Keywords

3.1 Introduction

Nowadays, communication is a word with multiple meanings implied, many of which are not only ambiguous but also contradictory. It has been associated with so many natural, physical, biological and social phenomena that its explanatory potential seems to have vanished. Common sense has adopted communication as an excellent metaphor when referring to information processes, social situations, biological conditions and even physical problems; all of them linked (in some ways), to a particular form, manifestation or expression of the communicative phenomena. Its potential to name different processes has been extended beyond the human scope to include the general forms of life, the interaction between humans, objects and ideas, and along the lines of how organisms know and interact with their surrounding world. However, this condition is not fortuitous, since its descriptive power is not grounded on any particular social or historical context, neither has it been generated by an academic theoretical conceptual field, it is rather a basic condition given that communication is fundamentally a natural phenomenon. Hence, the idea that I am interested in developing herein is that communication is not a social, biological, cognitive or physical phenomenon, but merely a process that involves a social, biological, cognitive, and physical component and that the fact that some components are highlighted in particular processes or research is a matter of scales and not of levels of organization.

Communication is a phenomenon that has been explained and defined in biology, physics, cognitive sciences, and in general, in the social sciences. However, communication seems to mean something different in each academic field. As a result, each field seems to have their own communicative phenomenon and its own theoretical explanation, and while some of those theories can be complementary, others are opposed or contradictory. This situation makes it almost impossible to work transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary in research projects or to clearly identify the limits and boundaries of the communication phenomena, the academic field of communication and, in particular, to clearly state its ontological dimension. What is communication? What does it describe in the physical, biological, chemical or social domain? What are its limits? What is its ontological nature? What is not a communicative process and why? Therefore, one possible path to overcome this situation is moving to the consideration of communication as a field or theory to the consideration of communication as a transdisciplinary concept, a proposal that aims to produce an integrated understanding of communication by combining the theoretical proposals that are complementary to each other, hoping it will allow us to move from one particular domain of reality to another and from one academic field to another.

According to the International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (François 2004), transdisciplinarity implies, first, the existence of a metalevel of models and concepts, leading to an integrated understanding by every part-taker of the system under study; and second, it implies the existence of a common metalanguage based on isomorphism, which finds itself very useful to convey generalized concepts and metamodels. For Peter Checkland, what we need is not interdisciplinary teams, but transdisciplinary concepts, “concepts which serve to unify knowledge by being applicable in areas which cut across the trenches which mark traditional academic boundaries” (Checkland in François 2004, p. 632). Thus, my foremost argument is the need to build communication as a transdisciplinary concept, an idea that could help us understand how it is expressed in each domain of reality and how each one of its explanations could be complementary to a general integrative theory of communication. However, in other to do this, it is extremely important to recover previous work on this subject.

Historically, there has been several theoretical approaches that define and explain communication, its meaning-making processes, and in general, the signification phenomenon. On the one hand, it is possible to identify theoretical traditions within the areas of semiotics, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and social psychology (just to mention some), and on the other hand, we can find other traditions grounded on cybernetics, systems thinking, life sciences, and mathematics, among others. Despite the clear differences both the humanistic and mechanistic traditions have, the main problem is that in each framework communication seems to be something different either in its conceptual form or in its empirical dimension.

As I have argued in previous work (Vidales 2017a), in the mechanistic view, the idea of communication is grounded in Shannon’s proposal of informational exchange between a sender and receiver (signals), a proposal that has been considered the foundation of the transmission or informational model of communication (Craig 1999). According to this view, communication has been defined as the process of sending and receiving messages or transferring information from one mind to another. On the other hand, from the humanistic point of view, communication is associated with the human process of meaning production and signification (signs) as well as with the cultural process of sign production and signification (Eco 1976; Danesi 2004, 2007; Kress 2010; Leeds-Hurwitz 1993; Jensen 1995; Bergman 2004; Vidales 2013). From this perspective, communication can be defined as a meaning-making process. Thus, we stand in front of two paradigms –among several others– (Craig 1999, 2013) that have been very influential in communication research, however, none of them has functioned as common ground for theoretical construction and empirical research (Bryant and Myron 2004) nor as criteria to define the limits or boundaries of communication as an academic field.

In the mechanistic view, communication is defined as a process of sending and receiving information, a condition that can be considered as a general principle to define the limits and nature of the communication phenomenon, however, the main critique that arise in the humanistic view is that this approach does not consider the meaning-making process, consciousness, and volition. At the same time, in the humanistic view, communication seems to be trapped in the cognitive and social domain of the human being ignoring its physical, chemical and biological conditions considering them only as pre-requisite for the emergence of communication in the human social domain. This is why the idea of communication as a transdisciplinary concept would be helpful, primarily because both paradigms are not opposed but complementary and can be useful to explain communication from the biological to the cognitive and social dimensions. Therefore, I am interested in exploring two main traditions. The first one is cybernetics; the one proposed by Norbert Wiener many years ago that has been further developed into second-order cybernetics by authors like Heinz von Foerster and Paul Watzlawick among plenty others. The second one is semiotics, and more precisely, the proposal made by Charles S. Peirce more than a century ago and that has been further developed by Morris, Sebeok and countless other authors, and which recently was expanded into the general framework of biosemiotics.

Having explored how communication can be defined and explained from the standpoint of cybernetics and semiotics, I will move towards the explanation and definition of communication arising from Søren Brier’s cybersemiotics , a conceptual integration of Peirce’s semiotics, second-order cybernetics, and Luhmann’s triple autopoietic systems theory, as a general framework that presents itself as a transdisciplinary theory of communication, cognition, information, and signification. Ultimately, from that, I will develop a more detailed proposal of communication as a transdisciplinary concept.

3.2 Describing Communication from the Point of View of First and Second-Order Cybernetics

One of the most important books written about cybernetics, which can also be considered foundational, is the one published by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1948 under the title “Cybernetics: or control and communication in the Animal and the Machine”, a book that had a strong impact on the scientific community, from engineering, mathematics and biology to life sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Later on, in 1954, Wiener published another book titled “The human use of human beings” in which he precisely discussed the social implications of cybernetics. For Wiener (1954), the emergence of cybernetics must be understood as part of a process of historical change in science in general and in physics in particular. The Newtonian physics, which had ruled from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth, described a universe in which everything happened to be regulated by law; a compact, tightly organized universe in which the future depended upon the past. However, physics way of thinking changed significantly by the end of the nineteenth century due to the work done by Ludwig Boltzmann in Germany and Josiah Willard Gibbs in the United States, both implementing a new and radical idea: the use of statistics in physics. Even when others like Maxwell were already using statistics, Wiener considers that “what Boltzmann and Gibbs did was to introduce statistics into physics in a much more thoroughgoing way, so that the statistical approach was valid not merely for systems of enormous complexity, but even for systems as simple as the single particle in a field of force” (p. 8).

Statistics is the science of distribution, but Boltzmann and Gibbs’s distribution was not interested in a large number of similar particles, but in the different positions and velocities from which a physical system might start. From the Newtonian system, the same physical laws are applicable to a great variety of systems that begin with a great variety of positions and momenta. The new application of statistics maintained a single principle, according to which a particular system may be distinguished from other systems by its total amount of energy but rejected the notion that systems with the same total of energy can be clearly distinguished and described by fixed causal laws. The functional part of physics avoids considering the uncertainty and contingency of events, and that was precisely Gibbs’ merit, to be the first to develop a scientific method capable to consider these features. So, for Wiener (1954), it is Willard Gibbs whom we must attribute the first great revolution of twentieth-century physics. This revolution means that physics no longer claimed to deal with what will always happen, but with what will always happen within an overwhelming probability, and in a way, that in a probabilistic world we no longer deal with quantities and claims about a real and specific universe as a whole, on the contrary, we make questions which may find answers in a large number of similar universes. Gibbs’ innovation was to consider not just one world but all the worlds in which it is possible to find answers to a limited set of questions regarding our environment, which means that the answers we may give to questions related to a set of worlds are probably found in a larger set of worlds. The measure of this probability is called entropy, and it has a tendency to increase.

Then, as entropy increases, the universe and all closed systems within tend to naturally deteriorate and to lose distinctiveness, and at the same time, systems also tend to move from a state of organization and differentiation (in which forms and distinctions exist) to a state of chaos and sameness. For Wiener (1954), in the universe conceived by Gibbs order is the least probable whilst chaos is the most probable, but while the universe as a whole tends to run down (in the case such a universe exists), “there are local enclaves whose directions seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves. It is with this point of view at its core that the new science of Cybernetics began its development” (p. 12). Wiener (1954), who had worked on the theory of messages since World War II, considered cybernetics to be closely related to it; he also considered a larger field broadly linked as well, which included not only the study of language but also the study of messages (as means of control of machinery and society), the development of computing machines, the study of the psychological and nervous systems, and provisionally, to a new theory of scientific method; all areas of research carried out from the standpoint of a probabilistic theory of message, a condition that can be considered Gibbs’ legacy as mentioned above.

In addition, it is important to point out that from the beginning; cybernetics defined not only information but also communication processes and control. According to Wiener (1954), when someone communicates with another person, a message is imparted, and when the other person communicates back to the original sender, he or she returns a related message that is primarily accessible to him or her and not to the original source. Subsequently, when someone’s action is controlled, a message is communicated to him or her, and unless it is in the imperative mood, the technique of communication does not differ from that of a message of fact which means that if the control is to be effective the original source must take cognizance of any message from he or she that indicates that the order has been understood and obeyed. This is what led Wiener (1954) to consider that society can only be understood through the study of messages and the communication facilities which belong to it, and moreover, that in the future, the development of communication processes and its facilities would make it necessary to study the messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machines and machines. A prediction that can be confirmed almost half-century later in which society could be understood in terms of the process of communication and messages from person to person through the mediation of machines.

For Wiener (1954), giving a message to a man or to a machine does not differ significantly, since we are aware of the order that has been sent and of the signal of compliance that has to come back, and “the fact that the signal in its intermediate stages has gone through a machine rather than through a person is irrelevant and does not in any case greatly change my relation to the signal. Thus, the theory of control in engineering, whether human or animal or mechanical, is a chapter in the theory of messages” (p. 16–17). Of course, there are some detailed differences in each case that must be considered, and that was precisely the purpose of cybernetics, to develop a general language or theory to understand and study the problem of communication and control in general, but also to produce a conceptual way to identify and classify their particular manifestations.

Wiener (1954) used the idea of the relationship between a system and its environment (in terms of information exchange and communication processes) to describe cybernetic systems. For example, in the case of human beings, a living system perceives its environment through its sense organs, and the information it receives is coordinated through its brain and nervous system until (after the proper process of storage, collation, and selection) it emerges through some organs, such as its muscles. Eventually, these emergent processes act upon the external world, which in turn, reacts on the central nervous system through its receptor organs. The information received is combined with the already accumulated stored information to influence future actions, and this is what information is about: is the content of what is exchanged by a system with the environment or the outer world as the system adjust to it and makes its adjustment felt upon it, as it also occurs with living organisms and machines broadly. This process, named as feedback by Wiener, is a concept that describes the process of control in a system (machine or a living organism) on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance, in other words, “feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance” (p. 61). From the above stated, it is possible to assume that information is related with the exchange between a system and its environment and that this process of exchange is what communication consists itself of. It is from this point of view that Wiener (1954) proposed his main thesis.

It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer operation machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine… In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together (p. 26–27).

