Cover not available
Part of
The Complexity of Social-Cultural Emergence: Biosemiotics, semiotics and translation studies
Edited by Kobus Marais, Reine Meylaerts and Maud Gonne
[Benjamins Translation Library 164] 2024
► pp. 32–58

Chapter 2
Infoautopoiesis and translation

| University of Maryland, Baltimore County
A biosemiotic perspective of translation entails the study of signs and meaning in living organisms, an infoautopoietic process existing since the origin of life. Infoautopoiesis makes the external environment meaningful to the organism, so it can mould it in its own image to satisfy its needs, and be moulded in turn. Self-created internalised semantic information results from interpreting environmental sensory signals as “differences which make a difference”. The content of individuated, inaccessible internalised semantic information may be translated into externalised syntactic expressions that comprise outward artificial expressions that lack semantic content. Yet, despite our ability for creation of sophisticated syntactic information, we are unable to make them produce semantic information. In short, infoautopoiesis is fundamental to translation at any level.
Keywords: translation, interpretation, biosemiotics, semiotics, information, infoautopoietic, infoautopoiesis, semantic information, syntactic information, Gregory Bateson
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • What is information?
    • The fundamental problem of information
  • Infoautopoiesis
    • The organism-in-its-environment
    • Self-creation, processing and transmission of information
    • Personal-subjective-relative information
    • Impersonal-objective-absolute information
    • Shannon-distilled information
    • Sensorial signals and infoautopoiesis
    • Flow of information
    • Peircean typology of signs
    • Interpretation and translation
  • Interactions of infoautopoietic organisms
    • Interactions between infoautopoietic organisms
    • Interactions between an infoautopoietic organism and objects
  • Summary and discussion
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 3 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.164.02car
References (46)
References
Barbieri, M. 2012. “What is Information?” Biosemiotics 5, no. 2: 147–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013. The Paradigms of Biology. Biosemiotics 6, no. 1: 33–59. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bateson, G. 1978. Steps to an Ecology of Mind; Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Ballantine Books.Google Scholar
Battail, G. 2009. “Applying Semiotics and Information Theory to Biology: A Critical Comparison.” Biosemiotics 2, no. 3: 303. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013. “Biology Needs Information Theory.” Biosemiotics 6, no. 1: 77–103. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bawden, D., and Robinson, L. 2022. Introduction to Information Science (2nd ed.). Facet Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berger, P., and Pullberg, S. 1965. “Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness.” History and Theory 4, no. 2: 196–211. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brier, S. 1999. “Biosemiotics and the Foundation of Cybersemiotics: Reconceptualizing the Insights of Ethology, Second-Order Cybernetics, and Peirce’s Semiotics in Biosemiotics to create a non-Cartesian Information Science.” Semiotica 127, no. 1–4: 169–98. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008. Cybersemiotics: why Information is not Enough! University of Toronto Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burgin, M. 2010. Theory of Information – Fundamentality, Diversity and Unification. World Scientific Publishing.Google Scholar
Burgin, M., and W. Hofkirchner (Eds.). 2017. Information Studies and the Quest for Transdisciplinarity – Unity Through Diversity. World Scientific Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Capurro, R. 2009. “Past, Present, and Future of the Concept of Information.” tripleC 7, no. 2: 125–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Capurro, R., and B. Hjørland. 2003. “The Concept of Information.” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 37, no. 1: 343–411. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cárdenas-García, J. F. 2018. “Information Ethics in the Information Age.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 14, no. 3: 147–66. [URL]Google Scholar
2022. “The Central Dogma of Information.” Information 13, no. 8: 365. [URL]. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2023. “Info-autopoiesis and the Limits of Artificial General Intelligence.” Computers 12, no. 5: 102. [URL]. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cárdenas-García, J. F., and T. Ireland. 2017. “Human Distributed Cognition from an Organism-in-its-Environment Perspective.” Biosemiotics 10. No. 2: 265–78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cárdenas-García, J. F., and T. Ireland, T. 2019. “The Fundamental Problem of the Science of Information.” Biosemiotics 12, no. 2: 213–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cárdenas-García, J. F., D. Romero Castro, and B. Soria de Mesa. 2018. “Object Discernment by ‘a Difference Which Makes a Difference’”. Biosemiotics 11, no. 1: 27–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Díaz Nafría, J. M. 2010. “What is Information? A Multidimensional Concern.: tripleC 8, no. 1: 77–108.Google Scholar
Farias, P. L., and J. Queiroz. 2003. “On Diagrams for Peirce’s 10, 28, and 66 Classes of Signs.” Semiotica 2003, no. 147: 165–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Floridi, L. 2010. Information: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hidalgo, C. A. 2015. Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. Basic Books.Google Scholar
Hutson, M. 2022. “Could AI Help you to Write your Next Paper?” Nature 611: 192–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kikuchi, K., L. Galera-Laporta, C. Weatherwax, Y. Y. Lam, E. C. Moon, E. A. Theodorakis, J. Garcia-Ojalvo, and G. M. Süel, 2022. “Electrochemical Potential Enables Dormant Spores to Integrate Environmental Signals.” Science 378, no. 6615: 43–9. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lloyd, S. 2006. Programming the Universe. Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Lombardino, J., and B. M. Burton. 2022. “An Electric Alarm Clock for Spores.” Science 378, no. 6615: 25–6. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marais, K. 2019. A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation – The Emergence of Social-Cultural Reality. Routledge.Google Scholar
Maturana, H., and F. Varela. 1994. De Máquinas y Seres Vivos – Autopoiesis: La Organización de lo Vivo [Of Machines and Living Beings – Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living], 5th Edición. Editorial Universitaria, S.A.Google Scholar
Maturana, H., and F. J. Varela. 1987. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Shambhala Publications.Google Scholar
Pattee, H. H. 2013. “Epistemic, Evolutionary, and Physical Conditions for Biological Information.” Biosemiotics 6, no. 1, 9–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Peirce, C. S. 1931–1936. The Collected Papers. Volumes 1–6. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
1958. The Collected Papers. Volumes 7 and 8. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Peters, J. D. 1988. “Information: Notes Toward a Critical History.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 12: 9–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Queiroz, J., C. Emmeche, and C. N. El-Hani. 2008. “A Peircean Approach to “Information” and its Relationship with Bateson’s and Jablonka’s Ideas.” The American Journal of Semiotics 24, no. 1–3: 75–94. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seelig, C. 1956. Albert Einstein, A Documentary Biography. Staples Press.Google Scholar
Shannon, C. E. 1948. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27: 379–423, 623–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silva, S. 2013. “Reification and Fetishism: Processes of Transformation.” Theory, Culture and Society 30, no. 1: 79–98. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sloane, N. J. A., and A. D. Wyner (Eds.). 1993. Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers. Information Theory Society. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stonier, T. 1997. Information and Meaning – An Evolutionary Perspective. Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Umpleby, S. A. 2007. “Physical Relationships Among Matter, Energy and Information.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 24, no. 3: 369–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vedral, V. 2010. Decoding Reality – The Universe as Quantum Information. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Von Uexküll, J. 1992. “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds.” Semiotica 89: 319. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wheeler, J. A. 1991. Sakharov Revisited: “It from Bit”. Proceedings of the First International A D Sakharov Memorial Conference on Physics, May 27–31, Moscow.Google Scholar
Wiener, N. 1948/1961. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (2nd ed.) MIT Press.Google Scholar
Yockey, H. P. 2005. Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar