Hoffmeyer, Jesper 2008. Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs. Edited by Donald Favareau. Scranton; London: University of Scranton Press. [Ch. 6. "The Semiotic Niche", pp. 169-211]
Since the chapter is very long, I'll parcel it with subheadings, which I usually don't do with mere chapters.
Zoosemiotics
"Images on the retina are not eatable or dangerous. What the eye of a higher animal provides is a tool by which, aided by a memory, the animal can learn the symbolic significance of events" (Sebeok 1979: 266). This observation, one that Thomas A. Sebeok ascribes to the ethologist John Z. Young, his the nerve of the zoosemiotic conception that Sebeok launched as early as 1963 (see Sebeok 1963; 1972; Sebeok ed. 1977). Sebeok goes on to say hat "Cephalopod brains may not be able to elaborate complex programs - i.e., strings of signs, or what Young calls mnemons - such as guide our future feelings, thoughts, and actions, but they can symbolize at least simple operations crucial for their survival, such as appropriate increase or decrease in distance between them and environmental stimulus sources" (Sebeok 1979: 43). (Hoffmeyer 2008: 169)
The symbolic significance of events is evidently simpler than "complex programs". Increasing or decreasing distance between an organism and a stimulis amounts to a "tropistic" orientation: "It is this fact of the orientation of organisms towards objects outside of themselves that leads us to find significance in 'topistic' responses, at the lowest biological level" (Latif 1934: 59). Feelings, actions, and thoughts constitute the well-known (almost Peircean) triad.
That beauty is in the eye of the beholder is a truth that cannot be repeated too often. Actually, as we now know, it is the brain rather than the eye that does the seeing for us. Don Favareau (2002: 10-11) has stated it this way:Significantly, recent research in the neurobiology of vision, especially the ground-breaking work of Semir Zeki (1993; 1999) demonstrate conclusively that sensory percepts such as visual images are not to so much "received" from incoming photon impulses as they are semiotically and co-constructively "built" across heterogeneous and massively intercommunicating brain areas. Thus we find that sensory signification per se is intimately bound up with motoric processes of bodily and environmental interaction in an ongoing process of semiosis that cus across the sub-systemic distinctions of brain, body and world.What beauty exactly a cephalopod is seeing is of course unknowable, but whatever it may be, it hardly bears much resemblance to anything we would see in the same situation. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 169)
"Beauty" here stands, effectively, for the Merkwelt - butyric acid is "beautiful" for the tick, for example. Already there's an Uexküllian orientation towards the many different worlds the different organisms inhabit. Beauty being in the eye or brain of the beholder is a roundabout way of arriving at the same point.
However, the cephalopod certainly sees something and this something very probably is precisely the thing it needs to see. Conceivably, one might object that the cephalopod doesn't really know what it sees, and that it just reacts to what appears in its field of vision, nor having the faintest idea of what it is about to do. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 169)
The point here being, evidently, that what any given organism sees is limited - conditioned by its constitution. The cephalopod sees what it wants to see - or what its evolutionary history has made it significant for it to see. And, of course, the cephalopod is denied even "the faintest idea" - the realm of ideas belongs exclusively to humans, donyerknow?
But since our knowledge of what it means to know, neurobiologically speaking, is rather limited, such an [|] objection likewise carries limited weight. Conscious knowledge is, for all we know, the privilege of a few big-brained animals, but most knowledge is probably unconscious, like the many routines one performs without paying attention to them. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 169-170)
What amounts to the same thing: only the "big-brained animals" are conscious (of knowledge - so, perhaps, capable of metacognition?). At the same time, most knowledge is probably unconscious. Biosemiotics appears to take Aristotle very seriously on his account of the three orders of life, whereas the Pythagorean interpretation, which is also evident when Nicomachean Ethics is read more closely, is that "the souls of animals are indeed rational in themselves, but are incapable, on account of their bodies, of acting rationally" (Plutarch, in Zeller 1881: 484, fn2). That is, animals, even small-brained ones, may indeed have ideas but are incapable of communicating them to us or perhaps even amongst themselves.
The phenomenon of blindsight, for example, offers some surprising insights into the hidden reserves of knowledge that we all apparenly carry around in our minded bodies. Blindsight may be observed in patients that have damaged their primary visual center so that they have lost access to a part of their visual field. If they are asked whether or not they can see an object placed in the blind area, their answer is, of course, no. And yet, if such paients are asked to guess where an object that they report they cannot see is placed, they may often point very accurately to is position. The explanation for his phenomenon is thought to be that visual impulses are divided into several parallel pathways on their way from retina to the brain, and some of these do not lead to the visual cortex but end up elsewhere in the brain. Here they obviously cannot produce conscious visual experiences, but the codified informaion is nevertheless still accessible to the analytic machinery of the brain. So, the patients see without seeing. Their vision is not accompanied by an experience of seeing - nevertheless they do, to some extent, know what their eyes tell them. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 170)
Something similar was noted with an externalistic explanation in split-brain patients: "It was then noticed that when, say, a circle was placed in the left hand, the patient would begin to look around the room and pick out some circular object, perhaps a clock, and would then move his head in a circle. The left hemisphere, given the clue by the movement, would then give the right answer 'Circle' and it was by the use of this technique that patients succeeded in scoring a high number of correct responses" (Fry 1977: 130-131). Not sure what this exposition on blindsight is supposed to achieve except that the brain is exceedingly complex. Context indicates, that this should serve as an illustration of unconscious knowledge.
Compared to worms, the cephalopods have impressively well-developed brains. The octopus may have as many as 168 million nerve cells, half of them in the visual cortex, and is capable of at least limited associative forms of learning. Judged on this background, it may perhaps be permissible to say that the octopus does indeed see. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 170)
This appears to imply that humans (and possibly other big-brained animals) have more-than associative forms of learning - perhaps, given our privileged position, we can count Revelation as a source of knowledge, as Chase (1863; 464)) posits, whereas all other creatures are godless and must rest on mere association of ideas.
