Semiotics is the systematic study of sign processes and the communication of meaning. In semiotics, a sign is defined as anything that communicates intentional and unintentional meaning or feelings to the sign's interpreter.
The term autopoiesis refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts. The term was introduced in the 1972 publication Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells.
Biosemiotics is a field of semiotics and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, biological interpretation processes, production of signs and codes and communication processes in the biological realm.
Medical cybernetics is a branch of cybernetics which has been heavily affected by the development of the computer, which applies the concepts of cybernetics to medical research and practice. At the intersection of systems biology, systems medicine and clinical applications it covers an emerging working program for the application of systems- and communication theory, connectionism and decision theory on biomedical research and health related questions.
An adaptive system is a set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, forming an integrated whole that together are able to respond to environmental changes or changes in the interacting parts, in a way analogous to either continuous physiological homeostasis or evolutionary adaptation in biology. Feedback loops represent a key feature of adaptive systems, such as ecosystems and individual organisms; or in the human world, communities, organizations, and families. Adaptive systems can be organized into a hierarchy.
Emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them. Within the philosophy of science, emergentism is analyzed both as it contrasts with and parallels reductionism. This philosophical theory suggests that higher-level properties and phenomena arise from the interactions and organization of lower-level entities yet are not reducible to these simpler components. It emphasizes the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Historically, emergentism has significantly influenced various scientific and philosophical ideas, highlighting the complexity and interconnectedness of natural systems.
Terrence William Deacon is an American neuroanthropologist. He taught at Harvard for eight years, relocated to Boston University in 1992, and is currently Professor of Anthropology and member of the Cognitive Science Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
The semiosphere is a concept in biosemiotic theory, according to which - contrary to ideas of nature determining sense and experience - the phenomenal world is a creative and logical structure of processes of semiosis where signs operate together to produce sense and experience.
Eva Jablonka is an Israeli evolutionary theorist and geneticist, known especially for her interest in epigenetic inheritance. Born in 1952 in Poland, she emigrated to Israel in 1957. She is a professor at the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. In 1981 she was awarded the Landau prize of Israel for outstanding Master of Science (M.Sc.) work and in 1988, the Marcus prize for outstanding Ph.D. work. She is a proponent of academic freedom, recognising that on such matters, "academic and political issues cannot really be kept apart", although she is not a proponent of simplistic solutions, and shows a preference to describe her own position.
Kalevi Kull is a biosemiotics professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia.
The tree of knowledge (ToK) system is a new map of Big History that traces cosmic evolution across four different planes of existence, identified as Matter, Life, Mind and Culture that are mapped respectively by the physical, biological, psychological and social domains of science. The Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System was developed by Gregg Henriques, who is a professor and core faculty member in the Combined-Integrated Doctoral Program in Clinical and School Psychology at James Madison University. The ToK System is part of a larger Unified Theory of Knowledge that Henriques describes as a consilient scientific humanistic philosophy for the 21st Century. The official Unified Theory of Knowledge website describes the ToK System as:
[A] theory of scientific knowledge that defines the human knower in relation to the known. It achieves this novel accomplishment by solving the problem of psychology and giving rise to a truly consilient view of the scientific landscape. It accomplishes this via dividing the evolution of behavioral complexity into four different planes of existence...The ToK also characterizes modern empirical natural science as a kind of justification system that functions to map complexity and change.
Biological organisation is the organisation of complex biological structures and systems that define life using a reductionistic approach. The traditional hierarchy, as detailed below, extends from atoms to biospheres. The higher levels of this scheme are often referred to as an ecological organisation concept, or as the field, hierarchical ecology.
Claus Emmeche is a Danish theoretical biologist and philosopher, one of founders of contemporary biosemiotics. He is associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, and is head of the Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies at the Faculty of Science.
Jesper Hoffmeyer was a professor at the University of Copenhagen Institute of Biology, and a leading figure in the emerging field of biosemiotics. He was the president of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (ISBS) from 2005 to 2015, co-editor of the journal Biosemiotics and the Springer Book series in Biosemiotics. He authored the books Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs and Signs of Meaning in the Universe and edited A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics.
Harold Joseph Morowitz was an American biophysicist who studied the application of thermodynamics to living systems. Author of numerous books and articles, his work includes technical monographs as well as essays. The origin of life was his primary research interest for more than fifty years. He was the Robinson Professor of Biology and Natural Philosophy at George Mason University after a long career at Yale.
Copenhagen–Tartu school of biosemiotics is a loose network of scholars working within the discipline of biosemiotics at the University of Tartu and the University of Copenhagen.
Artificial life is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline was named by Christopher Langton, an American theoretical biologist, in 1986. In 1987, Langton organized the first conference on the field, in Los Alamos, New Mexico. There are three main kinds of alife, named for their approaches: soft, from software; hard, from hardware; and wet, from biochemistry. Artificial life researchers study traditional biology by trying to recreate aspects of biological phenomena.
The internal measurement refers to the quantum measurement realized by the endo-observer. Quantum measurement represents the action of a measuring device on the measured system. When the measuring device is a part of measured system, the measurement proceeds internally in relation to the whole system. This theory was introduced by Koichiro Matsuno and developed by Yukio-Pegio Gunji. They further expanded the original ideas of Robert Rosen and Howard Pattee on the quantum measurement in living systems viewed as natural internal observers that belong to the same scale of the observed objects. According to Matsuno, the internal measurement is accompanied by the redistribution of probabilities that leave them entangled in accordance with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics by Everett. However, this form of quantum entanglement does not survive in the external measurement in which the mapping to real numbers takes place and the result is revealed in the classical time-space as the Copenhagen interpretation suggests. This means that the internal measurement concept unifies the alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Luis M. Rocha is the George J. Klir Professor of Systems Science at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science, Binghamton University. He has been director of the NSF-NRT Complex Networks and Systems graduate Program in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He is also director of the Center for Social and Biomedical Complexity, between Binghamton University and Indiana University, Bloomington, a Fulbright Scholar, and Principal Investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal. His research is on complex systems and networks, computational and systems biology, biomedical complexity and digital health, and computational intelligence.
Marcello Barbieri is an Italian theoretical biologist at the University of Ferrara whose main interest is the origin of novelties in macroevolution. He has been one of founders and first editor-in-chief of the journal Biosemiotics until 2012; currently, he is an editor of the journal BioSystems. His research field is code biology, the study of all codes of life from the genetic code to the codes of culture. His major books are The Semantic Theory of Evolution (1985), The Organic Codes (2003), and Code Biology. A New Science of Life (2015).
