1

Publication data:
Claus Emmeche (2004): Causal processes, semiosis, and consciousness, pp.
313-336 in: Johanna Seibt (ed.): Process Theories: Crossdisciplinary Studies in
Dynamic Categories. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
(This web version may contain typhos corrected in the printed version)
// p. 313 /

Causal processes, semiosis, and consciousness

Claus Emmeche
Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies
Blegdamsvej 17, DK-2100 Copenhagen , Denmark
Internet: www.nbi.dk/~natphil/ Email: emmeche [at] nbi.dk
URL of this paper: www.nbi.dk/~emmeche/cePubl/2004f.cpsas01.pdf
Abstract
The evolutionary emergence of biological processes in organisms with inner, qualitative
aspects has not been explained in any sufficient way by neurobiology, nor by the
traditional neo-Darwinian paradigm natural selection would appear to work just as well
on insentient zombies (with the right behavioral input-output relations) as on real sentient
animals. In consciousness studies one talks about the hard problem of qualia. In this
paper I sketch a set of principles about sign action, causality and emergent evolution. On
the basis of these principles, I characterize a concept of cause that would allow for a
naturalistic explanation of the origin of consciousness. The suggested account of
causation also turns the hard problem of qualia into the easier problem of relating
experimental biology to experiential biology.

1. New approaches to life and consciousness

The past 15 years have witnessed a considerable increase in scientific and
philosophical consciousness studies, including research into the material processes related
to phenomena of consciousness. This is well reflected in the recent development of
cognitive science. Cognitive science studies information processing in the mind in a cross-
disciplinary fashion, drawing on research in neuroscience, psychology, logic, and artificial
intelligence (especially conceptual modelling based on neural networks). Even though
researchers in cognitive science originally did not focus on the study of consciousness,
they found they were unable to escape philosophical questions concerning
conceptualization, the functioning of symbols, intentionality, reference, and knowledge. In
brief, cognitive science found itself saddled with the problem of how to account for the
aboutness aspect of consciousnessconscious processes (like the processing of symbols
and similar intrinsically intentional phenomena) are about something, and usually refer to
something other than itself. Semioticians have not hesitated to point out that these
concepts pertain to significance, and thus are located within the sphere of interest of any
theory of sign processes.
Later on in the 1990s, consciousness studies established itself as a field of
research with separate journals and large conferences. Consciousness studies tries to
 2
overcome the traditional sceptical position of the hard // p. 314 /
sciences that one could not
deal in any serious theoretical fashion with subjective phenomenai.e. with phenomena
which hitherto were studied only phenomenologically from within (or even by very
naive forms of introspection), or by relating data from without of human brain activity
(gained by various scanning methods) with the verbal reports of experimental subjects
communicating their simultaneous experiences from within of doing different tasks. In
the same period, traditional philosophy of mind seemed to rediscover its proper object
(Searle 1992) and again became a flourishing area of research. Indeed, philosophy of mind
was inspired by cognitive science to state (or reformulate) the so-called hard problem of
consciousness (Chalmers 1996). Similarly, cognitive semantics (Lakoff & Johnson 1999)
and new AI or new robotics (Ziemke & Sharkey 2001) increased the interest in new
conceptions of knowledge and language as phenomena that are always strongly tied to the
condition of being realized through a body (embodied knowledge)as enacted
phenomena in interaction with a surrounding environment in specific situations (situated
cognition) and expressed in sign systems whose meaning is grounded in basic metaphors
related to the body and the specific context in which that local agent is embedded.
Furthermore, within the philosophy of biology interest shifted from a narrow
focus on problems within a neo-Darwinian conception of evolution towards a more
semiotic perspective. Within neo-Darwinism, the evolution of species is taken to be the
result of natural selection of the fittest variants of the set of phenotypes (or
interactors), themselves being an ontogenetic and molecular product of inherited
genotypes (or replicators). The neo-Darwinian paradigm operates with an account of
evolution as an algorithmic and mechanist process and due to this fact the emergence of
physical systems capable of processing experience and signification remains a deep
explanatory problem. From the neo-Darwinian point of view natural selection works on
insentient zombies just as well as on sentient animals, provided they have the same
behavioral input-output relations and the same functional architecture as sentient animals.
The natural history of signification remains unexplained, and it is this lack of explanation,
or at least the inconceivability of such a process within a paradigm constrained by a
mechanist metaphysics, that biosemiotics seeks to remedy. Biosemiotics1 does not
contend the concrete findings and explanations of neo-Darwinism as a limited scientific

1 It is beyond the scope of this paper to introduce biosemiotics in any detail. The basic idea of biosemiotics is t o
consider living systems not so much as organized molecular systems, but rather as semiotic systems (sign
processing systems) where the molecular structure functions so as to mediate semiosis, or sign action. During the
last decade more and more theoretical biologists have been influenced by biosemiotic ideas. For brief
comprehensive introductions, see Hoffmeyer 1996, Emmeche et al. 2002, Kull ed. 2001.
 3
research programme, but questions any assertion as to the completeness of that
framework vis--vis all aspects of evolutionary processes. As a corrective theoretical
enterprise, biosemiotics attempts to contribute to an investigation of those questions that
have been dismissed due to the materialist and reductionist assumptions of neo-
Darwinism, // p. 315 /
such as the question about the emergence of consciousness. Other
research areas of theoretical biologye.g., the new form of interactionism in the
evolution-development debate called developmental systems theory (see Oyama et al.
2001) and the transpositions of complexity research in modern biophysics by Stuart
Kauffman and otherscontribute in parallel other missing links for a more coherent
theory of evolution, and serve as additional inspirations for the biosemiotic project. These
theoretical developments open up new perspectives on the processes linking
consciousness, body, organism, and environment, including the qualitative aspects of
consciousness that have been neglected due to traditional metaphysical and
methodological presumptions of natural science.
The purpose of this paper is to offer some suggestions about the concept of cause
that is needed for a biosemiotic understanding of the origin of consciousness in evolution.
This is a much more limited project than trying to sketch any specific theory about the
evolutionary emergence of consciousness. Within the current biosemiotic literature there
are various vaguely formulated ideas about an alternative concept of cause which could be
used to overcome the problem of dualism, and to integrate physical, behavioural, and
phenomenological descriptions of the phenomenon of consciousness. Given that semiotics
takes its departure from the work of C. S. Peirce, the latters ownvery
generalconcept of final causation in Nature is an obvious point of departure (Santaella-
Braga 1999, Hoffmeyer 2002). However, the Peircean notion of final causation needs to
be reassessed in view of the results gained in nearly hundred years of subsequent research
in physics, biology, and process philosophy. In particular, I shall here consider the
possibility of integrating (a) the understanding of sign action and interpretation within
biosemiotics with (b) a special elaboration of the concept of cause from the point of view
of non-linear dynamical systems theory and complexity research (see Emmeche 1997 for a
brief introduction to this field). Thus, I will investigate if such a refornulated notion of
causation derived from biosemiotics and complexity research can contribute to an
understanding of the origin of consciousness in evolutionary history.
 4
2.General principles for a natural semiotics of causes.