Umwelt Theory
Early in the twentieth century, the Estonian-born German biologist Jakob von Uexküll saw, long before anybody else, that a biology that would be true to its subject matter would have to direct its searchlight explicitly on the perceptual worlds of organisms, their Umwelts as he called them. The Umwelt, as Uexküll used the term, is the subjective or phenomenal world of the animal. The way Uexküll saw it, animals spend their lives locked up, so to speak, inside their own subjective worlds, each in its own Umwelt. Thus, while modern biology employs the objective term ecological niche (that is to say, the set of conditions - in the form of living space, food, temperature, etc. - under which a given species lives), one might say that the Umwelt is the ecological niche as the animal itself apprehends it. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 171)
Umwelt = (subjective) perceptual world. There are other designations, e.g. "the subjective experiential world of an organism" (Kull, Emmeche & Favareau 2008: 44). Perhaps I'll have to collect these variations. Even between these two, there's a qualitative difference: experience is a broader category than mere perception. That organisms are "locked up" in their Umwelten is reminiscent, of course, of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In any case, the important point here is that in this instance, somewhat enigmatically, there is as if a simple equivalence sign placed between these concepts: Umwelt = the ecological niche from the organism's internal (subjective) position. Thus, metaphorically, the ecological niche itself, determined by the scientific observer, is the etic ecological niche, whereas the Umwelt is the emic ecological niche.
In Bedeutungslehre (The Theory of Meaning), published in 1940, Uexküll writes, "If we stand before a meadow covered with flowers, full of buzzing bees, fluttering butterflies, darting dragonflies, grasshoppers jumping over blades of grass, mice scurrying and snails crawling about, we would instinctively tend to ask ourselves the question: Does the meadow present the same prospect to the eyes of all those different creatures as it does o ours?" (Uexküll 1982[1940]: 45). And to illustrate why the answer to this question is no, he uses the example of a meadow flower:[|] Each of these acts, he says, "imprints its meaning on the meaningless object, thereby turning it into a conveyor of meaning in each respective Umwelt" (ibid., 131). (Hoffmeyer 2008: 171-172)
- A little girl picks the flower and turns it into a decorative object in her Umwelt;
- An ant climbs up its stalk to reach the petals and turns the flower into a natural ladder in its Umwelt;
- A larva of the spittlebug bores is way into the stalk to obtain the material for building its "frothy home," thus turning the flower into building material in its Umwelt; and
- A cow simply chews up the flower and turns it into fodder in its Umwelt.
The "prospect to the eyes" betrays an anthropocentric vision - it is the little girl's experience of the meadow flower that is primarily visual. For the ant and the spittlebug the flower is instrumental (either as a tool or place of habituation). And for the cow it is food. Indeed, more interesting examples could be summoned with particular plants. The Encyclopedia is full of notices that primarily consider the interests of humans and cattle - what humans use a certain plant for (medicine, paint, etc.), and whether it is suitable as feed for horses, cows, lambs, pigs, etc. (200 years ago people were evidently held keen account of which animal is fond of which weeds.)
The species-specific Umwelt of the animal, the model it makes of its immediate surroundings, is for Uexküll the very point of departure for a biological analysis. As the two parts in a duet must be composed in harmony (tone for tone, bar for bar), thus, he says, the organism and its Umwelt must also be composed in a contrapuntal harmony with those objects that enter the animal's life as meaning-carriers (ibid., 68). It is this idea of contrapuntal harmony that lets Uexküll call the flower beelike and the bee flowerlike, or the spider flylike, and the tick mammallike. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 172)
This here raises the question: if it is "species-specific", then why is it the model of its immediate surroundings belonging to a single animal? Shouldn't it be the world-model of the animal species? It implies, in effect, that all specimens of a given species have the same model, or at least are capable of producing similar models. As to contrapuntal harmony - after my recent readings on Pythagoreanism, this hits different. Harmony is, elementally, the same thing as octave, i.e. the relationship of 2:1, as in 220hz and 440hz (cf. Zeller 1881: 460-463). The contrapuntal harmony Uexküll had in mind, on the other hand, amounts to complementary melodies, where specific notes do manifest the octave, but the point is in there being harmony between strings of signs (to borrow verbiage from above). The flower's bee-likeness and the bee's flower-likeness, etc. still sounds like the ancient alchemical notion of sympathy (I don't yet have good quotes on the Pythagorean "like attracts like" topic).
[...] whereas Driesch, in his attempts to capture the essence of the life-world, returned to the Aristotelian concep of entelechy, Uexküll used the much more commonsensical word plan (Kull 1999d). Now, there can be no doubt that the Uexküllian conception of evolution as a sort of overarching regularity (Planmässigkeit) or composition of a big symphony, goes against the ontological intuitions of most modern biologists, who see chance mutations as the ultimate source creativity in the organic world. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 172)
Calls to mind Clay's orderly concurrence of aptitudes, which is just a psychological approximation of Leibniz's pre-established harmony, which in turn is an extension of Pythagorean cosmic/numerical harmony. The point evidently being that chance mutation is not the only or even the primary catalyst to evolution. Going with the musical metaphor, a musician's finger may slip and s/he may play the wrong note for an instance, but the rest of the band keeps going and self-correcting, the erring musician returns to the correct notes. In this scheme, the slip has to become significant somehow for it to enter the "plan". If it's an indie band instead of an orchestra playing centuries old pieces, it one of the bandmates may decide that the slip sounded good and incorporate it into the song.
