge of Self and Other. We not only think, but also do things with metaphors, such as transforming a friend into some kin, or vice versa

The norms and values of Post-Normal Science (PNS) are instrumental in guiding science advice practices. In this article, we report work in progress to systematically investigate the norms and values of PNS through a structured review. An archive of 397 documents was collected, including documents that contribute to the endeavour of ameliorating science advice practices from a PNS perspective. Action and structure-oriented viewpoints are used as complementing perspectives in the analysis of the ethos of PNS. From the action-perspective we study how prototypes of norms and values are reflected upon in negotiations of normative issues relating to science advice. From the structural perspective we study how interrelated prototypes of norms and values are presupposed in prescriptions, proscriptions, and goals for science advice practices. Through this analysis we identify a plurality of interrelated prototypes of norms and values. Finally, we propose an acronym that integrates the analysed plurality of norms and values. As a mnemonic and communicative devise we call this ethos TRUST (Transparency, Robustness, Uncertainty management, Sustainability, and Transdisciplinarity) and propose TRUST as a nexus for future reflective negotiations of ambivalences in post-normal practices of science advice.

Calls for interdisciplinarity in the humanities often presume the existence of disciplines as separate academic fields, with research collaboration framed as a crossing of the borders between separate areas of knowledge. By way of two case studies and a comparative approach called borderology, the chapter questions such a notion and investigates other aspects of interdisciplinary work as practised by researchers in the humanities and the social sciences. First, the rich work on modern love by sociologist Eva Illouz, illustrating a form of intrinsic interdisciplinarity, is analyzed. Second, recent work within friendship studies is compared, and borderology is used to shed light upon friendship both as a real phenomenon and as a cluster of concepts invoked and investigated by different disciplines. These examples may help policy makers appreciate one of the ways in which the humanities are always already interdisciplinary.

Whereas the classical sciences were organized around academic disciplines, knowledge production today is increasingly interdisciplinary and distributed across a variety of societal sectors. Classical disciplines have not only specialized and multiplied; they are increasingly interacting with extra-academic fields and supplemented by new transdisciplinary methods focusing on solving grand societal challenges, such as globalisation, multiculturalism, equality, democracy, security and health. Given the nature of these challenges and the ways in which university leadership has been organised, the very notion of liberal arts and humanities within Western research universities is undergoing profound transformations. This book addresses the signatures of the transformative process in the humanities and the organisation of disciplinary knowledge. Based on multidimensional methodologies for mapping knowledge diversity, the volume outlines reasons for optimism on the potentials of the current hybrid university system. Drawing on a number of case studies and conceptual-empirical mappings of the humanities in Denmark and beyond, and avoiding simple metrics, the volume opens for an appreciation of different types of impact and styles of reasoning, both in classical and interdisciplinary fields of the humanities. From this perspective, a more composite picture of human culture, language and history can emerge from humanities research. It goes beyond the picture of rational agents, and situates human interaction in more complex landscapes of collective identities, networks, and constraints that open for new forms of intellectual leadership in the 21st century.

This book presents programmatic texts on biosemiotics, written collectively by world leading scholars in the field (Deacon, Emmeche, Favareau, Hoffmeyer, Kull, Markoš, Pattee, Stjernfelt). In addition, the book includes chapters which focus closely on semiotic case studies (Bruni, Kotov, Maran, Neuman, Turovski). According to the central thesis of biosemiotics, sign processes characterise all living systems and the very nature of life, and their diverse phenomena can be best explained via the dynamics and typology of sign relations. The authors are therefore presenting a deeper view on biological evolution, intentionality of organisms, the role of communication in the living world and the nature of sign systems - all topics which are described in this volume. This has important consequences on the methodology and epistemology of biology and study of life phenomena in general, which the authors aim to help the reader better understand.

