Cybersemiotics:
A transdisciplinary view of information, evolution, signification and meaning
What makes Cybersemiotics different from 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 processes become the ground reality, on which our conceptions of ourselves, action, meaning and the world are built.