Rather, Uexküll's Planmässigkeit may be understood in its purely local and situated context:The semiotics of corporeal life in any creature - ourselves included - does take part in the dance of ecosemiotic motifs, the local Planmässigkeit, which has been framing the evolutionary processes and has formed the particular form of the Umwelt of each species. The Umwelt must serve to guide the animal's activity in the semiotic niche, i.e., the world of cues around the animal (or species) which the animal must necessarily interpret wisely in order to enjoy life. The semiosphere, as I use the term, i.e., the totality of actual or poential cues in the world, is thus to be understood as an externalistic counterpart to the totality of Umwelts. Together they form, in the term of Jakob von Uexküll, an unending set of "contrapuntal duets" (Hoffmeyer 2006: 94).I shall not delve further into the details of Uexküll's ontological positions but simply conclude that, whether the deeper presuppositions that nourished the works of Uexküll are deemed acceptable to a modern scientific sensitivity or not, his Umwelt theory was, in any case, a milestone on the way to the establishment of a biosemiotic understanding of nature. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 173)
Identifying the totality of actual or potential cues in the world with the semiosphere in my opinion makes it a static concept. As if the semiosphere were merely the store-house of cues. The library. Whereas the Lotmanian semiosphere is the totality of semiotic structures and processes. It is fairly difficult to make out here the exact relations between these terms. The "local Planmässigkeit" forms the species-specific Umwelten. The Umwelt in turn guides the individual animal in its semiotic niche - "the world of cues around the animal (or species)" - here the parenthesis indicates the issue I pointed out above: the Umwelt of a single animal is? the same as the Umwelt of its species. If so, then how are Umwelt and semiotic niche different concepts?
For a characteristic concept in the work of Uexküll is the word hinausverlegen - a word that I, in agreement with Thure von Uexküll (Jakob's son), will translate as "projected to the outside" (Uexküll 1982). What is projected to the outside is precisely the Umwelt:No matter what kind of quality it may be, all perceptual signs have always the form of a command or impulse [...] If I claim that the sky is blue, I am doing so because the perceptual signs projected by myself give the command to the farthest level: [|] Be blue! [...] The sensations of the mind become, during the construction of our worlds, the qualities of the objects, or, as we can put it in other words, the subjective qualities are building up the objective world. If we, instead of sensation or subjective quality, say perceptual sign, we can also say: the perceptual signs of our attention become the perceptual cues (properties) of the world (Uexküll 1973; quoted in Uexküll 1982[1940]: 14-15).Animals unconditionally and throughout their lifetimes conjure up internal models of the outer reality that they have to cope with. And these virtual realities apparently may sometimes entail an interactive aspect, too, since it is known that almost all vertebrate animals do on occasion dream. The Umwelt theory of Jakob von Uexküll is presumably the first serious effort ever made to subject virtual reality to scientific investigation (Hoffmeyer 2001c). (Hoffmeyer 2008: 173-174)
This I would call collapsing Firstness and Secondness for other species. We've already as-if collapsed their Thirdness and allowed them only some measure of associative learning. Here the idea seems to be that animals don't even perceive things that are unactionable. In effect, this denies aesthetic enjoyment to animals. A wolf and a bear sitting together in the bog, enjoying the sunset? Nah, they're, umm... constructing a plan, what to do next, taking the setting sun as a cue that their prey will soon come out of their nests or something. I'm not even absolutely against this collapse - there's an analogue with the concept of the phatic image, the image that commands attention effectively and makes you look whether you want to or not (e.g. advertisement, propaganda posters, etc.). There may very well be a good point in this. From my quasi-Peircean viewpoint it just looks like putting the cart before the horse: so-called action-signs must necessarily include, or generate from, perception-signs. To say that all perceptual signs have an inherent actionability in them is to deny the animal subjects either pure perception as such, or free will (if not both).
Umwelt theory does not, of course, represent an atavistic revival of animism in biology. Quite to the contrary, one might say that modern science, in its obsessional rejection of animism has itself maintained a strange trace of that which it rejects, in that in is very fear of spiritualism, science has closed itself off from vast areas of the world which most of us would take to be very real even if objectively immaterial in some modest sense of this term. Or to state this differently (and using these terms as science understands them), materialist science spirit-ualizes and, consequently, denies that area of lived experience that is the virtual reality of all animal perception. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 175)
A familiar fear. As the title of this blog may indicate, I approach spiritualism and religiosity with ridicule. Nevertheless, I do not deny mystic experience and do not scoff (at least as not as loudly as I did before) at the concept of soul. Even if completely imaginary, it has its merits as a concept. We today would not, of course, deny animals consciousness as they long ago did, and don't consider consciousness a "spiritual" concept.
Self-Organization, Semiosis, and Experience
Juarrero's scenario for the formation of complex adaptive systems a capable of intentional and meaningful action is an impressive tour de force and is, in any case, a decisive contribution to the understanding of the philosophy of self-organization. Nonetheless, her analyses omit the semiotic aspect of selfhood as one of its concerns. It therefore remains unexplained how the element of first-person perspective that necessarily clings to intentionality - i.e., the fact that intentionality always presupposes an intentional subject - might possibly have appeared out of sheer complexiy. How, in other words, could a self-organizing system that - in principle at least - might be described algorithmically in terms of sequences of ones and zeroes ends up with intentionality in the first-person sense of this term? (Hoffmeyer 2008: 178)
I'm not seeing how exactly the question of intentionality is semiotic here.
Traditionally the argument has been that the reason why evolution - though based on a continuous stream of chance events - can nevertheless create strange phenomena such as people, is that we, in the words of Eugene Yates (1998: 447),are the result of a random variation blocked at the statistical "left wall" of simple organisms, by the fact of their minimal complexity. The thus-constrained drift through chance must be toward the right (increased complexity), but it has no special outcome or elaboration. By a concatenation of accidents encountered [|] and avoided, we are here, along with Venus flytraps, humming birds, and crocodiles. But the modal (most frequent, widely distribued, and most totally massive) forms of life are the bacteria.I concur with this argument as far as the appearance of complex organisms is concerned. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 178-179)
The median organism is bacterium.
