Defining life as a semiotic phenomenon

Emmeche's position that living systems are fundamentally semiotic; supports biosemiotic approach to cognition.

Source paper

extracted_from

(2005) · Pamela Lyon

concept

Biosemiotics
introduces
Framework treating meaning-making as intrinsic to living systems; supports view of memories as interpreted signs requiring creative interpretation.

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

Phenomenon of Lifeconcept0.821
The observable emergence of life-quality from wholeness; both a functional and aesthetic quality in buildings and nature.
Recursive Phenomenon of Lifeconcept0.773
The idea that life in a building comes about as centers cooperatively intensify each other's life, a recursive bootstrapping process.
Life is a thing which can only be reached by humanness, by the personal, by the individual, childish temperament.claim0.757
life (in artifacts)concept0.757
The quality of having profound wholeness, which makes us feel our own existence most deeply.
Life is a pervasive quality that includes ordinary biological life but also a kind of life in stones, concrete, and wood posts.claim0.755
Summarizes the chapter’s view that life exists in the very materials of a building.
Biological life (narrow mechanistic definition)concept0.752
The conventional 20th-century definition: a carbon-oxygen-hydrogen-nitrogen system capable of self-reproduction, healing, and stability over a lifetime.
What is an appropriate definition of 'life'?question0.750
Background definitional challenge noted as notoriously difficult, motivating the paper's approach of updating 'machine' rather than defining 'life'
Life is exactly that property of space in which each spot becomes unique according to its place in the larger scheme of things.claim0.750
Definitional claim equating life with spatial uniqueness.