Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Cosmolanguage
Material Language
Mental Language
(
External World
)
(
Internal World
)
Fig. 6.7 The postulate that the cosmolanguage is manifest in two ways - externally as material
language (including cell language) and internally as mental language (exclusive to
Homo sapiens
?)
of the cosmolanguage, I am in effect postulating that the
language principle
(or more generally
semiotic principles
) applies to all phenomena in the Universe.
In Ji (2002a), I expressed the same conclusion as follows:
... the principles of language (and associated semiotic principles of Peirce, including
rule-governed creativity and double articulation) are manifested
at two levels - at the
material level in the external world as well as at the mental level in the internal world. We
may refer to this phenomenon as the “principle of the dual manifestations of language or
semiosic principles”, or the “language duality” for short. Like the wave/particle duality in
physics, this matter/mind duality may be a reflection of a deep-lying complementarity
which may be identified with the following triad
...
:
(6.26)
Figure
6.7
can be read in two ways - diachronically (or ontologically) as
indicating the evolution of the mental and material languages from the
cosmolanguage, and synchronically (or epistemologically) as indicating that the
material and mental languages are complementary aspects of the cosmolanguage.
Both these interpretations are consistent with the model of the Universe called the
Shillongator proposed in (Ji 1991). Figure
6.7
may be consistent with Wolfram's
munication, and computation as fundamentally related.
6.2.7 Semiotics and Life Sciences
S
emiotics
and the
science of life
(i.e., biology, agricultural science, and medicine)
have had a long and venerable history of interactions (e.g., ancient physicians in
both East and West diagnosed the diseases of patients based on symptoms; farmers
used cloud patterns to predict weather, etc.), but the connection between
semiotics
and
life sciences
in general may have undergone a significant weakening when the
reductionist scientific methodologies were imported into life sciences from physics
and chemistry around the nineteenth century. The reductionist trend in physics
began with the birth of the mathematically oriented physics following the success-
ful experiments with falling bodies performed by Galileo in the seventeenth
century. After over three centuries of domination of physical and biological