But this kind of explanation fails to take seriously the fact that we are not just complex material aggregates, but also subjects. Every person is genuinely an "I" phenomenon, whereas complexity in principle can be exhaustively described as an "it" phenomenon. How "it"-s can possibly become "I"-s is the puzzle that must be explained - and not even dynamic systems theory does yet offer a solution to this puzzle. What is missing, I would argue, is the admission of a semiotic dimension of explanation. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 179)
We are not merely what but who. This subjective experience, I may already guess, is semiotic.
When we are often bothered (or offended in our scientific taste) by the badly hidden anthropomorphisms in Uexküll's writings, it is because it is maintained through his whole work that animals are much more like us than science has so far been willing to accept. And this is exactly because the animals have an Umwelt, an internal model of the relevant parts of their environment (i.e., those parts of the environment that are relevant for them), and that this model has to be included in any fully explanatory analysis of their life. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 179)
This "an internal model of the relevant parts of their environment" is another good approximation of the Umwelt. I suspect there are many others like it even within this chapter, not to mention the whole book.
We need to take care to express things correctly here, and it may be a problem that language simply does not readily provide us with the appropriately subtle words. A tick waiting for butyric acid to reach its sense organs hardly has any experiences (as this term is normally understood). In fact, my guess would be that it is about as interactive as a computer in standby position. But in the moment its receptors catch the signal butyric acid in intensities that exceeds the lower threshold value, a reflex-like movement occurs in it, immediately causing it to drop down upon (what turns out to be) its prey below). Now, even in this very split second, the state of the tick probably does not rise to the level of what we might call an experience, but here one might perhaps imagine the presence of some glimpse-like state of feeling - a let go impulse. On one level, of course, it is pointless to discuss unanswerable questions such as this. I do mention it here, however, because the question of the evolutionary history of experiential existence has huge theoretical implications, and raises the natural-science question: What might be the function of an experiental world? In other words, what good is the having of experiences in a biological sense? (Hoffmeyer 2008: 179)
Indeed, "experience" might not be the correct term here. On the other hand, attempts to reform such language (e.g. E. R. Clay's as one of the earliest comes to mind) have been negligible in their effects.
Since we are bodily creatures bound to operate by and in a world of space and time, the simplest - or safest - way to organize our calculatory imagination, also is also in time and space, or in other words iconically. Our muscles are not preprogrammed to their functions, but are calibrated in the course of our ongoing interactive life processes, and our muscles and our experienced worlds are tightly reciprocally calibrated. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 180)
The subtle and complex world of action-potentials.
Then what about an animal whose nervous system is not sophisticated enough to produce such higher-order interpretants in the form of analog-coded models? The need for some primitive version of a holistic marker is probably present in all forms of life, and I imagine a graded series of such markers that in the lowest end consists in the patterns of attraction and repulsion characteristic to chemotactic behavior in bacteria. In other words, I suggest that the phenomenon of experience has primitive parallels all over the life world. Uexküll distinguished sharply between plants and animals. Only the former had nervous systems and, therefore, Umwelts. Plants instead possessed what he called a wohnhülle - a cover of live cells by which they select their stimuli. Like Anderson et al. (1984), I shall prefer to use Umwelt as a common concept for the phenomenal worlds of organisms, of whatever kind these might be. Although plants, fungi, and protists do not posses nervous systems, they do have receptors to guide their activities, and they all, in our view, possess some kind of semiotic freedom, however limited it might be. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 181)
Very interesting stuff. We know even less about how plants "experience" the world than we know about animals. This subject is particularly interesting because there are those who believe that plants can see (hence the change in leaf coloration during fall), and communicate with each other via electrical signals through the roots.
The Semiotic Niche
But even though science might not need to concern itself with examining the inner side of subjectivity, it may and should be concerned with examining the external side of subjectivity, such as the question of how the possession of subjectivity affects the living systems under study. It is not the task of biology to say what animal experiences are like (considered as experiences), but it is the task of biology to deal with the fact that at least some animals have experiences, and to study how this affects their livelihood. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 183)
In other words, science has to grapple with the consequences of experience.
The most obvious way biology could do this is by directing more attention to what I have previously referred to as the semiotic niche (Hoffmeyer 1996b). For the niche concept has a long ancestry in ecology. In 1917, Joseph Grinnell defined the niche as the totality as places where organisms of a given species might live. Ten years later, Charles Elton gave the concept a functional turn - seeing the niche as a description of the ecological role of the species, its way of life, so to say. The resulting duplicity in the understanding of the concept of niche has clung to it to this day: On the one side, the niche is a kind of address (Grinnell) on the other hand it is a profession (Elton). (Hoffmeyer 2008: 183)
What I'd like to know is how the concept of niche differs from Aristotle's concept of diet, which has become part of our common sense terminology but which originally, as I understand it, stood for something very similar to what is intended with the ecological niche (i.e. what and whom a species eats, and who its it, etc.). One aspect that immediately springs to mind is that niche includes more than nutrition, e.g. "places where [they] live".
In 1957, G. Evelyn Hutchinson gave the niche concept its modern definition, namely as an imaginary n-dimensional hypervolume, whose axes would indicate the multiple ecological factors of significance for the welfare of the species (Hutchinson 1957). Thus, the niche of a plant might include the range of temperatures that it can tolerate, the intensity of light required for its photosynthesis, its specific humidity regimes, and the minimum quantities of essential soil nutrients needed for its survival. Hutchinson also in this context introduced the distinction between an organism's fundamental niche and its realized niche. The fundamental niche of a species includes the total range of environmental conditions that are suitable for existence without the influence of interspecific competition or predation from other species. The realized niche describes that part of the fundamental niche actually occupied by the species. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 183)
Some of the same factors apply on animals, too - cf. e.g. polar-bears moving south with climate change. The fundamental/realized corresponds roughly with substance/accident and virtual/actual.