Consider the following six principles.

1. There are several types of causes.
2. Causes are real on several levels.
3. Signs act in nature and enter into networks of causes. // p. 316/

4. By emergent evolution new types of causes are generated.

5. Causes are associated with levels of signs.
6. The causes within a complex include causes within the components.
I hold that these principles (which are not logically independente.g. (5) can be derived
from 3. and 4) highlight central aspects of the notion of cause and causation needed in a
comprehensive theory of evolutionary history. My main task in this section is to
elaborate on these six principles and to try to render them plausible.
1. The principle of causal pluralism. Complex things are the outcome of complex
processes and thus they have many kinds of causes; effective, organizational, material,
semiotic. It is a physicalist presumption that only elementary particles harbour the causal
powers of the universe in which we are situated. On the contrary, we must allow that
causes by which we mean real powers in nature, in mind, and in society which change
things, process information, and develop the richness of phenomena in the world can
have a plurality of characteristics, and that we can achieve an understanding of these by
different forms of inquiry. This idea is not new but goes back (although in a substance-
metaphysical framework) to Aristotle who distinguished between different types of
causes.
2. The principle of causal realism on several levels. The causes are located in
nature, not merely in our description of nature, and nature has several levels. Physicists
talk about the quantum ladder spanning from quanta to atoms, molecules, and so on.
Biologists talk about cells, organs, organisms, populations and species. The properties of
the phenomena at higher levels cannot normally be reduced to the properties of the
entities or processes at the lower levels. A thing or entity at level n may have its own
causal powers interacting with other entities at that same level. Such entities may be
found to be an organized processual product of interacting components belonging to level
n-1 (e.g., an organism, being composed of cells, causes changes in other organisms). The
items in what we vaguely call the physical world have causal powers, but the same
 5
applies to phenomena in what we just as vaguely call the psychic2 world. Also social
phenomena like institutions, and abstract entities like numbers and rules of inference, are
governed by constraints with causal consequences. In an institution the individuals are
constrained by social rules, and in her thoughts the mathematician is constrained by
abstract rules, and indeed, even within a cell the molecules are constrained by their
functional relations to other molecules defined by the whole causal network of
metabolism.3 A thought can cause the following thought, and in their modes of being that
are explorable by science thoughts are associated with (i) biological states in the parts of
an organism (especially those parts in the // p. 317 /
nervous system that process signs,
though not exclusively in the brain), and (ii) the environment of the organism. There is
nothing mysterious about conscious and physical phenomena both having causal powers.
Apart from the mentioned physicialist bias there is nothing in the concept of a cause that
would prohibit assigning causal powers to non-physical items.
3. The sign principle. Causes exist in nature, including that very large part of
nature that brings about (generates, process and interprets) signs. This is the semiotic
account of signs as very general processes, active in nature as well as in mind, which
constitute the very precondition for human beingsand living beings in generalto know
their worlds, their Umwelten. This approach to signsversions of which are known since
antiquityreceived its most comprehensive elaboration in Peirce for whom signs are
triadic relations developing in time4 through an interplay between lawlike tendencies and
spontaneous random perturbations, and mediated by an interrelationship to other signs;
or, as one may say, through the interplay with historically determined coding systems.
Signs are not simply mental or psychic constructions in the figments of individual
persons brains, they are relationally extending within the physical space (so that
something physical has to instantiate or realize them); even virtual signs in information
technology systems have this material aspect. Yet this materialist aspect of the sign
principle does not commit us to physicalist reductionism, as higher order spaces are
embedded within, yet irreducible to, the physical space. (The physics cannot be ignored,

