*5.3. Why Information is Enough*

The cybersemiotic approach of Søren Brier is outlined in his major book [82], *Cybersemiotics*. The title reflects is program of defining a new semiotics that in his view emerges from the computational processing of knowledge. The subtitle is *Why Information is not Enough* and refers to the limitations of standard logical and computational theories of information. Brier refers here to the lack of an adequate rigorous framework for philosophy, now including phenomenology, in an adequate relation to the natural sciences.

As Brenner has noted elsewhere [1,30,55], Brier among other semioticians have based their underlying world view on proposals of Charles Sanders Peirce for logic and semiotics, in fact of a theory that implies their equivalence. Peirce made a classification of phenomena into those instantiating categorial properties of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, roughly related to the degree of interaction present. The problem for us is that the properties selected have, by Peirce's own admission, no grounding in any physical reality. They thus rejoin the body of knowledge referred to in Section 5.2 as anti-realistic. The semiotics of Peirce, and accordingly of Brier, is a description of the world, including living systems, in terms of 'signs' to which human beings can give an interpretation = meaning. Biosemiotics has become a highly active field of inquiry designed to explicate the role of complex signs in knowledge.

In our view, the approach of Brier and other semioticians displaces the emphasis from the ontology of the world to its epistemology without giving an adequate reason or substitute for it. Peirce did not claim that his system was based on any ontological commitment as to the ground of his signs, but that did not prevent him or his followers from assigning major hermeneutic value to them. We will return elsewhere in this paper to a discussion of phenomenology as such. We simply restate here the advantages of the LIR physical view of the energetic aspects of the origin and propagation of information, without reference to signs. Information inheres in both the physical and epistemological evolution of real processes and hence serves as a concept unifying the physics, biology and neuroscience of mind.

The somewhat apodictic statement by Lupasco cited above that physical processes, and hence their informational content *are* meaning is supported by the Kaufmann-Logan notion of biotic or instructional information [83]. It is also dualistic approach in which intrinsically meaningless Shannon information, the lowest level that characterizes a physical system without the self-reference present in living systems, is contrasted with biological information which always entails meaning. It emerges from the material-energetic structure of the latter in a process of which the 'structure' is a dynamic part. As originally emphasized by Lupasco [84] "everything is structure" or better a *structuring* (*structuration*), and Logic in Reality describes the evolution of these structurings.