In the Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior, the following more down-to-earth explanation is offered: "Animals are commonly referred to in terms of their feeding habits; terms such as carnivore, herbivore, and insectivore being widely used. The concept of niche is simply an extension of this idea. For instance, there is the niche which is filled by birds of prey which eat small mammals, such as shrews (Soricidea) and wood and field mice (Apodemus). (Hoffmeyer 2008: 183)
Some support for the diet substratum hypothesis, though this piece of trivia comes from a translator's note on Nicomachean Ethics, and unable to rediscover it after the fact, it is not out of the question that I hallucinated it.
Traditionally, it has been assumed that natural selection would favour those individuals inside the competing populations that evade competition by entering into a partnership of reciprocal specialization in the choice of resources, what is called the strategy of resource partitioning. The result of resource partitioning is that niche overlap between different species is minimized. In tropical forests in South and Central America, for example, several hundreds of species of birds, monkeys, and bats all eat fruit as their primary food source - but the enormous diversity of available fruits there has allowed all of these species to specialize such that the overlap between their diets has become very slight. Similarly, in a now classic study, Robert MacArthur found that five species of singer birds with nearly identical niches self-segregated in a surprising way. Not only did they each seek food in different zones of the fir, they also ate insects in different combinations and timed their nest building differently. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 184)
Stuff familiar from the lectures, especially this self-segregation. Even in evident competition, nature can find a way for species to cooperate.
Since Hutchinson's niche concept is n-dimensional, it is in principle wide enough to also embrace the semiotic dimensions of an organism's need for a living place. It is plain, nevertheless, that the niche concept - as currently used in ecology - is grounded in a de-semiotized understanding of the interplay between organisms in nature. Behavioral ecology may well have become a fashionable part of ecology, but the methodology of this approach is based upon a selectionist frame of understanding that leaves no space open for a semiotic perspective. It is therefore necessary to introduce a special concept to cover the semiotic dimension of the niche concept, and my suggestion of the term semiotic niche was intended to do precisely this. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 184)
The reasoning for coining the term. Sadly, the point of it seems to have been missed, seeing as the term does not show up in empirical studies very often. A decade ago when one of my course-mates wrote her thesis about the concept I formed an erroneous impression that it is exceedingly fruitful; come to find out that it is more like a theoretical curio.
The idea behind the concept of the semiotic niche was to construct a term that would embrace the totality of signs or cues in the surroundings of an organism - signs that it must be able to meaningfully interpret to ensure its survival and welfare. The semiotic niche includes all of the traditional ecological niche factors, but now the semiotic dimension of these factors is also strongly emphasized. The organism must distinguish relevant from irrelevant food items and threats, for example, and it must identify the necessary markers of the biotic and abiotic resources it needs: water, shelter, nest-building materials, mating partners, etc. The semiotic niche thus comprises all the interpretive challenges that the ecological niche forces upon a species. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 185)
More on the semiotic niche expanding the concept of ecological niche so as to include semiotic factors previously not considered and the semiotic aspects of already well-known factors.
The semiotic niche in this way may be seen as an externalistic counterpart to the Umwelt concept. It makes the Umwelt concept easier to handle in an evolutionary context, since now one may pose the question of whether the Umwelt of a species is up to the challenges posed by the available semiotic-niche conditions. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 185)
In my presentation I put special emphasis on this because it enabled me to draw a scheme in which the "Umwelt" is inside the organism, and the "semiotic niche" is its imaginary (since Hoffmeyer himself uses this word above it should not be an embarrassment for the concept) external counterpart. The available semiotic-niche conditions may be imagined to stand between the fundamental and the realized niche.
Semiotic Freedom
Be this as it may, what interests us here is the question of whether the space of morphological possibilities for constructing animals (which apparently filled up at this time) would have simultaneously caused a filling up of the possibility space at the level of ecological niches. Were the fundamental ecological roles already established several hundred million years ago, and has evolution since then mostly been concerned merely with the finer adjustments of these basic settings? (As, for instance, when marsupials spread into many of the niches left open by the extinction of the dinosaurs only to find themselves replaced later, for the most part, by placental mammals.) (Hoffmeyer 2008: 186)
The Cambrian explosion produced "the approximately thirty-five fundamentally different ways (i.e., basic body plans) to be an efficient big animal" (ibid, 186), and the question here is, if these exhausted the possibilities and fine-tuned it to the maximum, or if there are yet some vistas not covered. Hoffmayer poses this as a rhetorical question; "The answer that I propose to this question is no" (ibid, 186) because of semiotic freedom.
Semiotic freedom was defined as "the depth of meaning that an individual or species is capable of communicating" (ibid., 109). The use of the word depth in this connection is related to Charles Bennet's concept of logical depth - his attempt to supply the concept of information with a measure for [|] the meaningfulness or complexity of the information, qualified as the number of calculatory steps spent upon producing it. I have no illusions as to the possibility of transferring this kind of calculation from the world of computers to the reality of nature, but intuitively it seems clear that the meaning of different messages may indeed have different depths. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 186-187)
An interesting idea. With regard to human texts, this would amount to an analogue of Lotman's (rather) convoluted concept of the artistic text. Any given utterance in a natural language is not a cultural text just by the merit of circulating in a culture. Otherwise even phatic utterances ("Have you eaten rice?" uttered millions of times per day in Asia as a greeting) would be cultural texts. The point is double or even triple articulation, and referential complexity - cultural texts are often based on literature, especially grand novels that are perhaps appreciated more than they are read (or appreciated exactly because they are difficult to read). From this perspective, it does indeed take more "calculatory steps" to fully understand an otherwise simple utterance. A recent example is the word "based" - young people use it in an ideologically charged sense but barely anyone knows what it means exactly because this would require on to go through a voluminous discography of an fairyl obscure and controversial rapper, Lil B. A simple utterance, but the depth of meaning behind it is immesurable.
