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 fo wood.