2 The adjective psychic (and the noun psyche) is used here for what we in English just as vaguely call
psychological phenomena in order to emphasize that it pertains to the psyche as that emergent property of
some organisms having an animate, experiential or inner world.
3 A detailed exposition of the inter-level relations in a living cell can be found in Bruggeman et al (2002),
see also Boogerd et al (2002).
4 One might think that temporally developing relations are not necessarily processes; they may be
sequences of states. However, in Peirces philosophy, process is of the nature of Thirdness, i.e., the
metaphysical category of mediation, and Peirce considered signs or semiotic processes of interpretation as a
temporally continuous developmental phenomenon (in accordance with his synechism, i.e., philosophy of
continuity).
 6
of course, since physical laws set limits on the amount of information that can be
contained in a limited space defined by some number of atoms, and on how fast signs can
be transmitted; physics cannot tell much, however, about the meaning of signs on higher
levels of signification.) Furthermore, the reality of signs does not imply any thesis about
correspondence or simple isomorphism between the signs of nature and our theoretical
knowledge. The semiotic realism of the sign principle is not a claim about simple
correspondence between language and reality, or about the truth of a sentence being
reducible to its truth-conditions. It is a way to express the reality of the existence of a
plenitude of signs in a human universe; the fact that the human universe is filled with signs
connecting nature and culture in hybrid ways. Implied in the claim of the reality of signs is
that signs have potential or actual causal roles, understood here as a capacity for
determination, which is a causal notion broader than efficient causality (cf. Santaella-Braga
1999). This is evident Peirces definition of a sign. A Sign, or Representamen, is a First
which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be
capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation
to its Object in which // p. 318 / it stands itself to the same Object (CP. 2.274). This doctrine
of the causal reality of signs has a principle of symmetry built in. When we claim that
parts of nature create, process, and interpret signs, we can just as well read such a
statement as the claim that the signs themselves (in ways that are open to scientific
inquiry) generate, turn-over, and interpret natural processes. It is an anthropocentric
presupposition exclusively to restrict all agency to human subjects. The signs deal with
us, just as much as we deal with the signs.
4. The principle of emergent evolution. Throughout the natural history of the
universe a continuous creative evolution has taken place; an evolution of new types of
systems and process types has appeared on higher levels based upon already existing
conditions and simpler components and processes. These levels are described today by
the empirical natural and human sciences in a mosaic of stories about, among other things,
the splitting of the four physical forces in the early universe and the separation of matter
and radiation; the generation of new stars and galaxies and clusters of galaxies; the
generation of solar systems with planets with individual geophysical and geomorphologic
characteristics; the generation of life in a few lucky places (such as here); the creation of
the first multicellular organisms; the rise of animals with mental representations (a new
kind of inner life); the arrival of social systems; the emergence of human beings with
their language and culture; the generation of states and higher forms of civilization. For
 7
each coming of a new type of system there appear some new properties, processes,
patterns and forms of movement, which in comparison with the former types are
emergent in the following sense. They are (a) radically new, that is, with new properties
characterizing the macro-level system rather than its component parts; (b) they are non-
predictable from knowledge about the initial conditions and the guiding laws or tendencies;
(c) they function as real causal constraints for the component processes that partake in
this new whole structure. In (a), radically new typically means irreducibility as
applying to (i) irreducibility in principle (de jure), and (ii) irreducibility in praxis (de
facto). The generation of new system types and the generation of a causal dynamics that
characterizes them are simply two sides of the same coin.
5. The principle of emergent sign levels. There are different levels of natures
handling of information, that is, generation of signs, translation, coding, re-coding and
interpretation of signs within the organism and in between it and its nascent environment.
Sign processes at a certain level (the focal level) can have specific characteristics that
cannot by any simple method be deduced from (or reduced to) lower levels of sign
processing. Such processes would then be // p. 319 / emergent compared to their parts, which
means they have (at least seemingly5) irreducible properties. As emergent relational
entities, these signs have a real existence, sui generis, and partake in a causal network
together with other signs on the same focal level. In this world of signs, which is simply
the signifying aspect of what normally happens in the material world, there are both
continuous transitions and graduations of the intensity6 of the various meanings, as well
as more sudden jumps between levels of signification as in the contrasts between
different coding systems (as in any semiosic architecture, cf. Taborsky 2002). This
dialectics between continuity and borders between levels is not something
incomprehensible and is not true only to signs. It can also be seen in simple self-
organizing systems. For instance, in oil heated in a frying pan one can see the formation of
heat convection cells (drop in some thyme powder or pepper, then its easy to observe):
A singular molecule can be constrained to the middle of a convection cell, or circulate
around in the periphery of the cell, and eventually be transported from one cell to its

5 The restriction seemingly is due to the fact that even though emergent properties are defined in terms of
genuine irreducibility, there may be cases where our claims concerning genuine reducibility may be changed
by developments within science.
6 It may be possible to define semiosic intensity precisely, but in the context of the present exposition this
concept is only implicitly defined (it be clearer from what I say on the 7th principle below). It connotes (but
does not equal) the semantic distinction between intensional and extensional, and the notion of
intentionality in philosophy of mind. However, semiosic intensity (or intensity of meaning) is more like a
measure of the number of possible experiential qualities of a sign process, and thus of the richness of its
interpretation. Thus, it is related to the notion of semiotic freedom in Hoffmeyer (1996).
 8
neighbor as the cells are continuously connected. Yet there are two levels: a level of the
continuous liquid of high viscosity constituted by an enormous amount of individual
molecules, and a higher level forming the pattern of convection cells, the level that
introduces distinctions in the continuum, distinctions of cells, bordering zones, centers,
peripheries, ordered directions of movement.7 The oil that is organized into these cells
(which are far from being alive in any biological sense) can be understood as a form of
proto-semiotics, or physiosemiosis (as sign activity occurs in the non-living chemical
and physical realm, in the background as it were, throughout the material realm
(Deely 1990: 30)). Suddenly the different regions of the liquid are ascribed (objectively
as it were, not due to the ascriptions of an external observer) a new significance, namely,
to be center or periphery of this or that cell. Obviously, we get more complicated
relationships on higher (bio- as well as glottosemiotic) levels between the emergent
meaning of a whole and its component parts, where the parts combine to determine the
meaning of the whole, and the whole conversely determine the meaning of the parts. The
meaning of a DNA sequence depends, among other things, upon its neighbouring
sequences, as the meaning of the individual words in a sentence depends on the meaning of
the whole sentence, and in fact on a wider pragmatic context. However, the meaning of the
whole is also determined by its parts. The individual DNA sequences co-define an
organism (together with an abundance of extra-genetic factors), as the meaning of
individual words co-determines the meaning of a sentence. This interplay between wholes
and parts is a general organicist principle (cf. Gilbert & Sarkar 2000). // p. 320 /
6. The principle of inclusion. The higher levels presuppose and include the lower.
Yet knowledge and understanding of the lowest levels presuppose as a rule the higher.8
The principle of inclusion is important both (A) generally, regarding the emergent levels,
and (B) particularly, regarding signs.
(A) With respect to the emergent levels the implication is that the biological
includes the physical, even though physics does not fully explain all biological
phenomena. A bacterial cell is an organized system of physical processes and doesnt
stop being so while unfolding its biotic and semiotic activities; the biological laws, habits
or regularities governing its metabolism do not in any way break the laws of physics (a

7 For a more fine grained analysis of convections cells, see Swenson 1999.
8 This second, upward direction of inclusion demands a separate treatment, but is not crucial for the
argument of the present paper. Downward inclusion as, e.g., in (A), a biologic process includes physical
processes, and, in (B), arguments including propositions, is primarily an ontological property, while
upward inclusion is a mixture of epistemic and ontological characteristics; e.g., the laws of physics (not
in their ontological sense but in their mode of existence as objects of knowledge) presupposing a knowing
inquirer.
 9
vitalist belief in some non-physical life force governing metabolism or the embryologic
form-generation is rejected). But this does not imply that physics could specify concepts
like genome, flagella, cell wall or signal transduction, needed to describe the
bacterial way of life. The bacterium is one peculiar way to organize a system of physical
processes, and physics cannot fully account for the peculiarities of this organization.
There are biological principles (like the cells regulatory memory encoded in DNA and the
overall structure of the cell) governing the physics of a bacterium. We have a parallel
situation when we look at the psychic level. The psyche of a human being is an
organization of experiential, conscious, and subconscious processes being realized in a
biological (and physical) system, but this organization is emergent relative to the
biological and the physical. It is in this sense that we should consider psychic processes
as included or embedded within biologic processes.
(B) Another important form of inclusion is the semiotic. Sign processes come in
various types, and the higher forms include the lower. This insight can be drawn from the
classifications (and tri-partitionings) of signs in Peirces writings. The following talk about
sign classification easily evokes the impression that a token of a sign type is a particular
entity, which is wrong. However, to re-emphasize, according to the nature of the sign, a
particular sign is a triadic relational process (and Peirce was indeed a process thinker). A
basic partitioning applies to what the very sign is in itself (i.e., a highly virtual being,
apart from its functions as signifying the object and as generating another sign, the
interpretant): The sign in itself can be (1) qualisign, (2) sinsign, or (3) legisign. A
qualisign is a sign of a mere quality like redness. A sinsign is a singular sign of such a
quality, like a token I may experience of particular redness here and now. A legisign is a
sign that is a type, like the word redness, of which the present text has several tokens
(i.e., sinsigns as individual replicas of the legisign redness). In this semiotic context, the
principle of inclusion (cf. Liszka 1996) // p. 321 / implies that the higher categories of signs
include the lower: The sinsign incudes the qualisign, and the legisign includes the sinsign in
the sense that it has to be realized through particular existing sinsigns. Without going into
details it should be mentioned that inclusion also applies for the higher trichotomies of
signs, that is, the tri-partitioning according to the (similarity-, or referential, or lawlike)
relation between the sign and its object, i.e., (a) icon, (b) index and (c) symbol (so that an
index includes an aspect of iconicity; a symbol involves an index of some sort); as well as
the tri-partitioning according to the signs relation to the interpretant, i.e., being (I) a
rheme (a sign which for its interpretant is a word-like sign of qualitative possibility), (II) a
 10
dicisign (a sign which for its interpretant is a proposition-like sign of actual existence),
and (III) an argument (a sign which, for its interpretant is an inference-like sign of a
general regularity, habit or law). Thus the activity of complex signs includes the activity
of less complex signs, which means to say that if, for instance, an argument is put forth,
this involves the processing of singular propositions and individual words. We return later
on to the connection between this principle and its application to emergent levels and to
signs.

3. Elements for a theory of the natural history of experience

From the principles set out in the previous section we can begin to catch a glimpse
of the contours of an evolutionary theory of the emergence of experience in natures
history. The normative idea of experimental biology has for long been one of an objective
science based upon the conduct of well-controlled experiments on observable properties
of organisms; properties any researcher could access from without as being part of a
public sphere of observation. The fact that amimate organisms, including the researcher as
a person, always have an inner experiential spherewe experience phenomena in a way
that has an intrinsic qualitative valuewas not thought to have any role in the idea of
biology after Darwin. Yet this aspect of life, the subject of what we could call experiential
biology, cannot (or at least not without great difficulty) be accounted for by means of the
objective methods of science. Some philosophers talk about qualia to denote the
special subjective character of experiences: the fact that roses (or the molecules they
emit?) have this particular attractive scent; and that a wet dog has a distinctive other
scent; or that light of a wave length of 600 nanometer is experienced as the colour quality
of orange.
Questions such as how do particular properties of the physical acquire particular
irreducible experiential qualities?, or what is the causal // p. 322 /
connection between the
physical universe and our subjective experience?, are often perceived as old and
unsolvable philosophical conundrums. The idea that a handful of principles like the above
mentioned should enable us to solve such questions may sound rather far-fetched. Yet let
us inspect for a moment an early proposal to this effect: that of Uexkulls. A biosemiotic
pioneer, baron Jakob von Uexkll already tried something similar a long time ago by
founding what he called Umwelt-research, i.e. research into the subjective Umwelten of
animals, the Umwelt being the subjective aspect of the world experienced by the organism
 11
(Emmeche 1990, Kull 2001). However, the conservative baron would not have embraced
the 4th principle as he did not like the theory of evolution. One of the advantages of
biosemiotics in its contemporary form, apart from its basic evolutionism, is that it does
not force upon us a dualist metaphysics that separates the phenomena into two distinct
worlds or realms which are afterwards difficult to connect again. Peirce, to booth, was a
monisthe did not believe in the existence of radically different ontological domains or
types of substances and developed his own form of process thinking (Rescher 1996).
His monism was semiotic, and conjoined with an ontological category theory, based on
the categories of firstness (possibility), secondness (existence), and thirdness (reality).
The third category includes phenomena of a lawlike nature; processes; the generation of
habits, and semiotic phenomena.9 Let us see how we can use some of the conceptual
building blocks of the Peircean system in contemporary thinking about life and
consciousness.
The leading idea is to construe the appearance of consciousness in evolution as a
process that in many ways resembles the emergence of other complex systems on higher
levels and here we can draw on insights from biology, complexity research and
cognitive science but without tying the description to a physicalist and objectivist
ontology (implied by many contributions from the mentioned areas) that allows us to
account only for the worlds outer or behavioral properties. From the outset we will
acknowledge that some complex systems (as for instance animals) may have emergent
phenomenal properties which are only directly accessible from within those very systems
themselves, yet such phenomenal properties being no less real than behavioural properties
accessible to public observers. This assumption needs to be backed up by Peircean
semiotics (seeing signs in organisms as including qualitative experiential aspects) as
embedding theoretical framework. As John Searle (1992: 97ff) pointed out, the standard
model of observation for natural sciencepresupposing a clear distinction drawn between
a subjective observer and the object observedbreaks down in the case of consciousness.
This distinction, and // p. 323 /
the model of scientific observation that rests on it, do not hold
for consciousness because of its specific mode of being real, i.e., because of it being at
once observer and observed. The traditional model of observation is a basic obstacle to a
biological understanding of consciousness (a conclusion Searle was not ready to draw).
Even an understanding of complex processes of living systems other than consciousness

9 By the third, I mean the medium or connecting bond between the absolute first and last. The beginning
is first, the end second, the middle third (...) Continuity represents Thirdness almost to perfection. Every
process comes under that head, Peirce (CP. 1.337).
 12
demands multiple, inner as well as outer, perspectives (Van de Vijver et al. 2003). Thus
there are good reasons to include the semiotic approach as a fully valid method on a par
with traditional objective methods, in particularbut not exclusivelyin order to
account for direct conscious experiences. The idea about signs, or sign action, as genuine
and real processes with qualitative aspects is an important key to an alternative research
framework in consciousness studiesand a key to an alternative philosophy of science
with a broader view of what the set of acceptable methods may comprise.
Let me begin with a brief explanation of how the generation of a complex system
affects its parts. In a sense, we are dealing here with the mind over matter formula,
though purged of any spiritistic mysticism and dualism. There is nothing mysterious
about a pattern having the power to govern its parts. The cell-like or beehive-like patterns
that emerge in a process of self-organizing convection cells on a frying pan will to a large
extent determine the trajectories of the individual molecules. After the initiation of the
self-organization of the pattern of convection cells, the movements of the molecules are
constrained by the pattern (cf. Swenson 1999). A lipid molecule in the oil cannot any
longer move around by random diffusion (as in a liquid where the molecules realize
Brownian random motion), but is now forced into an emergent pattern of movement.
This is what the notion of downward causation implies, a modern form of the
Aristotelian idea of a final cause (Emmeche et al. 2000). The form (pattern, or mode) of
movement constitutes a higher level which constrains or governs the movements of the
entities at the lower level. Complex systems studies within physics is rich in examples of
this kind, and once one is familiar with this way of conceiving causality, form, and
interactions between levels, one hardly finds cases in biology where this principle is not at
work, as biosystems intrinsically involve several levels of causality. (One may even
consider the influence of such a paradigmatic idea upon our capacity to identify individual
empirical cases as a further example of downward causation). A certain species in an
ecosystem has to adapt continuously to fluctuations in climate, nutrients, competitive
interactions with other species, and so forth, but if a species is decimated or even driven
to extinction by a competitor, this does not necessarily have to change the overall
dynamics of an ecosystem; a new species // p. 324 /
may simply take-over and occupy almost
the same niche as the former (Ulanowicz 1997). Thus, there are structures in the
ecosystem, e.g., in food webs, that allow particular elements to be substituted and define
criteria for their remaining in the system, and in that way constrain the possible
trajectories of evolution for the elements of the system. In a similar way, an enzyme
 13
within a cell cannot chemically do all kinds of reactions whatsoever, but is functionally
bound to realize very specific catalytic processes; thus one may conceive of function as
the active ascription of significance by the whole to the individual biological parts
(Emmeche 2002).
Downward causation is a form category of cause that must not be confused with
the time-sequential effective cause. The renaissance critique of the Aristotelian variant of
the principle of causal pluralism left one single type of cause as the only legitimate
candidate for use in causal explanations: the effective cause, interpreted as sequential in
time, if A (cause) now, then B (effect) thereafter. In contrast, downward causation
from the emergent level to the individual parts of the system is not something to be
understood as being extended in sequential time; it is rather the form of movement
(through phase space) which the whole system forces upon the individual elements. The
analysis of the physics of complex systems offer some good analogies for an
understanding of this kind of structural causation. From the physical point of view, phase
space is structured; it contains regions of specific types of attractors (e.g., point
attractors, cyclical attractors, strange or chaotic attractors) who delimit the possibilities
that a system in its movement through phase space may choose, even when choices are
real (as in bifurcations). Even though such analogies most often can be drawn only in a
loose and metaphorical fashion, it is still possible to achieve a schematic understanding of
conscious processes e.g., the visual consciousness of a prey animal and its pragmatic
decisions inferred from the percepts of a predator by considering such processes as a
systems movement through an abstract space of possible brain states. This abstract
space is a phase space with certain attractors that govern the activity of local clusters of
neurons (within a certain range of variation determined by random processes). In such a
weak version of downward causation (Emmeche et al. 2000) consciousness manifests
itself as a pattern governing the behaviour of the individual neurons or neuron cluster. In
fact, consciousness can be perceived as a form of movement at a high level that is co-
determining the behaviour at the micro-level of the individual cells and molecules in an
organism and its surroundings. In other words, the idea is to use a dynamical approach to
cognition (cf. Skarda & Freeman 1987; Port & van Gelder 1995; see // p. 325 /
also Newman
2001) but without eliminating or reducing the qualitative aspects of the phenomena of
consciousness.
 14
4. Consciousness and experience