Thus, the saturation degree of nutrient molecules upon bacterial receptors would be a message with a low depth of meaning, whereas the bird that pretends to have a broken wind in an attempt to lure the predator away from its nest might be said to have considerably more depth of meaning. In talking about semiotic freedom rather than semiotic depth, then, I try to avoid being misunderstood to be claiming that semiotic freedom should possess a quantitative measurability; it does not. But it should also be noted that the term refers to an activity that is indeed free in the sense of being underdetermined by the constraints of natural lawfulness. Human speech, for instance, has a very high semiotic freedom in this respect, while the semiotic freedom of a bacterium that chooses to swim away from other bacteria of the same species is of course extremely small. The middle ground between these two extremes is the main arena of biosemiotics. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 187)
Makes sense. Even in human speech there is a variety of semiotic freedom - as the very same "based" illustrates; we can, if we wish, make up words or give already existing words new meanings not found in the dictionary.
Semethic Interaction
The growth in semiotic freedom through evolution is caused by the possession in living systems of an extreme semiogenic capacity, a capacity based on their ability to read omens in the broadest possible sense in this expression - in other [|] words, to take advantage of any regularities they might come upon as signifying vehicles, or signs. And indeed, although the word is not often any longer used this way these days, I must stress at the outset that by the word omen I mean nothing at all mysterious or supernatural. Anything is an omen until we understand its true significance. Thus, whether this reading of omens occurs via genetic adjustments down through generations or occurs as an effect of the cognitive system of an individual organism, is, in this connection, virtually irrelevant. What happens in both cases is the same - seen from the standpoint of semiotics - although the time scales of events are, of course, widely different in the two cases. I have called this pattern of interaction semethic interaction (from the Greek, semeion = sign + ethos = habit) (Hoffmeyer 1994a; 1994b). Whenever a regular behavior or habit of an individual or species is interpreted as a sign by some other individuals (conspecific or alter-specific) and is reacted upon through the release of yet other regular behaviors or habits, we have a case of semethic interaction. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 188-189)
This semethic interaction seems to differ from the customary (Peircean) semiotic habit-formation by its (quasi-)communicative nature: it is the other's habits that are interpreted as significant. That is, habit-identification rather than habit-formation.
The bird that lures the predator away from the nest by pretending it has a broken wing - and then flies away as soon as the predator has been misled a sufficiently long way - is an obvious example of a partner in a game of semethic interaction. And, in fact, at least two cases of semethic interaction are involved here: first, the predator has perceived (genetically or by experience) that clumsy behavior signifies an easy catch. The bird's behavior is therefore (mis)interpreted as a sign for an easy catch. Here we have a very simple semiotic process, where a nearly lawlike (and clearly nonsemiotic) relation (of one certain physical state to another - i.e., clumsiness with vulnerability) serves as a signifying regularity, or sign for the predator (Hoffmeyer 2008a). [↩] The bird, however, takes advantage of a much less safe relation, the relation between the sign and its interpretant. By pretending to have a broken wing, the bird can "count on" (and again, this may or may not be a genetically fixed interpretant) the predator to misjudge the situation. In other words, the success of this strategy counts on a false interpretive act in the predator. That the predator will misinterpret the bird's behavior may be a safe assumption - seen from our view - but it is hardly a lawlike necessity. Clearly the act of pretending in this case has to be well executed. In this way then, semethic-interaction patterns are built upon other semethic-interaction patterns in chains or webs of increasing sophistication. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 189)
Here is where the concept of "semiotic freedom" really strikes out. The concept of semiosis in biosemiotics is opposed to necessity, regularity, lawlikeness. The premium is on choice, underdeterminedness, novelty, creativeness. The predator's instinctive draw towards injured, and thus more easily gained, prey is instinctive, overdetermined; the bird fooling the predator into this instinctive reaction is underdetermined - more so because it may not work, the predator is behaving predictably, the bird unpredictably (Lotman's discussion of the archetypes of the "fool" and the "crazy" come to mind).
Among biochemists, there is a rule of thumb saying that whenever nature keeps a store of energy (e.g., food) there will also always be a species that makes a living on consuming it. I shall suggest a quite similar rule of thumb by saying that there never occurs a regularity or a habit in nature that has not become a sign for some other organism or species. Admittedly, this rule may be less well investigated (so far!) than the biochemical rule, but it does catch an important [|] semiotic aspect of the evolutionary process, and that is this: Due to the mechanism of semethic interactions, the species of this world have become woven into a fine-meshed global web of semiotic relations. And I shall claim, furthermore, that these semiotic relations, more than anything else, are responsible for the ongoing stability of Earth's ecological and biogeographical patterns. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 189-190)
The proper area of the semiotic niche: instead of who can live where and eat what or whom, the question is, who can correctly interpret whose habits to further one's own ends. Crows collecting shiny things, some coins among them, is lawful and thus uninteresting from the semiotic point of view; crows trained by humans to search out, nab and bring to said trainers large-bill paper money on the other hand, is unexpected and semiotically novel - especially if it involves them forming new habits, such as preying on outdoor restaurants and tips left for waiters (now they're doing something they wouldn't otherwise do, a novel semethic interaction takes place).
