A systems view of biological health

Section 2: Theory

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I'll attempt to describe the disciplines of Biosemiotics / Ecosemiotics (the study of how Life communucates meaningfully with itself) in a few short paragraphs... [1]

Life communicates through signs.

Our culture has become extremely loud and direct. The three main reasons being:

• Many people and “interests” are competing with each other for the attention of everyone else - so the world is full of road signs, adverts, big bold headlines in red and black, emails, texts, pop-up notifications, loud phone ring tones and smoke/fire alarms, and so on.
• Most people (those whose senses are not hyper-aroused) have some degree of inherent numbness, partly due to the overloaded information-loudness we are surrounded by, and partly because of endemic numbness / loss of embodiment (dissociation) - the main topic of this book.
• There is a vast amount of extraneous noise and things of little import that nevertheless demand attention - that has to be shouted over the top of.

However, the main means of communication in Living systems is both subtle and indirect. The natural expression of Amicity is an interest in signs rather than direct communiucations. If a cell metabolises in a certain way, that changes its cytoskeletal rigidity, its membrane activity, its demand for nutrients and its excretions, its excitability, its responsiveness, its generation of biophotons and infra-red radiation, its internal (and therefore) external electrical charge distribution, and so on. So it has no need to expend energy or attention on creating communication - simply because the byproducts of its very act of Living communicates meaning. Each other cell implicitly understands what these signs are mainly because it makes them itself - or it understand what the cascade of feedback-response is when it responds to the signs it is perceiving.

In this way, Life inter-relates, and meaning is inferred via the signs that are everywhere in the Living environmemnt. One simply has to Live, to recognise other Life, to be open to an awareness of whatever your senses might convey, and to know instinctively that responsive interaction to these signs of Life will on the whole (imperfectly, but nevertheless, reliably) generate symbiotic associations or provide you with whatever you need, or keep you from harms way.

Human equivalent interactions are the flurry of subtle body-language that happens far faster than cognitive processes can interrupt. So you know the general feeling of the street that you are walking in through the body-usage - the gait, the use of head-turning and other qualities of movement - of all the other people.

Given this Amicable interest in such subtleties, our organism tends to filter out information that is higher amplitude - as meaningless noise - so organic information is NOT linearly “dose-dependent”. Rather, we are generally (biologically, subconsciously) affected more by information on a relatively subtle band (becoming more subtle if our aerials are out due to expectation of possible undetected meaning) [2], and we also obviously take notice of the higher-amplitide messages, but only because they mataphorically (or otherwise) beat our sensory systems round the head with a heavy piece of wood.

Meaning is a negative (within a context)!!

This goes all the way back to the Structuralism (of language) by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). If I name an Orange, it creates a definition by implying what it is not - i.e. everything that is NOT this colour, this skin texture, size, shape, etc - is NOT an orange. So we are constantly comparing differences to determine meaning. Therefore, something with no context is meaning-less.

There are very real implications for biology here. Firstly, most control through all means of communication (including neuological) is carried out through inhibition - seen most clearly in the control of muscles. Therefore living systems must of necessity be inherently active and oscillatory/polarised around neutral but non-passive state - so that the inhibition has something to work with. When providing new information we are not “making something happen” - but rather are perturbing an intelligent system that is both self-normalising and adaptive. Secondly, (as stated by Pask in his Conversation Theory) meaning must include contextual information. So the basis for all of the exercises described in this book can be distilled to defining a context. The context determnines the normality around which the systemic adaptations rotate.

The Innate nature of Semiotics

Somehow, the ability of foetuses and babies to communicate and make sense of the world seems to be constantly proven and constantly forgotten. [3] I believe the fact is too painful to take in because of the many ways that communication and information in early life was so malformed for most humans in Western society. Colwyn Trevarthen (1931–2024) was probably the first academic to observe and report that babies come into the world fully capable of sharing intersubjective experiences with thei rmothers through body language (mainly hand gesture), eye contact and vocal information - adding vocal musicality from 4 months. And equipped with the tools to learn cultural norms of intersubjective communication - both somatic (body language) and cultural (e.g. jokes). And it's certain that babies respond positively to kind supportive conversations that their mothers have with them whilst in the womb [4] (the opposite also being true). I'm sure none of this is specific to humans, and the pigeons in the trees outside my home sing to their chicks while they are still in the egg.