This led Wiener (1954) to propose that information is not only related to entropy but also to negentropy, a special case of order and organization, and to consider that information is information and not matter or energy. This was also the argument in which Tom Stonier (1990) based his proposal of negentropy, the organizational power of creating systems and structures in nature. As it can be seen, cybernetics is not interested in ‘things’ as such, on the contrary, as W. Ross Ashby (1957) argues, it is interested in ‘ways of behaving’. Even when cybernetics was associated with physics at the beginning, it does not depend on the laws of physics or on the properties of matter because its main interest is in all forms of behavior as far as they are regular, determinate, or reproducible. The main focus is in the process of feedback and not the organism or machine that produced it, nor its elements; that is why cybernetics is not interested in the individual acts a machine will produce here and now, but in all the possible behaviors it can produce and to which extent is a machine or any other system subject to determining and controlling factors in the process of producing such behaviors. As a result, according to Ashby (1957), cybernetics has two virtues. One is that it offers a single vocabulary and a single set of concepts suitable for representing the most diverse types of systems, providing a common vocabulary by which discoveries in one branch can be useful in another. For example, it is possible to find some suggestive parallelisms between a machine, the human brain, and society. The second virtue of cybernetics is that it offers a method for the scientific treatment of the system, and outstanding complexity that is too important to be ignored. For Ashby, these kinds of systems are only too common in the biological world.

As Wiener (1982) explained, cybernetics was a word form derived from the Greek κυβερνήτης (cybernḗtēs) referring to “steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder”. Cybernetics, as defined by Wiener, is the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine and it is primarily interested in explaining purposiveness or goal-directed behavior, which is an essential characteristic of mind and life in terms of control and information from the point of view of complex and stable dynamical systems. Dynamical systems are those capable of modifying their state and those that also include a whole series of other systems and more simple elements interrelated between them and acting together. From the point of view of processes and operations, a complex dynamical system that moves from one state to another while maintaining its stability is denominated a system of control. Therefore, Cybernetics is interested in what is common within different goal-directed systems (regardless of their physical nature) such as the organization of actions towards a particular and convenient goal (usually to adapt the system to their external conditions), which are the basic functions of performance that make them, precisely, a control, driving, dynamical and complex system (Jramoi 1968). However, despite its clear success in the development of automatic controllers, computers, information, and transmission systems, just to mention some, theoretical developments of cybernetics went far beyond these early applications.

Cybernetics was later on applied in anthropology, neurophysiology, cognition, molecular biology, psychology, communication, and industrial organization, among many other fields, by authors like Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Stafford Beer, Gregory Bateson, Gordon Pask, Paul Watzlawick, W. Ross Ashby, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Heinz von Foerster, and Arturo Rosenblueth. This last author was one of the many who participated in the series of interdisciplinary meetings held by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation from 1944 to 1953, meetings known today as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. During this period, cybernetics was also associated with the school of General Systems Theory (GST), founded around the same time by Ludwig von Bertalanffy who also considered cybernetics to be part of the GST. In other words, whereas GST studies systems at all levels, cybernetics focuses specifically on goal-directed, functional systems which have some form of control relation (Heylighen and Joslyn 2001).

However, from the beginning, Wiener (1982) suggested the possibility of identifying similarities between autonomous, living systems and machines but recognized the need for the development of a non-mechanistic view on cybernetics that emphasized autonomy, self-organization, cognition, and the role of the observer in modeling a system as the first step. Later work was not only a new step in the theoretical development of cybernetics, but a new understanding of reality, an understanding of understanding, a move from the observation of a system to the consequences observers may have upon the process of observing that system. In a nutshell, it was the birth of the cybernetics of cybernetics or second-order cybernetics. Second-order cybernetics “… began with the recognition that all our knowledge of systems is mediated by our simplified representations –or models- of them, which necessarily ignore those aspects of the system which are irrelevant to the purpose for which the model is constructed. Thus, the properties of the systems themselves must be distinguished from those of their models, which depend on us as their creators” (Heylighen and Joslyn 2001, p. 156).

According to von Foerster (2003), we can consider first-order cybernetics as the cybernetics of observed systems, and second-order cybernetics as the cybernetics of observing systems. Then, while Wiener’s proposal focused on communication and control, second-order cybernetics is focused on communication and control but regarding observing systems and their influence on the very process of knowledge production, which led theory to include concepts such as self-reference, self-organization and circularity; the first one associated to a logical operation in which an operation is itself an object of study, for example, when we talk about language, when we think about thinking, or when we become aware of our own consciousness.

As Francis Heylighen and Cliff Joslyn (2001) suggests, a first-order cyberneticist will study a system as if it were a passive, objectively given “thing” that can be freely observed, manipulated, and taken apart. However, a second-order cyberneticist considers any system, such as the biological or social ones, as agents in its own right but that interact with another agent, the observer. Subsequently, both the fundamental transformation generated in the academic field by information and the transformation cybernetics generated as a general epistemology, implied the need of explaining not only the observed world but also the importance of the systems observing that world; a major step into the field of epistemology since according to Gordon Pask we go from questioning the objectivity principle to assuming that all our notions are not independent of our nature as observers, and also, that this relation is not only a general condition for all observers but a condition for all the systems being observed (Pask in Foerster 2006).

The work done by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1980) on autopoiesis, the contribution of George Spencer-Brown (1979) on algebra, and the move from systems being observed to observing systems proposed by Heinz von Foerster (2003), among other contributions, where the theoretical basis that legitimate self-references processes not only as natural phenomena but also as a form of inquiry. The essential circularity of self-references was then considered the cornerstone of the world as we experience it –in its biological, organizational, cognitive and social notions. And it also goes directly to the heart of communication about communication, as Klaus Krippendorff (1984) suggested, and from which he proposed an epistemological foundation for a cybernetic perspective on communication that I consider essential in proposing communication as a transdisciplinary concept. Allow me to briefly recoup Krippendorff’s proposal.

According to Krippendorff (1984), cybernetics has been concerned with transformation, processes, and change, not with material things, a condition that explains why it has always emphasized the importance of variety and alternatives. The first one (variety) shown to be a requisite for adaptation, intelligent behavior, evolution, and at the same time it is recognized as a logical necessity of organization on all levels. From this point of view, it is possible to assume that these three forms, circularity, process, and variety are common to all cybernetic inquiry. Observation was added later, but it turned out to be one of the most important ones for second-order cybernetics. But what are the consequences of taking these forms as an epistemological basis for defining communication processes and communication itself? To Krippendorff (2009), communication theory by the 80s was primarily concerned on providing an ontological definition of what communication is, a position that had at least three consequences: (a) considering nature of reality or what exists as independent of observation, (b) considering observation as a one-way process of communication from disinterested objects of nature to intelligent and interested observers, and (c) “these ontological commitments force scientist into roles as detached observers intellectually superior to their objects of descriptive interest” (p. 38). Then, an alternative approach is an epistemological one.

Cybernetic epistemology does not concern itself with knowledge of what exists external to us, ontology, but focuses on processes by which we come to know, on “knowing”, denying “knowledge” to be a thing, and considering “the known” as constructed by the knower. Thus, cybernetics acknowledge observers and observed as interacting and communication between them flowing both ways. This allows the properties of observers to enter their domain of observation which renders the enlightenment standards of objectivity unachievable… The choice of one paradigm over another is not subject to empirical proof, for each carries its own criteria of acceptability. I propose here a basic epistemological unity for inquiries in general and communication in particular (p. 38–39).

As it can be seen, there is a clear difference between defining communication ontologically and explaining how such phenomena emerge in this world. The second approach is an epistemological perspective in which communication as an object of study becomes built into the process of inquiry about communication, producing a kind of vicious cycle. It is from this perspective that Krippendorff (1984) proposed that observation entails a unity of two processes mediated or embodied in an observer and his environment: (a) the drawing of distinctions (or distinctions), and (b) the formulation of relations (or relations). However, the idea of the separation or distinction between the observer and its environment must be understood merely as a prop to develop the idea, after which the distinction will no longer be necessary and should be abandoned in favor of the idea of an epistemological unity –system and environment as a whole–. “Distinctions are drawn by an observer in his environment. Whether distinctions are purposeful and reflected, or involuntary and determined by cause or conventions, they divide a space into parts and thus exert some force upon the observer’s domain of observation” (p. 53). Then, the drawing of distinction is arbitrary and creates, at the same time, variety in the observer’s environment by creating two alternatives at least. Drawing a distinction is fundamental for the observer because without a first distinction an observer cannot obtain any information and, in consequence, is unable to say anything about his environment. “Distinctions are prerequisites of understanding” (p. 54).

Relations, on the other hand, are formulated by an observer to reconstruct that holistic property in his environment which his distinction seems to violate, therefore, relations must be put in some form (a nervous system, a computer algorithm, a descriptive system or a language) that “must be capable of operationally representing, reproducing or modeling how one part formed by the distinction differs from, is linked to, correlates with, conditions, follows, causes, etc. the other part formed by the distinction” (p. 54). From this perspective, the epistemological unity lying under as the basis of cybernetic inquiry is precisely the alternated sequence of drawing distinctions and the formulation of relations by an observer, but it is unclear which came first in a particular phenomenon or when a particular phenomenon is analyzed. Hence, observation implies relations and distinctions in a sequence of interaction, it is a dialogue among the parts of a system that alternate between assuming the role of observer and environment, correspondingly, which makes it difficult not only to establish a distinction and to identify one side as an “observer” and the other side as “the observed”, but also to decide which side acquires knowledge about the other. “From this, a cybernetic epistemology would conclude that knowledge and understanding is neither objective nor subjective. It becomes manifest in the circular form of interaction” (p. 56–57).

Cybernetic epistemology is not concerned on the knowledge outside us (ontology) but on the processes by which we come to know, on knowing, on denying knowledge as a thing, and on considering the known as constructed by the knower, as it has been argued above. It is then a different vision that clearly assumes the role of observers in the processes of observation and it is also the epistemological basis from which Krippendorff (1984) develops notions of communication in three contexts: (a) communication in observed systems, (b) communication in systems involving their observers, and (c) communication in systems of production.

In the first case, communication in observed systems or first-order cybernetics, refers to observed systems approached to by an observer who sees himself as essentially outside that system, and as a consequence, the observer does not include himself in the description of the system nor does he see himself as observed by that system. From this perspective, the definition of communication is clearly an ontological one, as Harold Lasswell puts it in his famous “paradigm” (who says what, to whom, through which channels, and with what effects). On the contrary, and with its emphasis on epistemology rather than ontology, Krippendorff (1984) considers that cybernetics focuses its attention on the observer’s contribution to bringing phenomena into being, from which he proposes two definitions of communication. “Communication is what defies the decomposition (without loss in understanding) of a dynamic system, and, as it turns out equivalently: communication is what makes the behavior of one variable (component or part or member of a system) incomprehensible without references to the behavior of the others” (p. 58).

However, the previous definitions require that the observer draw at least three kinds of distinctions: (a) distinctions among individual parts of a system, (b) distinctions among the states these parts can take, which allow the observer to present the system as a whole and its parts as variable, and (c) distinctions in time, which allow the observer to ascertain the behavior, “and both definitions take communication to be the relation that recaptures what all three of these distinctions seem to violate. The cybernetic definitions of communication amount to a test of certain holistic properties of an observer” (Krippendorff 1984, p. 58). Since communication is considered to be a process that implies change, it is possible to assume that its fundamental transformation is behavior, and from this point of view, communication becomes embedded in one unity of the identity as follows: Behavior of the whole system is equal to the Behavior of each part viewed separately plus communication among all parts.

