J. Augustus Bacigalupi

Living systems at any given moment enact a very constrained set of end‐directed and contextually appropriate actions that are self‐initiated from among innumerable possible alternatives. However, these constrained actions are not necessarily because the system has reduced its sensitivities to themselves and their surroundings. Quite the contrary, living systems are continually open to novel and unanticipated stimulations that require a physiology of coordination. To address these competing demands, this paper offers a novel heuristic model informed by neuroscience, systems theory, biology and sign study to explain how organisms situated in diverse, complex and ever‐changing environments might draw upon the sparse order made available by ‘relevant noise’. This emergent order facilitates coordination, habituation and, ultimately, understanding of the world and its relevant affordances. Inspired by the burgeoning field of coordination dynamics and physiologist Denis Noble's concept of ‘biological relativity’, this model proposes a view of coordination on the neuronal level that is neither sequential nor stochastic, but instead implements a causal logic of phasic alignment, such that an organism's learned and inherited sets of diverse biological affinities and sympathies can be resolved into a continuous and complex range of patterns that will implement the kind of novel orientations and radical generativity required of such organisms to adaptively explore their environments and to learn from their experiences.

Time irreversibility is a central attribute of many process-oriented projects of semiosis, from Peirce’s endless semiosis to Valsiner’s Inter-modal Pre-construction Method. Grounding time irreversibility via an incrementally more rigorous system theoretic model can contribute to the efficacy of these semiotic process philosophies. If, for example, it can be shown that each moment in a semiosic system is distinct, even if related, to all other moments, then time irreversibility will have been demonstrated. This distinctness, or thisness, of the semiosic being, is the Scholastic idea of haecceity. This paper will contextualize the notion of haecceity via semiotic concepts. A system theoretic model – informed by thermodynamic, information and neuroscientific disciplines – will be summarized as a heuristic lens through which the semiotic concepts will be grounded. By extension, haecceity, understood semiotically, will also be grounded. And, once it can be rigorously illustrated that each present semiosic moment is ontologically unique and distinct from all other moments, both past and future, for the semiosic being, time irreversibility can also be justified.

This commentary explores biological models of analogical and associative learning in support of Illusion 1 and Illusion 4 in D. Noble’s target article. The intent is to support Noble’s theses of emergent higher level functionality from lower level stochastic dynamics and his etiological claim that “there is no privileged level of causation” through a biosemiotic lens. Upon these arguments, a case for creative agency via higher-dimensional constraints will also be made in support of Noble’s claim that organismic behavior is actively directed by an agent.

This paper explores how adaptive creativity is continuously generated and sustained in living systems. The philosophical frame and motivations for this investigation will be introduced by juxtaposing an actual creative process with current cybernetic efforts to automate creativity. Past and present process philosophers that have critiqued the implicit commitments of these contemporary techniques will set the stage for further investigations. The litmus test of progress in this investigation will be measured against the extension of two concepts: virtuality, as introduced by Gilbert Simondon (On the Mode of the Existence of Technical Objects), and relevant noise, as introduced by Bacigalupi (“Semiogenesis: A Dynamic System Approach to Agency and Structure”). To refine the concepts of virtuality and relevant noise for our purposes, a rigorous theoretical model will be proposed whose intent is to explain veritable unbounded creativity. This model will then serve as a heuristic lens to explore additional extant models, such as the Kuramoto model (Strogatz), that are used to explain empirical observations of adaptive and creative behaviors in a diversity of biological phenomena. Based on these models of biological creativity and the critique of the contemporary cybernetic project, this paper will conclude by outlining the ethical implications of our culture’s current commitments to a cybernetic world view and how we might evolve beyond it.

This paper will develop the concept of semiogenesis – a process of novel sign generation – and how instances of this process, such as agency, relate to their built environment and beyond. Section two will build on Hoffmeyer’s discussion of swarms, specifically the idea of overlapping swarms and its manifestation in the creation of termite mounds, in order to introduce three types of structure. Building upon this real-world example explored in section two, the third section will present a heuristic for semiogenesis: a neuromorphic dynamic system model grounded in information and thermodynamic theory. Through the lens of this heuristic model, the penultimate section will more rigorously characterize the similarities and differences between termite and human agency in their respective built milieus.