Making Differences Significant: Cybersemiotics’ Non-dual Transdisciplinary Framework of Nature, Mind and Culture

The dominant transdisciplinary view of cognition and communication is the info-computational paradigm, relying on a statistical objective concept of information in combination with Alan Turing’s general idea of computational process. This view, including Gregory Bateson’s ecological “mind”, constitutes a mechanization of mind, leaving out important aspects of lived reality of human embodied-conscious-experience and meaning. By contrast, the framework of Peircean triadic pragmaticist process- philosophical semiotics can encompass all of these aspects due to its phenomenological foundation; but is lacking a theory of the individual embodied mind such as the autopoiesis theory of Niklas Luhmann which has been generalized in his cybernetic system theory. Cybersemiotics is an attempt to integrate those two major approaches to arrive at a true trans-disciplinarity. Charles Sanders Peirce, working that his process of semiosis may be able to produce signification, draws his inspiration from Friederich Wilhelm Schelling’s objective idealistic philosophy as well as from the modern science’s dynamic theories such as thermodynamics. He develops a process philosophy based on synechistic non-dualism, where mind and matter are but two ends of the same continuum and the ontological foundation is emptiness, making a connection between science and spirituality possible if both are open for a falsificationist philosophy of knowledge.