Information and Meaning

Since the publication of Claude Shannon’s groundbreaking paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in two parts in the Bell Laboratory journal in 1948, understanding and research concerning communication and information has received a technicized treatment. As biosemiotics has been at the forefront in arguing, all living organisms communicate, but they do not do so in the digital mode used in information technology (IT) engineering. Life communicates in inherited, evolutionary ways that are traceable from single cells all the way to complex humans. What IT engineers call “redundancy” those studying living organisms call “meaning.” The trade between individual organisms and their environment takes place in the circulation, interpretation, and feedback loops of semiosis. In this way, organisms are able to maintain the features of adaptive, creative, and evolutionary learning systems by modeling their worlds in open, receptive fashion via the use of iconic and indexical signs. In other words, organisms make use of natural, then cultural metaphors and metonyms.