Therefore, there are some properties associated with the concept of communication related to observed systems that should be considered. Observed systems are informationally closed, that is to say, an observer can only consider information about what he observes or knows about the portion of the world he attends to. “All properties he is able to discern are limited by this information. Communication too can be analyzed and described only in terms of the information on hand” (Krippendorff 1984, p. 60). Traditionally, communication has been defined and analyzed based on Shannon’s proposal of a linear casual conception of a process that involves an active sender and a responding receiver, however, for Krippendorff (1984), cybernetics has developed a different approach based on the representation of circular causal processes of communication and information that involve feedback in which the observer takes the side of the part to which information returns.

By such repetition, circular processes of communication modify their own contents until the process reaches an equilibrium at which iterative modifications have ceased to be effective and if changes are then still present they are stationary and, to a significant degree, predictable. In observed systems this equilibrium is called homeostasis and the empirical fact of this convergence has earned the theory of communication explaining this phenomenon the name “convergence model”… Important is that the homeostasis actually reached by the observed system is not explainable from the properties of any of the system’s parts but emerges in the process of communication, which cybernetics proposes, is thus able to explain the emergence of stable forms as self-generated or eigen-properties of systems involving a circular process of communication (Krippendorff 1984, 61).

Now, regarding communication in systems involving their observers, Krippendorff (1984) suggests that a theory of such systems allows the properties of the observer to enter the description of the system, then these kinds of systems are primarily related to social systems (group of individuals who observe each other and communicate which each other about their observations) which are also self-referential, since observers must be constructed within the very object they claim to describe, and as a consequence, explaining and formulating a theory of those objects is also changing those objects as they are being described. In short, these types of systems are “social systems” and are related with second-order cybernetics as I have described before.

Social Systems consist of at least two observers paired in such way that each provides the other’s environment and they share the notion of ‘communication’ and the idea of ‘identity’ (whole equal parts plus interaction) with the observed systems, except that the parts now contain observers. In this case, the states of these observers are the distinctions drawn and the relations established by them, which can be seen as descriptions or representations but not as an external object, but as relevant history of the interaction between an observer and a portion of his world. In this context, communication becomes an exchange of descriptions among observers to an extent where the whole system is constituted by and cannot be understood without reference to these descriptions.

While a theory of observed systems is able to explain how a system converges towards homeostasis, in the case of social systems, this theory is able to explain how a system converges towards a stable description of itself and within itself. “By definition, a description is called stable when it remains unaltered despite repeated iterations or when it resists changes throughout the repetitive process of circularity” (Krippendorff 1984, p. 66), therefore, it is possible to argue that social systems compute their own stable realty. However, for Krippendorff (1984), reality is not owned by the system it emerges from, nor it is represented in, or separated from it. Social systems constitute themselves in the process of computing their stable reality through the descriptive acts of their members, and in so, and by its concern for predicting stabilities of descriptions, the theory of communication in social systems explains the constitution of these very own systems. “In social system distinctions are drawn in the course of communication and, when they have some degree of stability, constitute that system’s own boundaries” (p. 66), therefore, descriptions also define the identity of the system’s components and they do so in the system’s own terms.

A theory of communication in these kinds of systems is primarily concerned with how such identities evolve and what it is that the observing components of a system come to be, and where they locate themselves within the network of communication. But, such a theory also suggests “that the realities computed by each component need not be shared but must be compatible through manifest communication with the realities computed by the other components so that the reality computed by the whole may be stable” (p. 67).

Finally, in the case of communication in systems of production, the material realization and the energy this kind of systems require to maintain themselves in physical space is extremely remarkable. Hence, what we are describing is nothing but communication in systems whose material form is an integral part of its description. For Krippendorff (1984), these are systems that produce components that can interact with parts of the system already in existence, however, he also suggests that such theories of communication are nearly non-existent but can be grounded on the work of authors like the economist Kennet Boulding, the psychologist James G. Miller and primarily on the biological approach of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela which describe self-reproduction systems that contain essentially circular processes. For Krippendorff (1984), a way to define systems of production is to take its main processes as a starting point: all living things process information, but at the same time they also produce material entities that replace other entities that have decayed, and thereby maintaining the system in operating condition. Those material entities produced engage in interaction with other material entities and may expand the system in space and improve its processes, making the system more efficient in time, as well as in the space it occupies. As it can be seen, Krippendorff’s definition of systems of production is closely related with the idea of autopoietic machines described by Maturana and Varela.Footnote 1 To sum up, according to Krippendorff (1984),

Systems of production incorporate all kinds of communication. There are processes of communication of a linear or circular causal nature making the system or parts of it converge towards homeostasis and into subsystems of interdependent parts. There are processes of communication of descriptions making the system or parts thereof converge towards stable self-descriptions and develop local identities. But what I see to be characteristic of systems of production is that communication explains in what the production of and/or by a whole system differs from the production of and/or by its component parts. Including how the interaction of components copies, reproduces or produces itself in space. In systems of production communication is the ingredient of material organization (p. 71).

From the above stated, it is possible to argue that communication is not a thing, is not something that can be studied without considering the process of observation (distinctions/relations). In cybernetic epistemology, communication is not part of the observed system (it does not occupy any physical place) neither is an arbitrary and imagined construction without a ground, instead, communication is that observer-created relational construction which explains what makes a system defy its decomposition (without loss of understanding) into independent parts (Krippendorff 2009). We have then a cybernetic explanation of communication that allows us to understand how is that it emerges as a phenomenon and what is its relation with observers and the process of observation; but it seems that we have omitted an important process, that is the meaning-making process. What is the relationship between signification and communication? What are the relationships among drawing distinctions, the formulation of relations, and the emergence of meaning in living systems? Cybernetics seems to have a problem, just as the mechanistic view in general, when it comes to explaining the meaning-making process in living systems. And this is precisely why a semiotic vision is necessary in order to fulfill those aspects that a cybernetic epistemology cannot explain by itself when we are trying to address the nature of communication and signification in living organisms, not to say, the emergence of emotions, qualia or consciousness.

From the stand point of Søren Brier (2008), some of the research done in systems, cybernetics, and information sciences was built on metaphysical notions that have led to vague types of functionalism and that do not take a clear stand on first-person experience, the qualia of perception and emotions, and the problem of free will as I have shown with the cybernetic point of view. “Modern versions of the pan-informational paradigm often combine functionalism with non-equilibrium thermodynamics, non-linear systems dynamics, deterministic chaos theory, and fractal mathematics as descriptive tools. But again, we seldom encounter systematic reflection on how these versions differ from mechanistic views […] or on the nature of a concept of meaning and how signification arises in mind” (Brier 2008, p. 39–40). And this is why a signification theory is needed, and the reason Brier integrates the semiotic and the informational paradigms, since semiotics, as described by Peirce, is the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental variations of possible semiosis (EP 2:413) (Peirce 1998).

The importance of the semiotic paradigm is that it is focused on the possibilities of meaningful communication in living and social systems, through the search for answers about communication and meaning production in cultural and historic dynamics, and also in the biological conditions of meaning emergence. In this sense, Peirce founded semiotics as a general logic that integrated a general theory of sign production, which in turn permitted the expansion of semiotics beyond the human scope into sign processes within all types of systems, including, living systems. Brier (2008) suggests that in the semiotic philosophy of Peirce, feelings, qualia, habit formation and signification are basic ontological constituents of reality, which means that the semiotic paradigm should be able to penetrate beyond chemistry and physics, a movement that has been developed in biosemiotics research (Hoffmeyer 2008; merrell 1996, 2013; Sebeok 1979, 2001b; Martinelli 2007). From the info-computational point of view, information, matter, and energy are the three basic elements of reality, which implies that natural and objective information had to be present before the emergence of human minds and, in this sense, information is something more important than its observer or its interpreter. “Information is viewed as an objective and universal law-determined thing that both humans and machines absorb into their minds from nature, change by thinking, and bring it to society throughout language” (Brier 2008, p. 54).

However, in order to overcome this somehow reductionist view, it is necessary to explore the human mind, the reality of first-person consciousness, and to view the intelligence and meaning of communication as real. This implies that information sciences must include what has been already developed in cognitive sciences, systems sciences, semiotics, and biosemiotics, since they do not have experiential subjects with qualia and, therefore, do not have a unified transdisciplinary paradigm. Information sciences in the subject area of living systems and humans will not be able to explain vital aspects of the cognition and communication phenomena, such as meaning and the constraints of the social context, if they do not include a theory of meaning-making processes. Then, allow me to further explore the semiotic paradigm, in order to understand how communication can be and has already been explained from this perspective. The final move will be the integration of both perspectives into the general proposal of cybersemiotics in which communication is conceptualized as a transdisciplinary concept.

3.3 Describing Communication from the Point of View of Semiotics and Biosemiotics

In his contribution to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences, Charles Morris recognized the importance of Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs as a general criterion for science unification. In his work, Foundations of the theory of signs, Morris argued the double relationship semiotics had with science, for it can be considered both a science and an instrument of science. According to the author (Morris 1955), semiotics was seen as a general principle for science unification, since it encompassed all fundamental principles. During this movement towards the unification of sciences, Morris believed that the notion of sign was the key element, since that concept was capable of expanding itself in order to encompass the humanities, social and psychological sciences, and it was also capable of distinguishing these areas of study from the biological and physical sciences. In other words, the notion of sign was seen as a concept that could integrate the historically separated fields of biological, physical and social sciences. According to Morris (1955),

[…] The concept of sign may prove to be of importance in the unification of the social, psychological, and humanistic sciences in so far as these are distinguished from the physical and biological sciences. And since it will be shown that signs are simply the objects studied by the biological and physical sciences related in certain complex functional processes, any such unification of the formal sciences on the one hand, and the social, psychological, and humanistic sciences on the other, would provide relevant material for the unification of these two sets of sciences with the physical and biological sciences. Semiotic may thus be of importance in a program for the unification of sciences, though the exact nature and extent of this importance is yet to be determined. But if semiotics is a science co-ordinate with the other sciences, studying things or the properties of things in their function of serving as signs, it is also the instrument of all sciences, since every science makes use of and express its results in terms of signs (p. 80).

In considering semiotics as a general principle for the unification of sciences, Morris recovered Peirce’s proposal to understand semiotics (semeiotics) as a general logic, as a general epistemology capable of observing other sciences processes of knowledge production and the way they construct themselves. Later on, Thomas Sebeok, who was one of Morris’ students at Chicago, took an important step forward in the development of semiotics as a general framework by taking the systematic application of semiotics beyond the social phenomena. The importance behind Sebeok’s work lays upon his notion of ‘global semiotics’ that unified the physical, social and biological fields of signification, which was initially envisioned by Morris decades before.

For Sebeok (2001a), all human beings, or more precisely, all living entities in our planet modulate their environment by means of signs but just a small group of them will have a professional domain of this activity (Petrilli and Ponzio 2007). During his contact with Ray Birdwhistell at Chicago, who would be later recognized as the promoter of kinesthesia, Sebeok identified that the universe described under the label ‘nonverbal communication’ was much more profound and that if studied, it could lead us through the long trip between cellular structures and cultural structures, following a unique conceptual line, but also pointing out a basic premise about our own nature, the fact that life and semiosis converge, that are coextensive, or in other words, that “semiosis must be recognized as a pervasive fact of nature as well as of culture” (Sebeok 2001a, p. xvii).

