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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:
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.
We life in a fantasy world - a world of of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Iris Murdoch
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. An interesting recent example of signs (that is directly analogous to the way Nature works) is tiny mechanical / vibrational streses on fibreoptic network cables - which produce noise in the telecomms system. However, this noise carries information about the mechanical stress - and is likely to be a major future means to detect all kinds of local, regional and events including earthquakes. [3]. So (e.g.) adjacent organs and tissues in the body respond to each other meaningfully even if they have no direct neurological or apparent functional link. Similarly, electrical charge has been known for some time [4]. So (e.g.) adjacent organs and tissues in the body respond to each other meaningfully even if they have no direct neurological to use electrical charge for very significant processes such as bone stress fracture repair and (more recent research) group coordination and decision-making in adjacent cells [5]. So (e.g.) adjacent organs and tissues in the body respond to each other meaningfully even if they have no direct neurological
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.
References & Notes