Special Issue "Cybersemiotics—Integration of the informational and semiotic paradigms of cognition and communication"

Guest Editor
Prof. Dr. Søren Brier
Department of International Studies of Culture and Communication, CBS, Dalgas Have 15, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Website: http://www.brier.dk/SoerenBrier/index.htm
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• Cybersemiotics
• Informatics and computational philosophy
• Signification and biosemiotics
• C.S. Peirce's semiotic philosophy
• Semiotic machines
• New transdisciplinary frames of cognition and communication

Title: The Nature of Language
Author: Charles E. Bailey
Affiliation: Director, Global Institute for Scientific Thinking, Inc.; E-mail: cbailey1-at-cfl.rr.com
Abstract: This paper examines the challenges of understanding the relationship between natural language, human reasoning and behavior, and natural world reality, and the implications for accurate reasoning. The relationship will be explored with corollaries that define a functional relationship connecting usage-based language theories, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, complexity theory, evolution, physics, and the natural world. This paper contends that this functional relationship applies to cognition and can best be understood with a reference point based on cognitive accuracy, i.e. information accuracy, information processing accuracy, and event-level accuracy. For this purpose, accuracy is defined as achieving the narrowest possible difference between probabilistic assumptions and predictions on the one hand, and an external, predetermined reference point based on reliable knowledge and relative cause–and-effect observation on the other. Cognitive accuracy provides theoretical idealized global optima for identifying and evaluating deviations in accuracy. More optimal solutions will more likely be achieved when the environment (domain space) is accurately defined, policies and information are accurately processed, and the relevant and available feedback is accurately accounted for. Appropriately matching language to observed external natural phenomena can enable humans to apply cognitive accuracy to their own behavior, and to their understanding of the natural world around them. Using such a natural reference point can also establish a functional idealized optimum for reliably and more accurately evaluating human interactions within a dynamic uncertain (probabilistic) environment, i.e., the natural world represented as accurately as possible. This evaluation relies on and supports the benefits of developing information, conclusions, and solutions as accurately, effectively, adaptively, and robustly as possible.
Keywords: evolution, natural language, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, complexity theory, reasoning and behavior, novelty search, entropy, probability as logic.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Entropy, Information and Information Processing
Author: Jing Chen
Affiliation: School of Business, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada; E-Mail: chenj@unbc.ca
Abstract: Systems move from low entropy state to high entropy state. This directional movement is the source of useful energy that drives, among other things, the living organisms. Since all living organisms need to tap into this entropy flow for survival, it is inevitable that human mind is evolved to identify entropy as the most fundamental concept. This explains why information, which we collect for our survival, is represented mathematically as the entropy function. Since information processing is costly, human mind is evolved to store huge amount of data and relations to reduce its cost. At the same time, the stored data and relations also generate bias in information processing. The entropy theory of information offers a simple understanding about learning, knowledge and communication.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: The Antithesis of Entropy: Biosemiotic Communication from Genetics to Human Language with Special Emphasis on the Immune Systems
Author: John Oller
Affiliation: Department of Communicative Disorders, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA 70504-3170, USA; E-Mail: joller@louisiana.edu
Abstract: Entropy is defined as the antithesis of narrative-like reports that agree with each other and with material facts. The abstract convergence (strictly formal, logical agreement) of "true" representations makes them formally more complete than fictions, errors, lies, and nonsense each of which is strictly defined and shown to have many known analogs in biosemiotic systems. True representations, formally defined, following Peirce's exact logic, provide the necessary foundation for functional biosemiotic systems (and for validity in the sciences). The theory is applied to the communication systems of immunity and detoxification where breakdowns enable disease conditions such as cancers, AIDS, and self-immune conditions.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Rehabilitating Information
Author: Gary Fuhrman; E-Mail: gnox -at- xplornet (dot) com
Abstract: In an early paper on logic, C.S. Peirce defined a concept of ‘information’ very different from the later conceptions which gave rise to ‘information science’, and indirectly to current problems such as an overload of ‘useless information’. A study of further developments in Peircean semiotics, and in related conceptual frameworks including the cybernetics of Bateson and the cybersemiotics of Brier, reveals deep relations between Peirce's concept of information and the irreducibly triadic nature of signs. Since all sciences, indeed all cognition and communication, are semiotic processes, the core semiotic principle implicit in the Peircean concept may clarify how our uses of language and other symbolic media can actually INFORM – and thus transform – the way we humans inhabit the biosphere.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: The Cybersemiotics and Info-Computationalist Research Programmes as Platforms for Knowledge Generation
Author: Gordana Dodig Crnkovic
Affiliation: Mälardalen University, School of Innovation, Design and Engineering, Box 883, 721 23 Västerås/Eskilstun, Sweden; E-Mail: gordana.dodig-crnkovic@mdh.se
Abstract: Both Cybersemiotics and Info-computationalist research programmes present attempts to unify understanding of information, knowledge and communication. The first one takes into account phenomenological aspects of signification insisting on the human experience "from within". The second adopts the view "from the outside" based on scientific knowledge, yet with an observing agent able to computationally structure information in a self-reflecting loop.
The process of knowledge generation, embodied into networks of living agents constantly interacting with the environment and developing through evolution is studied in both frames of reference. The article argues for understanding of the two approaches as language games in two different languages applicable to different domains.
There are contexts in which we deal with complex informational structures where high level languages (such as Cybersemiotics) are the appropriate tools for conceptualization and communication. On the other hand, in order to understand basic mechanisms such as the evolution of informational structures from pre-biotic/chemical to living biological systems and complex intelligent organisms and their networks, which are scientifically tractable, a basic level language of info-computationalism is suitable.
The article discusses differences and convergences of two approaches which placing focus on distinct levels of abstraction help elucidate complex mechanisms of knowledge production.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Entropy, Function and Evolution: Naturalizing Peircian Semiosis
Author: Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Affiliation: East-West Centre for Business Studies and Cultural Science, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management gGmbH, Sonnemannstraße 9-11, 60314 Frankfurt am Main, Deutschland; E-Mail: c.herrmann-pillath@frankfurt-school.de
Abstract: Cybersemiotics claims that the standard uses of the Shannon information concept in cybernetics approaches to systems with cognition and communication fail to account for the semantic dimension of semiosis. Although I share this criticism, I think that the potential of a physicalist, or, more generally, naturalistic approach to semiosis is still left unexploited. This also poses limitations on the proper recognition of the role of entropy in semiosis. Entropy comes into full play if semiosis is seen as a purely physical process involving causal interactions between physical systems with functions. Functions emerge from evolutionary processes, as conceived in recent philosophical contributions to teleosemantics. In this context, causal interactions can be interpreted in a dual mode, namely as standard causation and as observation. Thus, a function appears to be the interpretand in the Peircian triadic notion of the sign. Recognizing this duality, the Gibbs/Jaynes notion of entropy can be added to the picture, which shares an essential conceptual feature with the notion of function: Both concepts are a part of a physicalist ontology, but are observer relative at the same time. Yet, from the teleosemantic viewpoint observer relativity does not imply reference to mental states. Thus, it is possible to give an account of semiosis within the entropy framework without limiting the notion of entropy to the Shannon measure, but taking full account of the thermodynamic definition. Finally, from this viewpoint, mental facts such as qualia or intentions emerge out of causal interactions between self-referential physical systems with functions. Therefore, mental facts are not ontologically autonomous, but merely are a special aspect of a particular kind of physical functions.