The stated before means that semiosis is not only a human sign activity but it is something that characterizes all living systems in our planet including animal and plants. For Sebeok (2001a), at the beginning of the 70s, it was clear that it was absurd to restrict semiotic research to our species and that is why it was necessary to extend their field of reference to the whole animal kingdom, in its great diversity, a field that was later named zoosemiotics by Sebeok himself. In consequence, for some decades “normal” semiotics became restricted to the realm of antroposemiosis, while zoosemiotics, as a new research domain, extended semiotics to other biological domains, although it was also focused on the study of the Homo Sapiens as a biological unity rather than a cultural one. In addition, for Sebeok, the proposal made in 1981 by Martin Krampen about the possible existence of semiosis in plants was the starting point of a new discipline, phytosemiotics. Later on, in 1991 with the work of Sorin Sonea, it also became possible to recognize semiosis processes in the prokaryote realm (included all bacteria) that lead semiotics to talk about the possibility of microsemiotics on the bacterial level that was, in turn, the ground for the later work of Maurice Panisser and Lynn Margulis. For Sebeok, without a doubt, the most important consequence of these perspectives that observed semiotic processes at a micro level such as cells and bacteria, was discovering that our own body is an almost invisible network of semiotic processes, and this is precisely the level in which Thure von Uexküll (1992, 1997) developed a conceptual framework to identify the pertinent integration of the levels of semiotics which were labeled as endosemiotics.

The next step was the integration of all these semiotic phenomena into the all-encompassing field of biosemiotics. “Biosemiotics (bios=life & semion=sign) is a growing field that studies the production, action and interpretation of signs, such as sounds, objects, smells, movements but also signs on molecular scales in an attempt to integrate the findings of biology and semiotics to form a new view of life and meaning as immanent features of the natural World. The biosemiotic doctrine accepts non-conscious-intentional signs in humans, nonintentional signs between animals as well as between animals and humans, and signs between organs and cells in the body and between cells in the body or in nature (Brier 2013, p. 233). The main point of Sebeok (2001a) is that he considered that humans and all living organisms in the planet live in what he called a semiosphere, a term grounded on the idea of biosphere (all of the biota and also the condition for the continuation of life) of the Russian Vladimir Vernadsky and recovered later on by Juri M. Lotman. For Sebeok, the biosphere is the parcel of Earth that comprises life-signs that includes the lithosphere (solid surface), the hydrosphere (oceans), and the atmosphere (gases); is where we live and what we are, and in the end, it is something that we share with the rest of the living organisms in the planet. Although the term semiosphere was originally used by Lotman, Sebeok considers that, in fact, Lotman’s concept was much more restrictive than Vernadski’s idea of the biosphere. And, even though Lotman (1990) affirms that there cannot be communication nor language outside the semiosphere, he fails to recognize that antroposemiosis is linked to zoosemiotics, which means that human semiosis is played out predominantly in the prelinguistic extra-verbal mode, and in consequence, the once considered a “primarily modeling system” (like in the ex-Soviet Union), in reality, turned out to be a secondary superstructure (Sebeok 2001a).

According to Sebeok (2001a), the earliest and smallest known biosphere module with semiotic potential to be considered as the “semiotic atom” is a single bacteria cell, one of the most complex living entities that display general autopoietic properties. Grounded on Sorin Sonea’s (1990) bacterial network work, Sebeok argued that bacteria can be seen as “the global organism”, since together they constituted the communication network of a single superorganism whose components are always changing, can be found dispersed across the surface of the planet, and are those who will create the environmental conditions that will favor a completely new form of life: the eukaryotes. Later on, it was Thure von Uexküll who proposed the term endosemiosis to refer to all processes of sign transmission inside all eukaryotic organisms and went on to identify any body as a hierarchically structured “web of semiosis”, an argument from which Sebeok identifies four ascending levels of endosemiotic integration. The first level of sign processes occurring inside individual cells is –as mentioned earlier– called microsemiosis, the second-level related to information networks is called cytosemiosis (von Uexküll et al. 1993). The third level concerns the combination of cells into organs by a network of nerve cells, which is subtly intertwined by dendrites of nerve cells with a considerably slower transport system for sign vehicles, the bloodstream. Finally, Thure von Uexküll and his co-authors “shown in their important study how the neural and immunological counterworlds are tethered by sign processes to form a conjoined unitary inner world, which corresponds to a fourth endosemiotic integration level that is then transmuted into an ‘experienced reality’” (Sebeok 2001a, p. 13). These levels are going to be of importance in the consideration of the levels of signification in Søren Brier’s cybersemiotics.

Then, for Sebeok (2001a), it is a movement that goes from semiotics to biosemiotics and from biosemiotics to global semiotics from which he postulates his two cardinal and reciprocal axioms of semiotics: “(1) The criterial mark of all life is semiosis; and (2) Semiosis presupposes life” (p. 10). In addition, Sebeok considers that “semiosis is the processual engine which propels organisms to capture ‘external reality’ and thereby come to terms with the cosmos in the shape of species-specific internal modeling system” (p. 15). This means that just as living organisms evolve, so does semiosis, but life is necessary in order for semiosis to exist, and in consequence, semiosis could not exist prior to the evolution of life, a condition that can be extended into Peirce’s (1955) definition of sign (something that stands for something to somebody, in some respect or capacity). In other words, it addresses a somebody, it creates a more developed sign inside the mind of that person, who becomes the Interpretant of the first signs.

The sign stands for something, its Object. Then we have an irreducible triadic relation among three elements, a sign, its objects, and its interpretant as the interpretation of the sign. On the other hand, for Morris (1955), semiosis is a process in which something is functioning as a sign and three main factors are involved: that which acts as a sign, that which the sign refers to, and the effect on the interpreter, in virtue of, whatever sign the thing in question is to that interpreter. Despite the clear difference between Peirce’s idea of the Interpretant and Morris’s idea of the interpreter, Sebeok’s main argument is the fact that both definitions of sign and semiosis (among many others) imply, effectively and irreducibly, that at least one link among its elements must be a living entity, an idea from which it is possible to recoup again the fact that there could not have been semiosis prior to the evolution of life, or that life and semiosis are coextensive, as it has been argued before.

Later on, by proposing semiotics as a general epistemology for thinking and observing the biological field, semiotics moved beyond the social and philosophical dimension in order to include all forms of semiosis in nature, resulting in the separation of its objects of study in two major areas: Biosemiotics and Physiosemiotic (Deely 1990). This is what led Sebeok to consider semiotics as a particular point of view for observing the emergence of semiotic processes in biological organisms in general, and in the human being in particular (Sebeok 1979, 2001a, b), and what led Jesper Hoffmeyer to consider semiotic processes not only as a central aspect in the development of living beings, but as a central aspect in their evolution and survival (Hoffmeyer 1996, 1997). That was the foundation of biosemiotics, an interdisciplinary scientific project based on the recognition that life is fundamentally based on semiotic processes (Hoffmeyer 2008; Favareau 2010).

As we can see, semiotics has evolved from a general logic to a general criterion for the unification of sciences, and ultimately, to a point of view (Deely 1990).Footnote 2 However, there is a final step that recovers these previous visions into an interdisciplinary project focused on the integration of some of the existing methods of investigation that relate to the comprehension of communicative, cognitive and informational processes. This is the cybersemiotic proposal, a project that could be considered as one of the continuations of Peirce’s proposal of semiotics as a general logic. However, before moving to the explanation of how communication can be construed as a transdisciplinary concept from the point of view of cybersemiotics, allow me to briefly sum how communication has been defined from semiotics. In his Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, Media , and Communications, Marcel Danesi (2000) defines communication as production and exchange of messages by means of signals, facial expressions, talk, gestures, or writing, and it is related with the art of expressing ideas, especially in speech and writing. On the other hand, in the Encyclopedia of semiotics (Bouissac 1998), communication is defined as something that indicates some form of transfer in a reciprocal or unidirectional mode and can be applied to both, the general and selective circulation of messages and their technological means of conveyance. However, the Encyclopedia also recovers one of the fundamental problems when it comes to define and distinguish communication and semiotics (or semiosis), mainly because they share almost the same object of knowledge. As stated in the Encyclopedia (Bouissac 1998), “Studies in communication are in some respects equivalent to semiotics. However, the different histories of the two terms have meant that there is both overlap and discrepancy between them. Communication theory can be taken to refer to alternative brands of semiotics, or semiosis can be understood as a specific set of theories of communication… For instance, communication markedly emphasizes agency and process, while semiotics usually focuses on the sign and their relations” (p. 132).

From the Encyclopedia’s point of view, there are at least four distinct notional themes from communication theory that have significant theoretical implications in semiotics: (a) the linear models of communication grounded on Shannon’s proposal of the messages exchanges and highly developed in the study of mass communication, (b) the reciprocal and participatory models of communication grounded in the Saussurean tradition and used in language-oriented research, (c) the idea of communication as process and product which is equivalent to the idea of text or message (product) and the chains of events linking the production, reception, and circulation of messages and meaning (processes), and (d) communication as material process, an argument that refers to systems that transport people and material goods from one place to another and, in modern societies, to the theorization of the interdependence of technological developments in transport systems and in the mass media (Bouissac 1998). In contemporary communication research we have, perhaps, a strong presence of the integration of both the first and fourth notional themes stated in the Encyclopedia.

The importance of reciprocal and participatory models of communication in semiotics is also recognized by Paul Cobley (2013) who considers the Saussurean tradition, later developed by Roland Barthes, as one of the most important and influential approaches in communication research. However, from Cobley’s perspective, it is important to recognize that Saussurean semiology is not principally concerned in how signs refer to or communicate about specific, but in how regimes of communication (somewhat removed from specific objects) are sustained and perpetuated.

After Saussure, Cobley (2013) explains the code and text theories as means of communication theory from the standpoint of Umberto Eco’s perspective. In the same manner, Winfried Nöth (2014) described those that have been considered the most important models of human communication, from the semiotic point of view, recognizing the importance of Saussure, Eco, Peirce, Buyssen, Prieto, Jakobson, Greimas, and Lotman’s communication models. However, Nöth also recognizes a fundamental problem regarding the relationship between communication and semiosis, and mainly, between the field of communication and semiotics. From his point of view, “If semiotics is the study of sign processes (semioses) in nature and culture, it necessarily includes the study of communication since communication is undoubtedly a sign process, but is the reverse also true? Are all process of semiosis processes of communication?” (p. 97). For Nöth, semiotics has been divided into two domains: semiotics of communication and semiotics of signification, considering the later as a broader domain beyond the study of communication (since it is concerned in the study of signs of non-communicative purpose) but in the end, as Nöth (2014) suggests, the dividing line between these two fields of semiotic research remains fuzzy.

From my point of view, the problem is the implied notion or definition we are using to describe what communication is and what communication processes produce. From the mechanistic view, communication is concerned with the information exchange, and from the humanistic point of view, it is concerned in the processes of meaning production. However, as I have argued before and I will do it in detail over the next section, communication is a process that can be identified in all domains of reality and cannot be separated from semiotic processes. In order to further develop this idea, I will focus on Peirce’s communication theory, considering the work done by Charbel Niño El-Hani et al. (2009) from biosemiotics since their proposal integrates information, semiosis, and meaning into a coherent framework in which communication is also defined as part of the emergence of semiosis in semiotic systems. Please allow me to briefly explore their proposal.