Similarly, a fascinating example of semethic interaction between humans and birds concerns the African Boran people and a bird known as the black throated honey guide, Indicator indicator (Sebeok 1979, 14-18). Collecting honey is an [|] ancient human practice as witnessed by 20,000-year-old cave paintings. The honey guide often accompanies the Boran people when they go out to collect honey. Indicator indicator guides them from tree to tree by characteristic call-outs. Thanks to this assistance, the time Borans expend finding the bees' nests (which is otherwise approximately three hours) is shortened by one third. The bees are smoked out, the hives are opened, and the honey collected. And while the honey guide birds cannot themselves open the hives, after the Borans have taken their honey, much valuable larvae and wax still remain in the hives for the birds to eat. The species designation Indicator bears witness to the spontaneous semiotic intuition that many biologists have upon discovering such interactions. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 191-192)
That's almost like cheating, not to mention destroying the hive. The Encyclopædia Britannica entry on bees had a more curious story of one American bee-hunter who, instead of picking up a musket and hunting big game as his neighbours did, went out, made a fire, and burned some bee-wax and left some honey out in the open. The bees were naturally drawn to this, as they are very keen on stealing honey from other hives. Leaving some honey out for them to gather, the hunter noted the direction the bees who had partaked of his offering flew, knowing full well of their habit of returning straight to the hive when carrying a full load. If memory serves, he mixed in some tint into the honey he offered, so that when he noticed a bee marked with his tint coming for seconds, he could from long experience of how fast bees fly, estimate the distance of their hive. Then all he needed to do was go in the directions they flew to, and almost without error found their nest in some natural edifice, e.g. trunk of a branch, which he then sawed off and brought home, thus amassing a collection of naturally formed hives. (Due to how long it takes for me to read a single volume of the encyclopedia, the exact quote will get here by fall this year, at the earliest.)
The water mite strikes a specific attitude while watching the vibrations in the water surface ready to seize the prey with its forelegs, and this is precisely the way the female seizes the male in the initial step in mating. It is, of course, particularly intriguing for the imagination that the hungrier females are more likely to gravitate towards the male and clutch him (Johnstone 1997, 161). Seen from the standpoint of semiotics, what goes on is that the male takes advantage of the female foraging Umwelt for the purpose of communicating his mating wish. Students of behavioral ecology aptly call this phenomenon sensory exploitation or even sensory trap. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 193)
The opposite is found in human advertisements when sexual content is used to draw attention but what is advertised is not in itself sexual (food, non-edible products, non-sexual services, etc.). Is this a sexual trap?
The Ecosemiotic Perspective
Traditionally, ecology has had a hard job in trying to map the multiple physical and chemical interactions between organismic populations, as these are reflected through such things as trophic structure and nutrient cycles. But the task of unraveling the semethic-interaction patterns between such populations is, of course, magnitudes more complex. Probably we have only seen the beginning of such studies, and my guess would be that our present knowledge gives us only a small glimpse of a nearly inexhaustible stock of intelligent semiotic interaction patterns taking place at all levels of complexity from cells and tissues inside the bodies up to the level of ecosystems. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 195)
The present lack of very impressive elaborations on a concept that is only 25 years old should not discourage us - considering the complexities involved, we may see broad and impressive employments of the semiotic niche concept by the middle or even end of the current century.
Thus, while most biologists suppose that symbiotic mutualism is an exceptional case of no general importance for evolutionary theory, I believe that semiotic mutualism involving a delicate balance of interactions between many species is widespread (see Margulis and Sagan 2003). And if this is indeed the [|] case, it has significant consequences for our thinking about evolution, for it implies that the relative fitness of changed morphological or behavioral traits become dependent on the whole system of existing semiotic relations that the species finds itself a part of. Accordingly, the firm organism-versus-environment borderline will be dissolved, and a new integrative level intermediate between the species and the ecosystem would have to be considered - i.e., the level of the ecosemiotic interaction structure. Clearly, this possibility becomes most interesting in cases where experience and learning enters the interaction pattern, as will often be the case in mammals and birds. Such learning might on occasion even subsume the evolutionary process, as is the case in human culture. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 195-196)
Between the organism and the environment there's "a matrix-like structure with multiple interdependent relationships binding populations of many different species into a shared interpretive universe" (ibid, 195). The "environment", in other words, is not an inorganic vacuum but filled with other species and their habits and sign-vehicles.
We shall thus suggest the term interpretance as a measure of the capacity of a system to respond to signs through the formation of meaningful interpretants. High interpretance allows a system to "read" many sorts of cues in the surroundings; such high-level interpretance means that the system will form interpretants in response to complex cues that might not be noticed, or even be noticeable, by low-level agents. Thus, a unicellular organism cannot interpret complex patterns such as animal tracks, and in this sense it has a low-level interpretance. Mammalian organisms, on the other hand, are capable of interpreting extremely complex cues - such as the individual behavioral patterns of conspecifics - accordingly, they may be said to have high-level interpretance. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 196)
New terms upon new terms upon new terms.
In fact, the higher forms of ants have now become so specialized that they cannot survive without exactly the right variety of fungus (New Scientist 17/12 1994, 15). So here, the long, slow, interactive processes of natural selection may finally have resulted in the total crystallization of the relations from the open form of play to the closed form of ritual (or as it has sometimes been called, instinct). (Hoffmeyer 2008: 197)
Underdetermined play vs overdetermined ritual/instinct.
The Biosemiotic Core of Evolution
And in fact, perhaps the most crucial single aspect of the embryological process (after the attainment of brute viability) is the development of the Umwelt of an organism. The role of the Umwelt is to regulate behavior (or, in general, organismic activities), for if it happens that the Umwelt of an organism is not well tuned to the semiotic niche, the chances of this organism surviving, much less leaving healthy offspring, will be diminished. Thus, it follows that the establishment of a good fit between the Umwelt of an organism and the semiotic-niche conditions it must cope with, stands as a central theater of natural selection. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 200)
The actors in this play: the organism, its Umwelt and its semiotic niche; the environment, its ecosemiotic interaction structure, and its semiotic-niche conditions.
