Liqian Zhou

Interoception——the perception of internal bodily states such as heartbeat, respiration, and visceral feelings——has long been considered a natural, closed, and pre-reflective dimension of conscious experience. Wearable sensors, biofeedback algorithms, and continuous physiological monitoring are now turning the inner body into a digitally accessible and modifiable object. This article proposes Cyberinteroception as a subdiscipline within the Cyberism framework and argues that digital technologies do not merely measure interoception but re-constitute it by externalising, amplifying, and re-routing internal signals. Three theoretical propositions are advanced and linked to core issues in consciousness research: the Distalisation Thesis (how digital readouts reshape metacognitive access to interoceptive states), the Augmented Regulation Thesis (whether digital feedback loops constitute genuinely new forms of conscious emotional self-regulation), and the Body-Ownership Plasticity Thesis (how artificial interoceptive signals can reshape the minimal self). I conclude that interoception is becoming technically programmable, a development that invites systematic re-examination of bodily self-consciousness in the digital age.

Biosemiotics and code biology are two promising approaches to understanding biological phenomena as meaningful. Biosemiotics proposes that a defining characteristic of life is code-duality, while code biology asserts that the nature of life lies in its code. However, they separated due to differences in their understanding of cellular-level interpretation, as well as related epistemological and methodological concerns. The split between the two was a great loss for biosemiotics. Meanwhile, code biology faces a conceptual dilemma when explaining the source of the normativity of organic codes without biosemiotics. The critiques of biosemiotics made by code biologists are reasonable and deserve serious concern. Based on Terrence Deacon’s thought experiment of autogenesis and his explanation of interpretation, the paper proposes the conception of operational interpretation to reconcile biosemiotics with code biology.

How semiotic freedom emerges in the evolution and development of organisms through semiotic scaffolding is a core problem for biosemiotics. There is a paradox in explaining this semiotic emergence: reduction in (semiotic) freedom leads to the creation of new semiotic freedom. Semiotic emergence is a species of dynamic emergence. Accordingly, the paradox of semiotic emergence is a species of the paradox of dynamic emergence. The latter paradox claims that reducing lower-level freedom generates new freedom at a higher level. The solution to the paradox lies in clarifying the ambiguity in the term freedom. The conceptual inconsistency in the paradox comes from confusing two types of freedom. One type of freedom means the possibility a system could have, while the other refers to the capacity of a system to access a specific (range of) state(s). There is an inverse relation between the two types of freedom. With the clarification, the conceptual inconsistency is explained away. This understanding of semiotic emergence may help us further understand core ideas in biosemiotics and provide a conceptual foundation for empirical studies of biosemiotics.

This article provides a comprehensive conceptual analysis of information. It begins with a folk notion that information is a tripartite phenomenon: information is something carried by signals about something for some use. This suggests that information has three main aspects: structural, referential, and normative. I analyze the individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for defining these aspects of information and consider formal theories relating to each aspect as well. The analysis reveals that structural, referential, and normative aspects of information are hierarchically nested and that the normative depends on the referential, which in turn depends on the structural.

The chapter first formulates the problems of information and analyzes why they are hard to solve. Then it critically reviews two classes of prevailing theories in information studies arguing that they cannot attain success because the assumptions behind them are too limited. In recent years, some semioticians have rediscovered the theory of information developed by Peirce. Deeply embodied in semiotics, the theory treats information as the communication of form in semiosis, which should be interpreted in terms of triadic relation in the semiotic relational process between representamen, object and interpretant. As a contemporary development of Peircean theory, cybersemiotics further constructs a conceptual framework through integrating it with Luhmann’s social system theory. In particular, the transdisciplinary framework cybersemiotics shows a promising way to explain superficially incompatible aspects of information with the aid of the principle of complementarity.

The principle of complementarity in physics can be generalized and extended to information studies. It helps explain the dilemma faced by information studies today. The prevailing endeavor that going beyond the limitation of formal theories and to develop a unified theory of information falls in the dilemma which is structurally homologous to the dilemmas in quantum physics. The dilemma is caused by an epistemological paradox called assignment paradox. The paradox can be removed through generalized complementarity. It means that the concept of information embodying in different theoretical contexts are different phenomenon. They are complementary to each other. The analysis brings bad news to methodologically reductionism and fundamentalism but good news to transdisciplinary approach.