The “practice turn” in philosophy of science has strengthened the connections between philosophy and scientific practice. Apart from reinvigorating philosophy of science, this also increases the relevance of philosophical research for science, society, and science education. In this paper, we reflect on our extensive experience with teaching mandatory philosophy of science courses to science students from a range of programs at University of Copenhagen. We highlight some of the lessons we have learned in making philosophy of science “fit for teaching” outside of philosophy circles by taking selected cases from the students’ own field as the starting point. We argue for adapting philosophy of science teaching to particular audiences of science students, and discuss the benefits of drawing on research within science education to inform curriculum and course design. This involves reconsidering teaching resources, assumptions about students, intended learning outcomes, and teaching formats. We also argue that to make philosophy of science relevant and engaging to science students, it is important to consider their potential career trajectories. By anticipating future contexts and situations in which methodological, conceptual, and ethical questions could be relevant, philosophy of science can demonstrate its value in the education of science students.

Theses on the semiotic study of life as presented here provide a collectively formulated set of statements on what biology needs to be focused on in order to describe life as a process based on semiosis, or sign action. An aim of the biosemiotic approach is to explain how life evolves through all varieties of forms of communication and signification (including cellular adaptive behavior, animal communication, and human intellect) and to provide tools for grounding sign theories. We introduce the concept of semiotic threshold zone and analyze the concepts of semiosis, function, umwelt, and the like as the basic concepts for theoretical biology.

Semiotic inquiry relating the natural sciences to an evolutionary philosophy of nature must address the relations between physical, biological and psychic systems. This can be done in various ways that either emphasize substantial differences between extensional and intensional descriptions, or strive to bridge the gap between theories of mind and matter be means of semiotic notions. Biosemiotics can contribute to integrate our concepts of matter, energy and sign systems such as the notion of a basic molecular code, which is not merely a chemical notion. It is argued that a semiotics of biological systems is in harmony with a pluralist ontology of emergent levels of organization. --- Published in: Edwina Taborsky, ed. (1999): Semiosis. Evolution. Energy: Towards a Reconceptualization of the Sign. Shaker Verlag, Aachen. (pp. 89-108). The book is based on the meeting "Semiosis. Evolution. Energy, Third International Conference on Semiotics", Victoria Colledge, University of Toronto, Canada, October 17-19, 1997.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between information and abductive reasoning in the context of problem-solving, focusing on non-human animals. Two questions guide our investigation: What is the relation between information and abductive reasoning in the context of human and non-human animals? Do non-human animals perform discovery based on inferential processes such as abductive reasoning? In order to answer these questions, we discuss the semiotic concept of information in relation to the concept of abductive reasoning and, more specifically, to the notion of manipulative abduction proposed by Magnani. Finally, we investigate a case study of corvids’ intelligence, namely, their capacity of causal cognition.

First, a principal distinction between two different kinds of semiotic investigations is introduced, both required in the study of living signs and signs of life. Then, the attempt within the new field of Artificial Life to model and synthesise computationally based living systems is discussed with special attention paid to the possible emergence of genuine life-like behaviour in such models of for instance self-reproduction. Remarks will be made on a seemingly odd aspect of the biological concept of life; that it is not as coherent as normally conceived of. In general, biosemiotic emergence of new sign functions is distinguished from other kinds of emergence that pertain to the domain of the observer and the modeling relation.

A central aspect of the relation between biosemiotics and biology is investigated by asking: Is a biological concept of function intrinsically related to a biosemiotic concept of sign action, and vice versa? A biological notion of function (as some process or part that serves some purpose in the context of maintenance and reproduction of the whole organism) is discussed in the light of the attempt to provide an understanding of life processes as being of a semiotic nature, i.e., constituted by sign actions. Does signification and communication in biology (e.g., intracellular communication) always presuppose an organism with distinct semiotic or quasi-semiotic functions? And, symmetrically, is it the case that functional relations are simply not conceivable without living sign action? The present note is just an introduction to a project aiming at elucidating the relations between biofunction and biosemiosis.