Peirce defined information as a connection between form and matter, and logically, as a product of the extension and intention of a concept. From this first approach, information can be conceived as the communication of a form from an Object to an Interpretant through signs. This is consistent with Peirce’s notion of habit since the authors suggest that information can be seen as a particular habit, subsequently, information can also be conceived as the communication of a habit embodied in the Object to the Interpretant so as to constrain, in general, the Interpretant as a sign. From this point of view, communication is more than the mere transmission of a form. “To put it in more detailed terms, the production of an effect of the Sign on the interpreter results from the communication of the form of the Object (as a regularity), by Sign mediation, to the Interpretant. The interpretation then becomes itself a Sign which refers to the Object in the same manner in which the original Sign refers to it […] According to this approach, ‘information’ can be strongly associated with the concepts of ‘meaning’ and ‘semiosis’. Peirce spoke of Signs as ‘conveyers’, as a ‘medium’, as ‘embodying meaning’. In short, the function of the Signs is to convey the form” (El-Hani et al. 2009, p. 92).

For these authors, the notion of form does not refer to “things” or abstract concepts, but to something that is embodied in the object as a habit, a “rule for action”, a “disposition”, a “real potential” or a “permanence of some relation” (EP 2:391) (Peirce 1998), all notions closely related to the very process of semiosis. Peirce defines a Sign as a medium for the communication of a form, but he sees it as a triadic relation to its Object, which defines it, and to its Interpretant, which also defines it. This argument led the authors to suggest that, if we consider both definitions of ‘sign’, it is possible to say that semiosis is a triadic process of communication of a form from the object to the Interpretant by sign mediation and, it is also possible to understand the idea of ‘interpretation’ “as basically meaning to subsume a given particular event under a general class of events, and, by thus subsuming it, to answer to it in a regular way, learnt by systems through evolution or developing” (El-Hani et al. 2009, p. 93).

In addition, in their study of genes, information and semiosis based on Stanly Salthe’s model of a basic triadic system in biology, Charbel Niño El-Hani et al. (2009) proposed what they have called a multi-level approach to the emergence of semiosis in semiotic systems, a proposal built upon Peircean semiotics, and particularly upon his theory of sign construction and triad formation. Their model addresses semiotic processes three levels at a time, according to which, in order to describe the fundamental interactions of a given entity or process in a hierarchy, we need “(i) to consider it at the level where we observe it (‘focal level’); (ii) to investigate it in terms of its relation with the parts described at a lower level (usually, but not necessarily always, the next lower level)’; and (iii) to take into account entities or processes at a higher level (also usually but not always the next higher level), in which the entities or processes observed at the focal level are embedded” (p. 139). Then, it is important to mention that both the higher and lower levels have a constraining influence over the dynamics of the entities or processes at the focal level. In this sense, these constraints are precisely the key elements in the explanation of the emergence of entities or processes at the focal level. The authors also recognized that the selection of the focal, the higher and the lower levels depends on the research goals and on the epistemological and methodological approaches on which a particular research is based. From this perspective, it is possible to assume that what is considered the focal level in one research might be different from what is considered the focal level in another research, and the same can be said about the higher and the lower levels. But despite this condition, it is important to mention that a higher-level constraining focal-level semiotic process can itself include semiotic processes. Then, “at the lower, the constraining conditions amount to the ‘possibilities’ or ‘initiating conditions’ for the emergent process, while constraints at the higher level are related to the role of a selective environment played by the entities at this level, establishing the boundary conditions that coordinate or regulate the dynamics at the focal level” (p. 140).

In their model, the authors (El-Hani et al. 2009) argued that an emergent process at the focal level is explained as a product of the interaction between processes at the higher and lower levels, which is another way to say that at the focal level, possibilities or initial conditions interact with boundary conditions. Then, “processes at the focal level are embedded in a higher-level environment that places a role as important as that of the lower level and its initiating conditions. Through the temporal evolution of the system at the focal level, this environment or context selects among the states potentially engendered by the components at the lower level those that will be effectively actualized” (p. 140).

As stated before, what is selected for particular observation is what occurs at the focal level, which is not a fixed phenomenon rather it depends on the observer’s interest or on their particular research goals. However, the authors consider that what we observe at the focal level are semiotic processes described as chains of triads. This, in turn, is what makes it possible to study the interaction between semiotic processes as potentially determinative relations between the lower level or Micro-semiotic level, and the higher level or Macro-semiotic level. In this sense, it is important to point out that, that while we can observe chains of triads at the focal level, at the macro-semiotic level we are able to observe networks of chains of triads. On the other hand, “the micro-semiotic level concerns the relations of determination that may take place within each triad S-O-I. The relations of determination provide the way the elements in a triad are engaged in semiosis” (p. 141).

As we can see, the authors’ proposal is based on the idea of the semiosis developed by Peirce in which an Interpretant can be a Representamen of a new triad at the same time. This is a basic criterion that is used in arguing that semiosis cannot be defined through an isolated triad but requires, as a minimal condition, the establishment of some kind of relation to a general chain of triads since a triad is a final point but also a new starting point. Furthermore, what we observe as a particular triad is, in fact, a particular moment of an endless semiosis process. This is the argument the authors use for asserting that, at the micro-semiotic level, a triad [ti = (Si, Oi, Ii)] can only be defined as such in the context of a chain of triads as previously shown [T = {…, ti−1, ti, ti + 1,…}]. Then, what will emerge at the focal level is a process that results from the interaction between the micro-semiotic and macro-semiotic levels. In addition, the Micro-semiotic level involves the relations of determination within each triad, and ultimately, the Macro-semiotic level involves networks of chains of triads in which every individual chain is embedded.

At this point, it is important to recover the idea of Dynamical and Immediate Objects proposed by Peirce, since it is an important distinction in the proposal made by the authors on semiosis emergence. Hence, what Peirce argued is that every Representamen is related to the particular Object it represents, but given that it cannot Represent the whole Object (Dynamical Object) it has to select a particularity to be Represented by the sign, which is, in turn, the Immediate Object. This is why Peirce considers that “[…] we must distinguish between the Immediate Object – i.e., the Object as represented in the sign – and the Real (no, because perhaps the Object is altogether fictive, I must choose a different term; therefore), say rather the Dynamical Object, which, from the nature of things, the Sign cannot express, which it can only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by collateral experience” (EP 2:248) (Peirce 1998). Then, it is possible to argue that the Immediate Object is the Object as the Sign itself represents it and whose Being is thus dependent upon the Representation of it in the Sign (CP 4:536) (Peirce 1931–1935). This distinction is very important since it is what I will use as a general principle to illustrate how theories evolve in time and how it is possible to understand their emergence, continuity, and rupture by recognizing how Representamens are Related to Dynamical and Immediate Objects and how that determines the construction of some Interpretants and not others.

El-Hani et al. (2009) use this principle to argue that at the micro-semiotic level initiating conditions are established and, in this process, it is possible to assume that every chain of triads always indicate the same Dynamical Object through a series of Immediate Objects, then, “the potentialities of indicating a Dynamical Object are constrained by the relations of determination within each triad. That is, the way O determines S relatively to I, and S determines I relatively to O, and then how I is determined by O through S lead to a number of potential ways in which Dynamical Objects may be indicated in focal level semiosis” (p. 143). However, this double determination process of potential and boundary conditions taking place at the focal level lead the authors to include a necessary distinction between potentiality and actuality. In this sense, it is possible to talk about a ‘potential Sign’, a ‘potential Object’, and a ‘potential Interpretant’. In the first case, a potential Sign is something that may be the Sign of an Object to an Interpretant; in the second case, a potential Object is something that may be the Object of a Sign to an Interpretant; and finally, a potential Interpretant is something that may be the Interpretant of a Sign. Consequently, the micro-semiotic level is the domain of potential Signs, Objects, and Interpretants. I will recover this idea later on when I discuss the levels of semiosis proposed by Brier (2008), however for the authors,

… we can consider a whole set of W of possible determinative relations between these three elements, which can generate, in turn, a set of possible triads. These triads cannot be fixed, however, by the micro-semiotic level, since the latter establishes only the initiating conditions for chains of triads at the focal level. To fix a chain of triads, and, consequently, the individual triads defined within that chain, boundary conditions established by the macro-semiotic level should also play their selective role. That is, networks of chains of triads constitute a semiotic environment or context which plays a fundamental role in the actualization of potential chains of triads. Chains of triads are actualized at the focal level by a selection of those triads which will be effectively actualized among those potentiality engendered at the micro-semiotic level. After all, a triad ti = (Si, Oi, Ii) cannot be defined atomistically, in isolation, but only when embedded within higher-level structures and/or processes, including both chains of triads T = {…, ti − 1, ti, ti + 1,…} and networks of chains of triads ST = {T1, T2, T3,…, Tn} (El-Hani et al. 2009, p. 144–145).

With what has been stated so far, it is possible to formulate a precise definition of semiotic and communicative systems, as both systems are very important for this framework of study. Following the authors’ model,Footnote 3 which is also based on Peircean semiotics, it is possible to argue that a semiotic system emerges from the external and relational quality that signs in order to link with other signs, as well as their internal quality of connecting I, O, and R, which in turn can be seen as the emergence of semiosis internally and externally produced, that is, the semiosis produced among signs and within signs. In this sense, the systemic nature explicitly states the importance of relations rather than entities, and makes it possible to conceive semiotic systems as systems of interrelated signs that share the same ground or Object of reference, which in turn can also be seen as a chain of triads related by the same biological, artificial or logical principle. Then, it is important not to confuse a semiotics System with an observer, from the semiotic point of view, for in the first case we have a “stable” chain of triads (signs) while in the second case we have a system capable of using, producing, reproducing and understanding that chain of triads within its own biological, artificial or human nature. However, at the same time, a semiotic system can be conceived as a system that is causally affected by the presence of signs and, in consequence, can also be understood as a system in which the main activity is the production of semiosis. This second approach indicates that a semiotic system can be construed both as a stable set of related signs grounded on a general principle, and as a system capable of using, producing, understanding and, in some sense, reacting to the presence of signs.

Then, a semiotic system is a set of signs and sign processes of different nature grounded on a particular principle related to its own logical, biological or cultural nature that makes the emergence of semiosis possible through the actualization of potential signs, triads, chains of triads and networks of chains of triads. A semiotic system is fundamentally a logical system but in order to operate as a system capable of recognizing, using or understanding signs it has to be actualized in a particular domain of reality. For example, we can consider living organisms as semiotic systems, which suggests the need to refer to them in terms of biological semiotic systems whose operations are biologically determined, and in the case of human beings, we can talk in terms of human semiotic systems that are biologically and culturally determined. In addition, this definition is also important for the clarification of communicative systems and the way they are related to semiotic systems, since the former is related to communication processes (communication) and the latter is related to semiotic processes (semiosis). For this reason, I consider that at this point it is extremely important to distinguish between communication and semiosis.

According to Dario Martinelli (2007) in his handbook proposal of Zoosemiotics (the field of semiotics applied to the animal kingdom) what usually happens is that we tend to confuse semiosis and communication just because communication is the most evident and predictable manifestation of semiosis. For Martinelli (2007), communication should be understood as just one form of semiosis and not as the semiotic process as a whole. However, I do not agree with Martinelli’s proposal, since I consider that communication and semiosis cannot be considered separate from each other, but rather always operating at the same time and on the same theoretical and empirical level.

Thus, both of them are related to the same phenomenon but they partake it in a very different way. According to John Deely (2006), from the semiotic standpoint we do not directly study sign action in the natural and cultural worlds, but only the knowledge of that action in so far as it is consistent with the systematic body of knowledge we tend to call semiotics. Then, semiosis is a way to name a particular aspect of a process in which something is functioning as a sign for an observer but it does not explain the nature of the action itself, and that is where communication is a key element since that action is, in fact, communication.