It may sound bizarre to treat self-organizing heat convection cells on a frying pan
as something that should have any bearing upon our understanding of consciousness, but
the basic idea is not some form of panpsychism, according to which consciousness should
be found--though of very low intensity--even in such a simple and purely physical
system. What is expected to be found in lower intensities are specific sign processes, that
is, signs producing and mediating other signs. Consciousness is, in contrast, an emergent
phenomenon, associated with particular forms of sign action in particular kinds of
systems: self-moving autonomous organismsanimals. The concept of experience
describes the continuous scale between very simple and very complex forms of sign
activity. The concept of consciousness describes a jump in this continuum. Experiences
understood as traces of particular significant interactions between a system and its
surroundings that for some period is represented within the system exist as coded even
in pure physical systems (like moon craters who indexically encode earlier meteor
impacts), although it is only with animals as a system type that the full implications of
this concept is unfolded. By drawing suitable distinctions in types of semiotic processes
we may be able to settle the controversy between, on the one hand, a crude
pansemiotics claiming that every phenomenon in the universe is a sign (which is hardly
true since both pure chance and the brute facticity of here-and-now in Peirces terms,
phenomena that are instances of the categories firstness and secondness are not yet
semiotic), and on the other hand, a restrictive variety of biosemiotics, claiming any
semiotic activity to be co-extensive with biological activity, that is, that one should not be
able to conceive of sign processes before the advent of life on Earth. I suggest that we
avoid both alternatives and rather work up clear distinctions between semiotic processes
in physical, biological and psychic systems, and thus conceive of the formation of
experience as a fundamental requirement for the particular type of semiosis that during the
course of evolution is intensified as consciousness.
In other words, I want to promote the thesis that there are comparable semiotic
processes at the physical and biological level. Our contemporary physical universe with
it characteristic chemical elements is a particular way of coding the energy of the
universe (Christiansen 2002, Taborsky 2002) i.e., this energy is not dispersed in a big
undifferentiated porridge, but is exactly // p. 326 /
differentiated into matter and radiation (a
difference that really makes a difference), and matter again is differentiated into the well-
 15
known elements (the periodic table being our rational symbol of the universes own
coding of the elementary particles into different kinds of atoms). Similarly, biological
phenomena are a particular way of coding organic chemistry. The organisms are not
dispersed into a big undifferentiated porridge of macromolecules (lipids, proteins, nucleic
acids, carbohydrates etc.); these substances are coded into the particular autocatalytic
system of the cell with its network of biomolecular signs, which continuously maintain
both the network and its boundary, the cell membrane. The evolutionary experiences
acquired by the cell lines natural history are coded partly in the form of sequence
information in DNA, and partly in the whole complex structure that a modern (pro- or
eukaryotic) cell embodies. If we move further up some levels of organization, to animals
with nervous systems, we can observe in a similar manner that new, psychic, processes
(processes like proprioception, movement, motor coordination, action, perception,
attention, consciousness) do not simply constitute an undifferentiated continuum of signs,
information processes, or computations, but are organized into emergent structures, in
which the animals experiences with its surrounding milieu are continuously transformed,
re-built, confirmed, encountered, felt, challenged, re-interpreted, and which forms a rich
(emotive, volitive and cognitive) structure of feelings, desires and thoughts; something
genuinely semiotic and crucial for the continuation of life of the organism.
Let us take a closer look upon the generation of the specific form of signs we
called experiences, within a macro-evolutionary perspective.10 We can do so by
formulating a new principle, closely connected to the earlier ones:
In macro-evolution experiences are intensified from movement to consciousness.
The idea is (a) to relate consciousness to certain especially salient jumps (or instances of
emergence) seen in physical and biological evolution, primarily the transition from
plants (loosely conceived) to animals i.e. from multicellular organisms with no nervous
system to those with nervous system; and (b) to relate this jump to a leap within the
semiotic aspect of the same macro processfrom experiences as simply past-directed and
fossil-like signs, to active, sensing, feeling, and future-directed signs (i.e. intentions, as
intentionality is often a directedness towards possible future state of affairs not yet
realized). Let us call this:
7. The principle of semiotic intensification. Signs are found at the physical, the
biological as well as the psychic level, and the same applies to experiences (broadly
construed as here). Experiences are // p. 327 /
fossilized signs (cf. Hansen 2000) or quasi-
 16
stable forms of movement that organize the systems past forms of movement in such a
way as to have significant consequences for the systems future movement. As signifying
they are triadic by nature and thus involve (i) the physical carrier of the fossil (the
representamen), (ii) its reference to its significance (the object), and (iii) its potential or
actual future-directed effects (the interpretant(s)). The intensification of the sign process
takes place at several levels, it is at once physical, biological and psychic (see below).
With the emergence of coded autocatalytic life on cell form, the semiotic freedom11 is
intensified at the biological level. Here semiotic intensification manifests itself both by the
appearance of qualitative irritability12 (in cells who selectively can respond to stimuli)
and by the emergence of code-duality in the form of cell-lines (with a digital as well as an
analog aspect, cf. Hoffmeyer 1996) incorporating past experiences into the future. This
semiotic freedom is greatly expanded later on with the neurally based forms of sign action
we observe with the arrival of animals. Intensification is to be understood both as
qualitative and quantitative. One might conceive of measuring the informational band of an
instance of semiotic processing such as cognition in chimpanzees and attempt to
operationalize this as information transmission per time unit in the brain modules where
the processing is going on. But apart from the theoretical and methodological problems
that would be generated by this endeavour, such a quantitative measure does not catch the
qualitative and content-related aspects of this kind of sign action. Yet we seldom doubt
that a chimpanzee experiences a content of its sensing or perceptual measuring the
environment. The idea of semiotic intensification is an attempt to make explicit the
intuition that animals experience their world with greater depth and diversification of
content than plants, and that something similar applies when we compare elephants to
flatworms, or grown-up animals to embryos (fully acknowledging the fundamental
difficulties involved in these kinds of comparisons). In a very general sense of the word
experience one can say that all these systems, even the purely physical, experience
something, get irritated or affected by their surroundings, and store this influence, even
when such stimuli are quite evanescent or produced by chance. In that generalized sense,
process and experience are interrelated in all situations where the process of interaction