The concrete shaping of the nervous system of an individual is, as we have seen, dependent on the sensory inputs that the individual receives, as well as on the brain's own interpretive activities. As a consequence of this, it might clarify matters to provide an extra - largely independent - layer of interpretive processing, that we have called the Umwelt landscape (Hoffmeyer 2001c). The canalization process then consists of a ball at the same time tracing a route through both of these landscapes. One might, of course, depict this as an n-dimensional landscape, and the combinatorial output of these two under-determined canalization processes thus creates the individual as a morphological-physiological system (modus Waddington), with an Umwelt calibrated to the de facto challenges of the semiotic niche it is supposed to encounter. Taken together, these two coupled canalizations effectively break the determinism generally supposed to rule over the genotype-phenotype transformation. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 201)
More new terms. Hoffmeyer 2001c = "Seeing Virtuality in Nature" in Semiotica, DOI: 10.1515/semi.2001.034
Intelligence and Semiosis
The extent to which different animals possess intelligence has been highly disputed. It has often been overlooked, however, that intelligence is not just something one has between the ears, but is very much a social skill, an ability to use physical marks as well as social relations to scaffold and organize one's knowledge and behavior. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 206)
Emotional intelligence? Social skills?
The American philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1998, 284) has recently suggested that the proprioceptive sense serves as a corporeal consciousness: "Any creature that moves itself, i.e., that is not sessile, senses itself moving. By the same token, it likewise senses itself when it is still. Distinguishing movement from stillness, motion from rest, is indeed a fundamental natural discrimination of living creatures that is vital to survival." (Hoffmeyer 2008: 206)
Indeed, movement and rest are even in the Pythagorean table of opposites.
It is a well-known fact that animals can and do dream. This implies that mental states may sometimes be uncoupled from bodily action. But the extreme extent of uncoupling between behavior and mental activity that characterizes the human mind is probably unique among animals. The uncoupling has made philosophers wonder how it can be that mental states are always about something. But seen from the perspective of biology, this is no surprise at all, since mental aboutness, (human intentionality) grew out of a bodily aboutness (Hoffmeyer 1996a). Whatever an organism senses also mean something to it - e.g., food, escape, sexual reproduction. This is one of the major insights brought to light through the work of Jakob von Uexküll (1982[1940], 31): "Every action, therefore, that consists of perception and operation imprints its meaning on the meaningless object and thereby makes it into a subject-related meaning-carrier in the respective Umwelt." (Hoffmeyer 2008: 207)
Thus, my objection towards collapsing perception and action may be due to anthropocentric uncoupling of these faculties. Similar objections arise in me with Brentano and other philosophers who hold that every emotion must have an object.
The Ghost of Lamarckism
The French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck - who in 1809 (fifty years before Darwin) suggested the first scientific theory of evolution in the history of the world - is a sad figure in the history of biology, outmaneuvered and overruled by his contemporaries, scorned and misunderstood by posterity (Burkhardt 1977). Lamarck's misdemeanor, seen with modern eyes, was that he believed that properties acquired by plans or animals in the course of their lifetimes could become inherited by their offspring. It is this, to the best of our [|] knowledge, false conception that nowadays is called Lamarckism. For instance, as the wading bird delicately set out to feed at still deeper water, Lamarck posited that its stilted legs would become incrementally prolonged in the process, and this, he claimed, would prove of use to the offspring as manifested in an ever so little prolongation in the length of the legs already from birth. Lamarck felt that through many generations, this process might lead to the substantial kinds of change that we can observe when comparing present species with fossilized specimens. By suggesting this (intuitively quite reasonable) connection, Lamarck in one bold stroke broke down the millenia-old wall inherited from both the Bible and from Plato and Aristotle that guarded the static image of the composition of the natural world. And yet, this world-changing figure is nowadays remembered mostly as a defender of a wrong theory that was successfully replaced by Darwin's. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 207-208)
A decade earlier, Encyclopædia Britannica included an entry in which it was speculated how animals like the alligators in Florida must have got off of Noah's boat in the Middle-East, and have temporarily developed warm blood to travel through Siberia, over the Bering Straight, through Alaska, and the continental US territories to reach the place where god intended them to live: "Let it not be objected, that animals bred in a southern climate, after the descent of their parents from the ark, would be unable to bear the frost and snow of the rigorous north, before they reached South America, the place of their final destination. It must be considered, that the migration must have been the work of ages; that in the course of their progress each generation grew hardened to the climate it had reached; and that after their arrival in America, they would again be gradually accustomed to warmer and warmer climates, in their removal from north to south, as they had in the reverse, or from south to north." (EB I, 569)
Lamarck believed that evolution was not just a process of change, but also a process of progression. He even suggested a new term, biology, as a designation for the study of this phenomenon of perfection that characterized the two kingdoms of animals and plants in contrast with the kingdom of minerals. And thus his idea of the inner feeling was needed as a means to justify la marche de la nature in this sense - i.e., as a progression (Burkhardt 1977). (Hoffmeyer 2008: 210)
Ooh, another obscure term.
And one may be allowed to suspect that the popularity of Darwinian explanations does not suffer damage by being so close an analogue to the dominating "economic realities" of Western societies. The idea that an "invisible hand" behind the back of the endlessly competing creatures has - all by itself - assured a healthy evolution of nature, has shown itself to possess an overwhelming appeal to the modern mind. (Hoffmeyer 2008: 211)
We read about this - how Darwin's theories took some impetus from economic theories - in a course on the history of science (cf. e.g. Orr 2009).
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