Type of paper: Article
Title: Cybersemiotics: Information, evolution and meaning
Author: Søren Brier
Affiliations: Professor, Department of International Culture and Communication Studies, Centre for Language, Cognition, and Mentality at Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark; E-Mail: sb.ikk@cbs.dk
Abstract: What makes Cybersemiotics different than other approaches attempting to make a transdisciplinary theory of information, cognition and communication, is its combination of four approaches: 1. A physio-chemical basic scientific paradigm based on objective empirical truth and mathematical theory but with no conceptions of experiental life, meaning and first person consciousness, 2. A biological science and natural history understood as the combination of evolutionary genetic theory with an ecological and thermodynamic view based on experiental living systems as the ground fact, engaged in a search for empirical truth, but with no theory of meaning and first person consciousness. 3. A linguistic-cultural-social structuralist constructivism that sees all knowledge as constructions of meaning produced by the intersubjective web of language, cultural mentality and power, but with no concept of empirical truth, life, evolution, ecology and a very weak concept of subjective consciousness, but taken conscious intersubjective communication and knowledge processes as the basic fact to study (the linguistic turn). 4. A phenomenological(Husserl) or phaneroscopic (Peirce )first person point of view taking conscious experiences before any distinction between subject and object as the ground fact, on which all meaningful knowledge is based, considering all result of the sciences including linguistics as secondary knowledge. The integrative synthesis is done in two steps: The first one is to accept two major and very different transdisciplinary paradigms as both legitimate: 1. The cybernetic-informational approach leading to cognitive science’s information processing paradigm 2. The Peircean phaneroscopic, triadic, pragmatistic, evolutionary, semiotic approach to meaning leading to modern biosemiotics. The first one is based on an entropic and mathematical definition of information and self-organization in a material and informational world, but with no concepts of first person conscious experience and meaningful linguistic intersubjective communication; the other one is based in a phenomenological intersubjective world of partly self-organizing triadic sign processes in an experiental meaningful world. In the final step the two are integrated in the Peircean framework by inserting the modern development of information theory and self-organizing emergent chemo- biological phenomena as an aspect of semiotic evolution creating the Cybersemiotic framework, where sign process become the ground reality, on which our conceptions of ourselves, action, meaning and the word are built.