10 Micro-evolution designates evolutionary processes within a species while macro-evolution comprises

processes like speciation, generation of longer trends and overall patterns of form relationships in evolution.
11 Semiotic freedom can be thought upon as a generative combinatorics of significations, see Hoffmeyer
1996.
12 The term irritability, denoting the capacity of certain parts of the body to contract when stimulated, was
introduced by the English physician Francis Glisson (c 1597-1677) who saw it as a property of all the
bodys fibres independent of consciousness and the nervous system (cf. Lawrence 1981). It has played an
important role in debate between mechanicists and vitalists over the basic definition of life.
 17
beteween one subsystem (corresponding to an agent) and another subsystem
(corresponding to the environment of the agent) leaves traces in one of the subsystems.
But only in complex living systems (showing history, multiple levels, and built-in genetic,
neural, or psychic mechanisms of selection as an element of the coding processes or
memory) the formation of experience has been able // p. 328 /
to achieve an intensified form
that makes it reach forward in time. This renders such a system anticipatory, i.e., endows
it with the capacity of operating with models of possible future states, including what has
been called mental models. Such models have both a formal outer aspect (as when a
neural code within the visual cortex can be described by scientists as algorithms for edge
detection, object recognition, etc.), and an aspect of being amenable to sensory experience
from within the system (being able to be sensed as colours, smells, sounds, touches and so
on). Thus experiences can be described both objectively in terms of (grammatical) third
person predicates, as when we investigate Peters or the chimpanzees mental model of a
banana, and subjectively in the form of descriptions of the grammatical first person, giving
others indirect access to ones own phenomenological experience of a banana tree.
In a physical system like a tornado (an open, metastable, dissipative, self-
organized system) there is no marked distance between outer and inner, nor between past
and future. Talking about a tornados spatial differentiation into eye and body is not
meant to imply any truths about a rich experiential life of tornados. For the tornado,
there is little separation between a reference of the experience to the conditions that makes
the same experience possible, the processes it realizes, and its immediate occurrence. The
movement is hardly evolutionary, there is no difference between the units of selection and
the unit of evolution; everything in the system is being selected for continuing self-
organizing movement given that the boundary conditions for such a type of movement of
system are satisfied. The movement is identical to a simple time evolution of the
system.13 (This is why moon craters as traces of experience have a different status
relative to us and relative to the moon, which is an important distinction for us moderns
who have no empathy with the scarred man in the moon).
In biological systems like the cell, experiences are, among other things, the genetic
fossils in DNA witnessing the specific proteins that were functionally participating in
earlier ancestor cell lines to maintain the metabolic form of movement. Here, a high degree
of temporal separation of past movement and present structure is achieved. This is due to
the fact that the digital code provides stable representations of, for instance, early active
 18
but now passive genes (so-called pseudogenes which have had immediate significance,
but now only have potential significance for the cell life or the species as a ressource of
variation and mutation). In addition, the systems boundary to its environment is sharper
and functionally effective. The cell membrane represents the organismic information about
a primary difference between inner and outer which intensifies the significance of // p. 329

/
molecular systems for measuring changes in what is outer in relation to the states of the
inner. The constant threat of the draining of energy reserves (and thus of death)
constitutes a telos within the system, that is, the goal of survival, a need, an overall
interpretant corresponding to the future dual possibility of death or continuing life of the
system. Each of these two possibilities, life or death, organize the developmental
trajectories of the elements of the system around a particular attractor, of which only one,
life, has a biological description in addition to the purely physical one. (The physical
description of the phase space, allowing for statistical measures, has to be supplied with a
an additional biological or quasi-semiotic description of (minimally) a historically
contingent sequence space of digital codes, cf. Kppers 1992). This goal or need of
survival, which already appears to emerge for free-living single cell organisms (simply
constituting a continuous line of cell divisions) receives more complicated elaborations,
both by the exchange of fragments of experience between the cells (e,g, by bacterial
conjugation DNA plasmids can be transferred from one cell to another, a kind of sex), and
by the generation of multicellular organisms with life cycle, alternation of generations and
sexual reproduction, i.e., species in a modern sense.
In a psychic (and thereby biological) system like a multicellular animal,
experiences are sign processes that temporarily fossilize as quasi-stable representations
of outer forms and their relations to the organism and its inner, and thereby create traces
in the form of neurally stored patterns of memory. Through the evolution of multicellular
organisms, especially of animals with a nervous system, an additional intensification is
achievedpartly by irritability14 (which gets differentiated into neurally based systems
of representation with outer as well as inner aspects), and partly by sign based strategies

13 This is compatible with a physical (and trivial) sense of time evolution in which no reference to specific
biological phenomena like natural selection based upon variation and inheritance is implied.
14 Cf. footnote 12 on irritability. It is useful to remember that Peirce (in his 1890 manuscript A Guess at
the Riddle) viewed the irritability of the protoplasm as an example of Firstness: The properties of
protoplasm are enumerated as follows: contractility, irritability, automatism, nutrition, metabolism,
respiration, and reproduction; but these can all be summed up under the heads of sensibility, motion, and
growth. These three properties are respectively first, second, and third. (CP.1.393). Here, the phenomenal
aspect of irritability (or sensibility), as a first, can be seen to correspond to the phenomenal aspect of very
simple forms of signs, the qualisigns (see below). Thus, we can conceive of simple irritability as already
 19
for reproduction and ecological competencies (such as food search patterns). The
semiotic intensification transforms merely vegetative organisms into animals, that is, it
endows them with dynamic forms corresponding to what Aristotle15 called a soul of
movement i.e., semiosic active systems, that through self-movement acquire
experiences, cognitively process these, and have an emergent phenomenal inner world.
Movement includes autonomously governed changes of form and position of parts of the
organism (like muscles) based upon sign processes like proprioception and sensori-motor
coordination. Movement must be distinguished from merely physical change of position
over time; rather, the course of movement in animals is always governed by semiotic
codes based within the animal body (an idea elaborated in detail by Hoffmeyer 2000, and
Sheets-Johnstone 1998). Movement is a process which is externally observable as well as
internally sensed. In simple animals the // p. 330 /
movement-governing models are identical to
the immediate coordination of sensory signs from the environment and proprioceptive
signs of the body, signifying states and movements of the muscles. Thereby an Umwelt is
formed as functional circles which dynamically represent flexible interactions between the
animal and its environment, i.e., a species-specific cutmediated by the sensory
organsof relevant features of the organisms physical environment is formed. The
simple kinds of experiences generated in this process can later on (in animals with more
elaborated systems for neural representation) be incorporated as a source for higher-order
anticipatory models, not only including here-and-now coordination of movement, but also
longer sequences of movement, based upon choice among (or inference to the best
consequences of) several possible routes of escape, or other kinds of action. Such models
are symbolic in form to the extent that the experiences govern the relevant inferences in a
law-like manner. (We shall not discuss the relevant concept of symbol here, but see
Stjernfelt 2001).
Consciousness appears as the present moments qualitative feature of a moving
animal which experiences a process of complex relations between sensing the movements
of its own body and sensing the corresponding changes of the environment.
Consciousness is an emergent higher order patters which (i) has genuine causal power in
its own right (just like the movement patterns that are based upon experiences and govern

