Third culture: cybersemiotic’s inclusion of a biosemiotic theory of mind

Abstract

The necessity of a third culture to find new cultural synergy between the two incompatible cultures of science and technology on one hand and humanities and social sciences on the other hand is stronger than ever in the globalized world. Today, complexity science with cybernetic, cognitive information science informed by general systems theory on one hand and one the other biosemiotics, informed by Peirce’s pragmaticistic philosophy on the other seem to be the two most obvious candidates to make the new transdisciplinary framework. The informational paradigm cannot make its philosophical framework encompass signification and first person experience and many researchers are instead trying to eliminate these aspects as having no causal influence on reality. A way out seem to use the still more advanced interpretations of C. S. Peirce’s semiotic philosophy in the form of biosemiotics as a foundation and adding the theories of complexity, self-organization, systems evolution, emergence, down ward causation, information, closure, agency and autopoiesis on this new foundation. I call this new framework Cybersemiotics and explore the ontological aspects of it here suggesting five distinct levels of organization making a synergy of scientific, semiotic, evolutionary, system theoretical and cybernetic concepts.