As mentioned before, Semiosis and Communication are two sides of the same phenomenon and they cannot be separated in empirical research, but given that they share the same ontological dimension it is easy to confuse them. Thus, since semiosis requires as a minimal condition the presence of an observer to whom something functions as a sign, communication is the action in which something is operating as a sign. As I have already argued, an observer is a Semiotic System and it is not necessarily related to human beings but to anything capable of using, producing, reproducing or recognizing something as a sign. Communication is action and Communicative Systems are sets of elements involved in a particular action. Communication and Semiosis share a theoretical and methodological environment but they describe different aspects of the same phenomenon. In other words, a communicative system is a set of general principles regarding a particular kind of system (logical, biological, or cultural) that makes possible the interaction between elements through the actualization of relations by sign action and, by extension, defies the decomposition of a system. In this sense, if a semiotic system is capable of actualizing signs, triads, chains of triads and networks of chains of triads it is because there is a set of general principles – a Communicative System – that allows the system to actualize them through action. As we can see, both semiotic and communicative systems are involved in the process of meaning production, reproduction, and actualization, which are the basic operations of the three systems I have proposed. For this reason, I find it necessary to clarify that thus separation is only for methodological purposes. Through the combination of Semiotic and Communicative systems we have as a result a “meaningful action”, regardless of the nature of the systems and of who or what the observer is. In the end, both systems are related to the emergence of semiosis through sign action.

Now, allow me to briefly summarize what I have argued so far. In the first section, I explored how communication can be defined from the cybernetic point of view and from which communication was conceptualized as that what defies the decomposition of a dynamic system, and that what makes the behavior of one variable incomprehensible without references to the behavior of the others. In the most complex system, those identified as autopoietic –or systems of production in Krippendorff’s terms– communication is explained in what the production of and/or by a whole system differs from the production of and/or by its component parts. Including how the interaction of components copies, reproduces or produces itself in space. In systems of production, communication is the ingredient of material organization. However, as I have argued before, these definitions do not explain what is the relationship between communication and meaning-making processes or what are their main differences and complementarities. In order to explore those problems, I discussed some basic notions of semiotics and Peircean semiotics from which communication was defined as a system and as a set of general principles regarding a particular kind of system (logical, biological, artificial) that makes the interaction between elements possible through the actualization of relations by sign action. Following Sebeok’s main argument in which he considers that there could not have been semiosis prior to the evolution of life, it is also possible to argue that there could not have been communication prior to the evolution of life, rather that once a living organism was established it is possible to consider that the three systems evolve together: biological systems, semiotic systems, and communicative system.

Just as semiosis can be identified in the inner world in the form of endosemiosis and to study its evolution towards social semiosis, it is necessary to find out the same idea regarding the communicative phenomena. Is it possible to find communication in the same dimensions semiosis is located? And, again, as Winfried Nöth (2014) has pointed out, “Are all process of semiosis processes of communication?” (p. 97). I will explore precisely the relationship among communication, semiosis and living organisms in the following section based on Søren Brier’s proposal, since from my point of view, cybernetics and semiotics are not opposed but complementary perspectives, however, an epistemological integration is still needed, and that is what cybersemiotics is about.

3.4 Describing Communication from the Point of View of Cybersemiotics

According to Søren Brier (2008), the first problem concerning the information and semiotic paradigms is that both are connected to cognition, information, meaning and communication but from a different perspective. The former, often referred to as the “information processing paradigm”, has been constructed on an objectivist conception of information combined with a computational approach in an algorithmic sense, which makes it a mechanistic and rationalist paradigm, however, this mechanistic approach cannot offer an understanding of human signification or its biological, psychological or social conditions, which makes the need for a universal science of information (one that is capable of including all these aspects into a general theoretical framework) evident. This is what led Brier (2008) to question “whether the functionalistic and cybernetic research must be viewed as complementary to a phenomenological-hermeneutical-semiotic line of theorizing on signification and meaning that ignores ontological questions outside culture, or whether these might be united within one paradigmatic framework through a revision of the ontological and epistemological foundations of both classical and modern sciences, as Peirce attempts” (p. 37).

As I have argued before (Vidales 2017a), although the mathematical theory of communication, the first integrative proposal in the history of communication theory, defined information as a statistical property of a particular message, it was very clear in pointing out that the meaningful dimension of a message was irrelevant to the theory.Footnote 4 Therefore, the important aspect was that the actual message is the one selected from a set of possible messages, which implies that a system must be designed to operate for each possible selection and not only for the one that will be actually chosen since this is unknown at the time of the design. In consequence, the “meaningful” aspect of messages was irrelevant to the theory, something that can be considered as the first conceptual problem inherited by it. However, at the same time, the mathematical theory proposed a concept of information within a very clear framework, which can be seen as one of its most important contributions to modern information sciences. The second integrative proposal is the one derivative from cybernetics, a theoretical proposal that I have explored in detail in the first section of this text.

However, Brier (2008) considers that some of the research done on systems, cybernetics and information sciences was built on metaphysical notions that led to a vague type of functionalism, and they do not take a clear stand on first-person experience, the qualia of perception and emotions, and the problem of free will. “Modern versions of the pan-informational paradigm often combine functionalism with non-equilibrium thermodynamics, non-linear systems dynamics, deterministic chaos theory, and fractal mathematics as descriptive tools. But again, we seldom encounter systematic reflection on how these versions differ from mechanistic views […] or on the nature of a concept of meaning and how signification arises in mind” (Brier 2008, p. 39–40). This is why a signification theory is needed and the reason why Brier integrates the semiotic and the informational paradigms.

The importance of the semiotic paradigm is that it is focused on the possibilities of meaningful communication in living and social systems –through the search for answers about communication and meaning production in the cultural and historical dynamics and also in the biological conditions of meaning emergence. As I have pointed out in the first section, it is possible to consider consciousness, perception, and the observer in the very process of knowing from the standpoint of second-order cybernetics; however, it is not clear how meaning emerges from this perspective and what its relation to communication processes is.

Peirce founded semiotics as a general logic that integrated a general theory of sign production which helped expand semiotics beyond the human scope and into sign processes within all types of systems, including (of course), living systems. For Peirce, “it seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning; but the explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the entire universe, not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part […] is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs” (CP 1. 573–574) (Peirce 1931–1935). Later on, Brier (2008) suggests that in the semiotic philosophy of Peirce, feelings, qualia, habit formation and signification are basic ontological constituents of reality, which means that the semiotic paradigm should be able to penetrate beyond chemistry and physics, a movement that has been seriously developed in biosemiotics research, at least regarding living systems (Hoffmeyer 2008; merrell 1996, 2013; Sebeok 2001a, b; Martinelli 2007; Favareau 2010).

But if we consider, as Brier does, that it is possible to assume from Peirce’s sign theory that meaning is a basic component of reality that allows the semiotic paradigm to penetrate beyond chemistry and physics, then it is necessary to explain if that indicates that meaning has, in fact, a biological, chemical, physical, social and cognitive components or if it is possible to identify meaning processes at a biological, chemical, physical and cognitive levels. These are two very different alternatives, but the former is the one I believe could lead us to an integrative vision if we consider Peirce’s Synechism and the idea of “Scales” rather than “levels” (West 2017), as I will argue in the last section.

According to Brier (2008), information, matter, and energy are the three basic elements of reality, which implies that natural and objective information had to be present before the emergence of human minds and, in this sense, information is something more important than the observer or its interpreter. “Information is viewed as an objective and universal law-determined thing that both humans and machines absorb into their minds from nature, change by thinking, and bring it to society throughout language” (Brier 2008, p. 54). However, in order to explore this possibility, it is first necessary to explore the human mind as first-person experience, intelligence and meaning communication –in terms of information, consciousness and sense production– or the reality of first-person consciousness which implies that information sciences must include what has been already developed in semiotics and cognitive sciencesFootnote 5 in order to solve some of the epistemological problems generated by the theoretical integration in an empirical way, particularly because information sciences in the subject area of living systems and humans will not be able to explain vital aspects of cognition and communication phenomena such as meaning, and the constraints of the social context.

On that account, for Brier (2008), the difference between knowledge and information is the fact that information is seen as a minor aspect of knowledge systems, however, they both need a process of semiotic interpretation in order to be meaningful, and thus, it is not possible to consider the meaning of information without the process of signification. Wiener argues that “information is information and not matter or energy”, but Brier adds “information is also not meaning until it has been interpreted by a living system” (Brier 2008, p. 76). This is why Brier (2008) recognizes the need for a different and more sophisticated theory capable of including the cybernetics point of view, as well as a theory of signification in a coherent and integrated framework: “such a theory must be supplemented by a theory of signs and signification, as well as by theories about those biological and social systems for which the difference can make a difference, as cybernetics largely address the circularity of differences in self-organized systems […] to go deeper into an understanding of the process, we must analyze the whole process of sign making, as C.S. Peirce does in his semiotics” (p. 94).

Cybernetics sees information as an internal criterion of an autopoietic system in response to a perturbation, but “only in established structural coupling can signs acquire meaning. Second-order cybernetics brings to semiotics the idea of closure, structural coupling, interpretation and languaging” (Brier 2008, p. 98). Consequently, a paradigm of information, cognition, and communication also needs to integrate first-person consciousness embodied in a social context in the processes of meaning production in its attempt to build a framework capable of integrating information, cognition, sense, and meaningful communication. In the process of connecting information and human consciousness to its biological nature, is that a signification theory is needed, but also a theory of how meaning is produced in living systems, which is exactly the main interest of biosemiotics, a proposal that integrates Peirce’s semiotics to a biological theory of life and evolution. Biosemiotics is a response to the impossibility of cybernetics and information sciences to include consciousness and the phenomenological world into the explanation of living organisms.

For Brier (2008, 2009, 2010), the consequence of these omissions is that humanities, natural and social sciences are transformed into knowledge systems unable to explain their own foundation and who ignore the evolutionist origins of cognitive and communicative human abilities, as well the role the observer plays in the observation process, which in turn, generates a world without the conscious subject, just as Krippendorff (2009) pointed out. This is why it is extremely important to argue that consciousness, meaning, and communication are also natural phenomena related within a continuum, i.e., inside a particular type of connection between mind and matter, but also between nature and culture. From Peirce’s Synechism (the tendency to regard everything as continuous), consciousness and matter can be considered as two ends on a continuum, which includes mind and matter, as well as individual embodied and social mind. In consequence, Brier (2009) considers that there cannot be a theory of signification without a theory of mind that places consciousness centrally in one’s ontology. From his point of view, there are three basic frameworks: (a) one based on a cybernetic informational worldview, as argued on the first section, which is derived from a sort of basic physicalistic ontology that considers within its complexity the emergence of life followed by cognition, and therefore is able to consider consciousness, qualia and feelings. (b) a second one related with autopoietic processes, i.e. the self-creating organizationally closed systems, and (c) the Niklas Luhmann’s triadic autopoietic system theory, which attempts to integrate the two previous frameworks (Brier 2009).

Based on Bateson’s cybernetic theory of mind, Maturana and Varela’s autopoietic theory as well as on Husserl’s phenomenology, Luhmann’s theory is trying to solve the problem of qualia and first-person consciousness and its involvement in communication and language by introducing an understanding of the psyche and socio-communicative systems as autopoietic systems. Luhmann clearly distinguishes living systems or biological systems (cells, brains, organisms, etc.), psychic systems and social systems (societies, organizations, interactions) as different kinds of autopoietic systems –which should be perceived as a way of understanding different types of systems or as different types of autopoiesis and not as describing an internal system’s differentiation. For Brier (2008), Luhmann defines the three as closed systems –closed towards one another as well. “Although all three are present and function simultaneously in human beings, there are no direct ‘inner connection’ among them as systems; they communicate only through interpenetration. This is an elegant cybernetic formulation of the organizational reasons behind the difficulty of integrating the autopoiesis of self-consciousness, the body-mind, and social communication through language” (p. 237). From this perspective it is important to point out that communicative systems are autonomous and have their own intrinsic form of closed organization, two conditions that transcend both biological and psychological autopoiesis, and this is the reason why Luhmann considers that social systems use communication as their particular mode of autopoietic reproduction, since their elements are communication that is recursively produced and reproduced by a network of communications and that cannot exist outside of such a network. For Luhmann, communications are not “living” units, are not “conscious’ units, and are not “action”, furthermore, communication is not a process of “transferring” meaning or information, on the contrary, “it is a shared actualization of meaning that is able to inform at least one of the participants… What remains identical in communication, however, is not a transmitted, but common underlying meaning structure that allows the reciprocal regulation of surprises” (Luhmann in Brier 2008, p. 239–240).

For Luhmann, it is possible to think about a theory of social communication systems as autopoietic systems since social systems use communication as their particular mode of autopoietic reproduction, in addition, the human phenomenon of communication and the production of meaning can be explained as reproductive representations of complexity –avoiding the idea of meaning as something subjective, psychological or transcendental and allowing us to review them in a systems-theoretical way.

It is then, from Luhmann’s perspective, that Brier (2009) suggests what he considers the cybersemiotic model of cognition and communication, which presupposes that in the human realm biological autopoiesis, psychological autopoiesis, and a socio-communicative autopoietic system (language games) work in-between human beings (intersubjectivity). The three autopoietic systems have mutual structural couplings, and the idea of cybersemiotics is “to view the interpenetration between the three organizationally closed systems as a semiotic phenomenon” (p. 48), since signs acquire their meaning just where the systems interpenetrate. From cybersemiotics, signs and language games arise on the basis of the interpenetration of the three autopoietic systems, in such a way, that three levels of communication result: “(1) A behavioral reflexive level of bodily coordination… (2) A level of instinctively based signs games depending on motivated anticipatory felt significations… (3) The socio-linguistic level based on language games” (p. 48).

According to Maturana and Varela, interpenetration is a process that develops over time, generating a coordination of behavior that they called languaging, which is the biological connection between two individuals in a social species, but it is not a sign nor a language game, is the necessary environment for the development of communication as a signification system with its own organizational closure (Brier 2008, 2009). Now, in an attempt to integrate Luhmann’s theory of the human social-communicative being as consisting of three levels of autopoiesis, from the standpoint of cybersemiotics it is also possible to distinguish the following: (a) the languaging of biological systems (coordination of behaviors between individuals of a species at a reflexive signal level), (b) the motivation-driven signs games of psychological systems, and (c) the language games of self-conscious linguistic human beings through the generalized media of socio communicative systems (Brier 2008, 2009). Then, it is possible to assume an exosemiotic level of relations among living organisms, that in the particular case of the human being, it is established by mutual structural couplings, the socio-communicative autopoietic language games, the sign games and the cybernetic languaging through signals. “We should therefore distinguish between language games, sign games and the level of reflexes: languaging” (Brier 2009, p. 48). From this perspective, Brier proposed the signification sphere, a cybernetic concept that delineates the cognitive domain of a living system (including the biological and psychological systems) and that makes it different from the rest of the environment –which is basically experienced as noise.

What we have then is a description of three closed autopoietic systems (biological, psychological and social-communicative) that interpenetrate each other and between them when it comes to relations between human beings (mutual structural couplings, the socio-communicative autopoietic language games, the sign games and the cybernetic languaging through signals) which can be seen as a way to integrate social system’s theory with semiotics and cybernetics in a description of autopoiesis and external semiosis. However, we have to keep in mind that there is also an internal semiosis process, as Sebeok (2001a, b) suggested decades ago, identified under the name of endosemiosis, as I have described in the previous section. While exosemiosis is describing the sign process that occurs between organisms, endosemiosis denotes the semiosis process that occurs within organisms. It is from this perspective that Brier (2008) introduced the term thought semiotics as a way to name the interaction between the psyche and the linguistic system, mainly because “This is where our culture, through (mostly) linguistic concepts, offers possible classifications of our inner feelings, perceptions, and volition” (p. 395–396). It is also important to notice that, (a) these inner states in their non-conceptual or prelinguistic states are not recognized by conceptual consciousness, which is related with our life world, a condition Brier (2008) calls phenosemiotic processes or phenosemiosis, and (b) as the interaction between the psyche and the body are internal, but not purely biological as in endosemiotics, Brier (2008) calls the semiotic aspect of the interpenetration between biological and psychological autopoiesis intrasemiotics. In his words, “These terms remind us that we are dealing with different kinds of semiotics, not absolute qualitatively different systems. We need to study more specifically how semiosis is created in each instance” (p. 396). Finally, Brier (2008) introduced the term ecosemiotics, based on Winfriend Nöth’s proposal, to designate the signification process of non-intentional signs from the environment or other living beings (a process that creates meaning for another organism). As a result, for the author,

we are forced to supersede the old version of the cognitive science based on the use of the model of physical information science and develop theories that can take us a level beyond it to living, feeling and willing systems with spontaneous cognition. The aim is to develop a broader, transdisciplinary, and more evolutionary framework for studying the development of cognition, communication and knowledge in the human life-world. This is necessary to integrate knowledge from the sciences with knowledge produced in the humanities and social sciences about communication, meaning and language in order to gain a deeper understanding of the social production of knowledge and rationality (Brier 2010, p. 1912).

And this is, precisely, the basis of cybersemiotics. Nevertheless, if we are interested in developing a general theory capable of explaining semiosis and communication processes in living organisms from the biological to the social, human, cultural and cognitive levels, it is extremely important to explain what those levels are and how they associate, as well as, how communication and semiosis are both connected and differentiated theoretically. In other words, the question is how to develop a transdisciplinary framework where both a scientific theory of nature and a theory of communication and meaning can be integrated alongside an evolutionary theory of levels of semiosis (Brier 2009). Now, having described the main idea of systems cybersemiotics proposed from cybernetics and semiotics and its interrelations, it is important to develop a final argument associated with the idea of levels of semiosis propped by Brier (2003, 2010), or what he calls “the heterarchical levels of evolutionary cybersemiotic emergence”.

In his proposal, Brier (2010) considers that cybersemiotics is a proposal that unites cybernetic, systemic, informational, and semiotic approaches towards self-organization, selection of differences, and constructivism. However, the modern vision system thinking has on nature is based on multilevel, multidimensional hierarchies of inter-related clusters forming a heterogeneous general hierarchy of processual structures or a heterarchy. According to the author,

Levels are believed to emerge through emergent processes, when new holons appear through higher-level organization. I have been skeptical about the ability of this paradigm to account for the emergence of life and sense experience and later linguistically borne self-consciousness. But if this system and cybernetic view is placed into a Peircean framework, where living potentialities (Firstness) are processes manifested through constraints and forces (Secondness) into regularities and patterns (Thirdness) in a recursive manner from level to level, it makes much more sense. The new emergent level then acts a potential for the development of the next level. Levels can form and dissolve when their dynamical parameters are near critical points. Stabilization requires that the system moves further from the critical point into organizational patterns, like energy wells. But one then has to accept a Hylozoist view of matter as Hylé (Brier 2010, p. 254).

It is from this perspective that Brier (2008, 2010) proposed the five basic ontological concepts that describe, in turn, the five cybersemiotic levels made by the integration of Peirce’s semiotic philosophy. The first level is of a physical nature and is described as quantum vacuum fields entangled by causality, however, it is not considered to be physically dead as in classic physics, on the contrary, from the Peircean view, it is part of Firstness which also holds qualia and pure feeling.

Even when this perspective could be problematic for some physics, this is one of the most mysterious levels we have encountered and that claims for different forms of explanation. The second level is related to Peirce’s Secondness and is of efficient causation. This level is ontologically dominated by physics (kinematics and thermodynamics), but it is also considered by Peirce as the willpower of mind and by modern information science as the differences, which, when interpreted, can become significant and meaningful. In addition, the third level is a protosemiotic level of objective information where the formal causation manifests itself clearly, and it is ontologically characterized by chemical sciences and concepts of pattern fitting. The fourth level is related with Peirce’s Thirdness and it is where life is self-organized and where semiotic interactions emerge, initiating internally in multi-cellular organisms in what has been called endosemiosis and between organisms as sign games. In this level, information can be useful in analyzing life at the chemical level, but from a biosemiotic perspective it is not sufficient to capture the communicative, dynamical organizational closure of living systems. Finally, the fifth level is where the human self-consciousness emerges through syntactic language games, bringing along rationality, logical thinking and creative inferences (intelligence).

Cybersemiotics recognizes the meaningful aspects of the world and of human life as the limits of information theory and cybernetics since “the meaning of information is not information and the information of meaning is not meaning when we only use the term information physicalistic” (Brier 2010, p. 1914). On the contrary, it is possible to argue that the meaning of certain information is defined by the difference that someone experiences from it, therefore, meaning could be seen as the difference that a sign makes to somebody in the world, as it represents something in a way or another, as Peirce suggested. Meaning is a concept that entails the perception of signs but also the understanding of communication, which implies, in turn, the need to find out to what extent it is possible to have information without meaning or, on the contrary, if information is always a particular aspect of meaning. According to Brier (2010), “there is a field of information in the cybernetic world, but there is no field of meaning, as cybernetics and autopoiesis theory do not have a theoretical definition of first-person consciousness as part of their paradigm […] The meaning of information is not informational, but semiotic in the Peircean sense and meaning is therefore not comprehensible to information science” (p. 1915).

In consequence, Brier (2008) argues that traditional information and communication analyses based on data and theories of information transmission have several problems when trying to answer questions about the way knowledge systems are organized and constructed. According to the author, new ways to conceptualize communication could be helpful in understanding the development of social systems as self-organized and self-produced networks. Then, instead of an explanation based on the communication of information, the author proposed an explanation based on the processes of conjointly actualized meaning. This is where the need of a triadic theory of signification, such as that proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce, is recognized and which can be seen as an attempt to provide a theory of signification to systems and cybernetics thinking, and as a very important integration towards the construction of a framework for the study of meaning emergence. According to Brier (2008),

Meanings, then, are the result of a coupling process based on joint experiences. This is an important foundation for all languages and all semiosis. Words do not carry meaning; rather, meanings are perceived on the basis of the perceiver’s background experience. Percepts and words are not signals; rather, they are perturbations whose effects depend on system cohesion. After a long period of interaction, a concept acquires a conventional meaning (Eigenbehavior) within a certain domain. The perception and interpretation of words force choices that open up opportunities for action and meaning.

This conception is complementary to ‘the transmission model,’ in which one imagines packages of information sent via language from a sender to a receiver. In the cognitive view, this is modified so as to consider that which is sent as only potential information. In second-order cybernetics, biological and social contexts are made explicit through the theory of autopoiesis, and there is a clear understanding of the paradigmatic origins of knowledge from different knowledge domains (p. 87).

