Cell Language Theory, The: Connecting Mind And Matter

414 The Cell Language Theory: Connecting Mind and Matter

b2861 The Cell Language Theory: Connecting Mind and Matter “6x9”

G: About your previous question concerning the Peircian scheme,

I need time to think about. In the last years I had some troubles with

Peirce (although I still consider him as my main inspiration source). It

seems to me that his theory of signs applies very well to biology but is

not sufficiently general, since it does not know information theory,

which is the basic form of communication that is applicable to physics.

S: There were some recent posts in the biosemiotics and Peirce lists

that discussed Peirce’s writings on information. (If you are interested,

I can try to dig out them for you.)

I have long thought that, since signs can be viewed as the carriers of

information, semiotics can be considered as the theory of information,

or the information theory can be thought of as a branch of semiotics.

G: Here, I prefer to speak of the basic operations of dealing with infor-

mation: processing, sharing and selecting. Although these aspects have

a certain analogy with Peircean schemes, they need also to be kept dis-

tinct. Moreover, signs are not clearly distinguished from the higher form

of symbolic thinking, and although Peirce has devoted some thought to

symbols he has never developed a ripe and articulated theory about.

S: As you know Peirce recognized three kinds of signs — icons (signs

related to their objects by similarity), indexes (signs related to their

objects by causality), and symbols (signs related to their objects by

habits, conventions, or laws). He then defines 10 classes of triadic

signs, each of which consisting of three what I call “elementary signs”

(see Sections 6.6.1 and 6.6.2; my addition).

My feeling is that Peirce’s semiotics is rich enough to provide a sound

and versatile theoretical framework to analyze QM viewed as a system

of signs referring to the fundamental reality. (This agrees with the

Josephson thesis, Statement (4.8); my addition.)

G: Finally, I am not satisfied with his Firstness–Secondness–Thirdness

because these are categories while, according to what I understand of

QM, the basic reality of our world cannot be grasped with categories.

S: I think there is a fairly good correlation between the structure of QM

and Peircean metaphysics [Table 10.4].

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