having outer, behavioural aspects (like a capacity to contract responsively upon a stimulus) as well as inner
aspects (feeling, pain, itching).
15 Compare Aristotles biologically based psychology in De Anima (see for instance Everson 1995). No
need to say that the purpose here is not to give an exposition of the hierarchic system of souls in
Aristotle, but to let his system inspire the interpretation of what has been called here the semiotic
intensification as an evolutionary process. On the combination of Aristotle and biosemiotics, see also
Brogaard (1999).
 20
the behavior of the organism) and (ii) has a qualitative, phenomenal aspect (just like
irritability). I cannot go here into details on the neurobiology of memory, proprioception
and perception, or the electrochemically based processing of information in the nervous
system. But it is possible to conceive of consciousness as a specific property of the
dynamical interpretation of experiences, and of experiences of experiences, including
proprioception; this interpretation is an ongoing affair, continously modulated against the
habit-like traces that earlier experiences have deposited in the neural codes of the body.
Like any sign, consciousness is a dynamic, relational, and intentional phenomenon;
consciousness connects signs outside to signs inside the organismconsciousness is
nothing in itself, it emerges only in connection with the general semiosic make-up of the
experiences of the body.16 The subjective nature of experience is rooted in a semiotic
intensification of those qualisigns that are parts of the subjective aspects of irritability
(and appetite, see Brogaard 1999) that are found in even simple organisms. The signs
themselves have both formal outer aspects allowing us to re-represent them as an
algorithm or a logic model, but // p. 331 /
their formalization does not exhaust their qualia
character. Normally this character is shadowed by their dynamical and formal aspects, but
it can be observed in direct immediate experience. This means that semiotics as a set of
methods must include not only the construction of empirically testable models of
dynamic and formal aspects of consciousness (as it is already done to a large extent within
cognitive science) but also phenomenological approaches to the qualitative experiential
processes connected to sign action. The situation calls for a qualitative organicism
(Emmeche 2001), according to which complex systems are both emergent and capably of
supporting phenomenal experience. They are considered as emergent patterns of
movement with downward causality (in the sense mentioned above in which the emergent
pattern of movement organizes the dynamics of the parts through new boundary
conditions for their unfolding). In addition to this, complex systems as exemplified by
animal bodies are also taken to realize phenomena such as telos, semiotic intentionality
(cf. Peirces notion of final causation) and experience formation within an Umwelt. The
phenomenal aspect of sign interpretation is simply the experienced quality, the inner side

16 Describing consciousness as being nothing in itself and only understandable as a situational, relational
and embodied phenomenon, may seem to contradict my claim above that consciousness is an emergent
higher order pattern with a genuine causal power in its own right, yet, this discussion can only be clarified
within a general treatment of the nature of emergence and downward causation (see, e.g., Emmeche et al.,
2000). The fact that an item is a higher order phenomenon, such as a mental image, and has a causal power
sui generis, does allow for the possibility that the item is also essentially dependent upon its constituent
parts and processes and its (semiotic and material) relations to its environment.
 21
of those transformations in the neural state space that are generated with this higher form
of semiosis.
Thus a new concept of qualitative complexity is abducted: A system of processes
is qualitative complex if (i) the system is self-organizing and has emergent properties and
downward causality, (ii) the system has an Umweltthe subjective aspect of the world
experienced by the organismgiving rise to experience-based qualia (such qualia having
the character of qualisigns as defined above), (iii) these qualia have causal efficacy (not in
the sense of efficient causation but as a form of final causation). Merely epiphenomenal
interpretations of qualia are accordingly excludedfor certain aspects of the system the
fulfillment of criterion (ii) is a a necessary condition for fulfilling criterion (i).
In other words, an externalist description of the motion (changes of spatial
positions) of an animal within an environment is not sufficient for understanding the
specific animate, flexible and graceful form of movement governed by an interactive
experiential Umwelt. Within the Umwelts embodied process of experiential becoming
(incorporating a phenomenal dimension grounded in the qualisigns included in the
systems semiosis), consciousness emerges a causally consequential form of orchestrating
(by downward causation) the correlative self of the system, making it cohere and giving
the movement its animate form.
This is of course an insufficient sketch of the causal principles that must be taken
into account in a future processual and biosemiotic theory of consciousness, yet I hope
the vague approximation to such principles // p. 332 /
I have offered here suffices to outline
the project. To restate, we have the following principles that may be used to formulate a
more detailed theory about the emergence of conscious processes in evolution: (1) There
are several types of causes, and one can see consciousness and mental signs as quasi-
autonomous formal and final causes that are active within the complete system of an
animal in its surroundings. (2) The causes are active at several levels and one can consider
the psychic as the level for conscious sign action (this level also include non-conscious
signs). (3) Signs act in nature and enter into networks of causes; within the body
conscious signs enter together with other signs in causal networks. (4) By emergent
evolution new types of causes arise, and experience-based movement in animals is such a
type. (5) Causes are related to sign levels, and have, like the signs themselves, an outer as
well as an inner side. (6) Causes in complex phenomena include causes in simple
phenomena; and causes that regulate consciousness include causes regulating physical and
biological processes in the animal as well as sign processes related to sensing and
 22
irritability. (7) In the course of macro-evolution experiences get intensified from
movement to consciousness, and one can conceive of consciousness as the experiential
aspects of sign processing (production, coding and interpretation of signs) in self-moving
systems. (8) Consciousness is the present qualitative moment of a continuously running
future-directed experiential process.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Frederik Stjernfelt, Stefanie Jenssen, Jesper Hoffmeyer and Johanna
Seibt for critical comments on an earlier draft of this piece.

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