Code poiesis: Life's fuel

Abstract

This paper highlights the coupling of copying and coding as central to the promulgation of life, leading to the concept of code-poiesis as the self-generating propulsion behind macro-evolutionary shifts. My goal is to better integrate body with mind and, following Freud, to find the archaic origins of human cognition through the universal unconscious phenomenon of the ‘dream.’ Uncovering this continuity is buttressed by the deep parallels Barbieri finds between the origins of life and the origins of mind. His three macroevolutionary transitions –from organic to neural to cultural – are examined identifying the reiteration of copy-and-code at each shift while contributing a singular psychoanalytic piece at the neural level via Freudian dream theory through which the leap from brain to mind is explained. The main underlying question is; if the two key Barbierian mechanisms, copy and code; 1) begin the promulgation of life, and; 2) propel semiotic progressions in micro-developmental steps into macro-evolutionary stages, then we ought to be able to find them reiterated in different ways, isomorphically, at ever higher, more complex levels of organization of the human nervous system. Here I demonstrate how, and in what ways, this is so. Finally, a fourth evolutionary stage already in progress is discussed: the externalization of mind in the computational age of the algorithm.