Getting back to Frederik's Chapter 6 at 07:14 AM 11/26/2014, John Collier wrote:
We will now look at examples of innate signalling between animals. Unlike the previous examples, which involved only innate perception-action cycles, these involve signalling between different animals, communication of a sort, and typically some sort of coding.
HP: Chapter 6 is full of examples of signaling and communication by special purpose symbols. What is missing is the fact that the existence of all these special purpose Dicisigns and perception-action cycles depends on the information expressed by the general purpose language of the genes. This includes the construction of the nervous systems that can also learn. By general-purpose language I mean a communicable (heritable) open-ended (evolvable) symbol system that instructs all the organism's special purpose signaling, perceiving and acting systems.
Also, I don't find any clear distinction between the language in which the symbolic information is expressed and the consequent physical action that is instructed or constrained. For example, Frederik speaks of the perceptual Dicisign reading the active site followed by the action Dicisign of swimming (p. 145). He goes on to say that this is not merely a causal process and that the semiotic aspect of this process "lies in the fact that the weak local interaction makes a whole class of surface stimuli from different sources give rise to the same typical behavior. Thus it is the fact that the bacterium does not interact causally with the whole of the molecule (before consuming it, that is) but merely weakly interacts with a spot on its perimeter which is a precondition for its turning a semiotic and not merely causal process."
I do not follow this semiosis vs. causality distinction. There is no reason why the actions of the bacterium could not, in principle, be completely causally described by chemical and physical laws given the genetically constructed molecules. On the other hand, there is a good reason why the order of the symbol sequences forming the language of the genes cannot be causally determined or explained by any laws.
Why is this? It is the most obvious characteristic of semiosis that it is not determinable or influenced by physical laws. Physically, insofar as sequences contain information, any order of symbol sequences is energetically equivalent, both in genetic sequences and human texts. This follows from the definition of information and the laws' dependency on energy. Of course, the order of meaningful genetic and human language sequences are restricted by local syntax, the origins of which are poorly understood in both cases.
For this reason I would say that Dicisigns and propositions are a type of information that belong within genetic language along with other types of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_expression>gene expression many of which are only recently being discovered. (I also include epigenetic and any form of heritable information.)
It has been over 140 years since Maxwell's semiotic demon began confusing physicists, but by now it is a well-established principle that any semiotic system insofar as it is interpreted as bearing information is indeterminable by laws; and conversely, any system insofar as it is completely determined by laws does not involve semiosis. The only other restriction on semiotic information is that its use cannot violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
Howard
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