As previously argued, it is possible to assume that the meaning of a particular type of information is defined by the difference experienced by a system. That is to say, “meaning” can be conceived as a term that suggests sign perception and the understanding of communication, which implies that “meaning” is a difference realized in the world by a sign that stands for something in some respect or capacity, as argued by Peirce. Then, Shannon’s information concept is useful to explain communication processes in the engineering field but not in the attempt to formulate a scientific basis for a general information theory. Therefore, Brier (2010) concludes that there is a field of information in the cybernetic world, but there is no field of meaning, and he also recognizes the importance of semiotics as a general theory of meaning emergence and sign production. As a result, the question of meaning emergence has been shifted from social sciences to biology and has developed the new field of biosemiotics (Hoffmeyer 2008).

Having presented some of the basic ideas of cybersemiotics, it is important to point out that communication from this framework seems to be related with Luhmann’s socio-communicative autopoietic system, however, it is my intention to propose that meaning and communication are two basic processes that cannot be separated and that are the result of the interpenetration of the five cybersemiotic levels. This implies that they are not located in a particular level, but it is possible to find an “expression” of them in each level. Both, communication and meaning have their origins in the very nature of biological organisms, as endosemiosis, but they all go through the psychological and cognitive dimensions of semiosis having their complete realization in social semiosis and in the domain of Lotman’s semiosphere. This is why I consider that what we need is a transdisciplinary concept of communication capable of moving from the biological to the psychological, cognitive and social domains in order to avoid limiting communication to a particular domain or level of reality; however, what is still lacking is an explanation of the physical and chemical levels of reality. Nevertheless, this is also useful not only when it comes to biological, psychological or social phenomenon, but also when it comes to scientific and disciplinary domains. Then, my final argument is precisely the proposal of communication as a transdisciplinary concept.

3.5 The Need for a Transdisciplinary Concept of Communication

As I have argued before (2013, 2015, 2017a, b) and stated in the introduction of this chapter, my intention is to explore the possibility and need of moving from the consideration of communication as an academic field to the consideration of communication as a transdisciplinary concept in order to understand how it is expressed in the various levels of reality involved in the meaning-making process. This suggests the possibility of moving in, moving towards and moving across the five heterarchical levels of evolutionary cybersemiotic emergence– from endosemiotics and phenosemiotics, to exosemiotics, cognitive and social semiotics. This consideration assumes the inclusion of a new and particular vision about objects of knowledge and about the knowledge construction process. Objects of knowledge allude to transdisciplinary concepts, i.e., “concepts which serves to unify knowledge by being applicable in areas which cut across the trenches which mark traditional academic boundaries” (Checkland in François 2004, p. 632). Objects of knowledge have an abstract configuration that it is not particular to any theory or field of knowledge, instead, they are conceptual constructs objectivized in a particular theory and field but that can be extended beyond one particular discipline, and beyond levels of cybersemiotic integration. This means, as I have argued before, that communication is not a social, biological, cognitive or physical phenomenon, but that communication is a process that involves a social, biological, cognitive, and physical component and the fact that some components are highlighted in particular processes or research projects is a matter of scales and not of levels of organization. The same could be said about semiosis. Semiosis and communication emerge as a result of the five cybersemiotic levels, and the fact that we focus in a particular level rather than in another is just a matter of scales (West 2017) and does not imply that they are ontologically defined in a particular domain of reality either biological, social or physical.

According to François (2004), these general concepts or models are identical representations obtained from specific situations, interrelationships or processes. Each discipline studies its problems on its own terms; nevertheless, there are some common features that underlay apparent dissimilar situations or configurations, and that is what the construction of general frameworks and transdisciplinary concepts consist of and the reason why communication can be defined as a transdisciplinary concept. As I have argued in previous sections, communication can be defined from the cybernetic point of view as that what defies the decomposition of a dynamic system, and that what makes the behavior of one variable incomprehensible without references to the behavior of the others. In the most complex system, those identified as autopoietic systems, communication explains in what the production of and/or by a whole system differs from the production of and/or by its component parts. Including how the interaction of components copies, reproduces or produces itself in space. In autopoietic systems, communication is the ingredient of material organization. On the other hand, from the semiotic point of view, communication is defined as a system and a set of general principles regarding a particular kind of system (logical, biological, and artificial) that permits the interaction between elements through the actualization of relations by sign action. Following Sebeok’s main argument in which he considers that there could not have been semiosis prior to the evolution of life, it is also possible to argue that there could not be communication prior to the evolution of life, but once a living organism was established, then it is possible to consider that the three systems evolved together: biological systems, semiotic systems, and communicative system.

What has been described before are some of the main features we have to examine if we want to consider communication as a transdisciplinary concept, however, we still have to explain how this is related with the five heterarchical levels of evolutionary cybersemiotic emergence described before. How can communication be related with the first and second levels of physical nature, the third level of objective information, the fourth level of endosemiosis and signs games, and the fifth level of the human self-consciousness? Brier (2008) clearly suggests that exosemiosis, endosemiosis, phenosemiosis and intrasemiosis are terms that remind us that we are dealing with different kinds of semiotics, not absolute qualitatively different systems, a situation that implies the need to study more specifically how semiosis is created in each instance. However, my main thesis is that communication is a key concept to understand how it is possible to identify the movement within and across levels of reality based on the idea of scales rather than on the idea of levels itself. Moving from the physical and biological levels to the cognitive and social ones is an effort that describes scales of reality in all levels and semiotic processes involved. In explaining social semiosis there is implicitly an endosemiotic level involved as Sebeok argued long time ago, but focusing our attention in social semiosis, endosemiosis, sign games or phenosemiosis is just a matter of scales and not of levels, since at least the fourth levels are present in each communicative and semiotic phenomenon described. This is why I have mentioned before that communication is not a social, biological, cognitive or physical phenomenon, but a process that involves a social, biological, cognitive, and physical component and the fact that some components are highlighted in particular processes is a matter of scales and not of levels of organization.

The main argument is that the idea of scales could make possible the recognition of the emergence of similarities or isomorphism in each level regarding semiosis and communication processes, something that it is not clear enough when the explanation comes from the idea of levels and hierarchies, even with the proposal of heterarchical levels. Different from cybernetics and semiotics, Geoffrey West (2017) reflected on the idea of scales and scaling from the point of view of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks, and he asked some questions that are closely related with those made by cybersemiotics as well. “Could there conceivably be a few simple rules that all organisms obey, indeed all complex systems, from plants and animals to cities and companies? Or is all of the drama being played out in the forest, savannahs, and cities across the globe arbitrary and capricious, just one haphazard event after another?” (p. 2). The answer to these questions is precisely the idea of scales. According to West (2017), there are an enormous number of scaling relationships that quantitatively describe how almost any measurable characteristic of animals, plants, ecosystems, cities, and companies scales with size. Scaling and scalability is how things change with size, an idea that can be applied for investigating the implication of scaling in semiotic and communicative processes from cells to humans to societies. “The existence of these remarkable regularities strongly suggests that there is a common conceptual framework underlying all of these very different highly complex phenomena and that the dynamics, growth, and organization of animals, plants, human social behavior, cities, and companies are, in fact, subject to similar generic ‘laws’” (p. 5).

For West (2017), there is a close relationship among scaling, complexity, emergence, and self-organization. A complex system is defined as a system composed of myriad individual constituents or agents that once aggregated take on collective characteristics that are not usually manifested in, nor could easily be predicted from, the properties of the individual components themselves. Even when complex systems do not have concepts of experience and meaning, this idea is in correspondence with how humans being are described from biosemiotics and cybersemiotics, and with Sebeok’s (2001a) recognition of our own body as an almost invisible network of semiotic processes. The description of endosemiotics to exosemiotics seems to be the description of a complex system and, in consequence, it could also be addressed as a matter of scales. In addition, West suggests that a universal characteristic of this kind of systems is that the whole is greater than, and often significantly different from, the simple linear sum of its parts. “In many instances the whole seems to take on a life of its own, almost dissociated from the specific characteristics of its individual building blocks. Furthermore, even if we understood how the individual constituents whether cells, ants, or people, interact with one another, predicting the systemic behavior of the resulting whole is not usually possible” (West 2017, p. 23). The collective outcome in which a system is manifesting other or different characteristics from those resulting of the integrations of their individual parts is called an emergent behavior, and the main characteristic of the resulting system is that there is no central control. Now, from the emergent behavior is possible to define also self-organization, that is “an emergent behavior in which the constituents themselves agglomerate to form the emergent whole” (p. 23).

In the process of scaling up from the small to the large, West (2017) argued that this process is often accompanied by an evolution from simplicity to complexity while maintaining basic elements or building blocks of the system unchanged or conserved. Could semiosis and communication be those kinds of elements that are maintained in the process of scaling the five heterarchical levels of evolutionary cybersemiotic emergence? These are the kind of issues that still need to be addressed. In the end, cybersemiotics presents itself as a new non-reductionist vision of cognition and communication that tries to solve the dualistic paradox of natural sciences, exact sciences and humanities by starting from a halfway point between semiotics cognition and communication as basic sources of reality where all of our knowledge is created, and thus, suggests that knowledge is produced within four aspects of human reality: “our surrounding nature described by the physical and chemical natural sciences, our corporality described by the life sciences such as biology and medicine, our inner world of subjective experience described by phenomenologically based investigations and our social world described by social sciences” (Brier 2013, p. 220). From the standpoint of cybersemiotics, there are four different types of historical explanations: the nomological, the biological evolutionary, the social-historical, and the personal-subjective, i.e., four areas of scientific knowledge that attempt to explain reality from their own perspective and, from my point of view, four areas that also describe different scales.

Therefore, the challenge as stated by Brier (2013), is to produce a new paradigmatic base that allows the integration of knowledge produced inside each one of these forms of explanation, in other words, a foundation that will allow the integration of knowledge from the study of the embodied conscience produced by exact sciences, life sciences, social sciences and humanities without reducing the result to only one view avoiding as much as possible any type of reductionism, from scientific to radical constructivist reductionism. Thus, Brier considers that “cybersemiotics constitutes a realistic foundation for a comprehensive understanding of the natural, life and social sciences as well as humanities and that it can provide a deeper understanding of the differences in the knowledge types they produce and show why each and every one is necessary” (p. 223). However, in its attempt to build a transdisciplinary framework of cognition, information and communication, cybersemiotics also needs to build transdisciplinary concepts in order to explain how such integration is possible and to be able to create bridges that allow us to move between and across levels, as well as from one scale of observation to another. Communication and semiosis are two of those concepts, and the need to think in terms of interdisciplinary knowledge is important and necessary for the task of theoretical integration. For Paul Cobley (2010), cybersemiotics is transdisciplinary not just because it is situated between science and humanities and because it evokes knowledge from both, but specifically, because it explores concepts that operate both in nature and culture. These concepts can be located at the most fundamental levels of life, like molecules and cells, as well as in the most complex social configurations like language and symbolic social dimensions.

Finally, as I have argued before (Vidales 2017b), this approach sets forth a completely different conceptual path from the one that we have followed in communication studies so far, thus, it entitles the need for other forms of historical reconstruction and of knowledge construction in contemporary communication research. What we cannot deny is that this approach represents a formidable challenge, since we still have to go through the critique of the foundations in our own historical narrative, and specifically, to start the dialogue with other fields of knowledge in the same level of our conceptual production. Correspondingly, and since theoretical discourse, per se, represents a problem for historical reconstruction, there still lays the need to show empirical evidence of the range and use of a proposal like this. However, it is also about recognizing that the conceptual space of communication exploited in richness and depth in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Communication actively works in border sciences, in contemporary science, and in explanations of life, society, cognition, and meaning. It might be the first time in history that it reaches its current state as a central element of life, which means that we must take a chance and stop reading history to start being part of its construction.