Il socio Valerio Marconi partecipa a "Eighth International Conference in Code Biology", Olomouc, Repubblica Ceca, 7-11 giugno 2022

Eighth International Conference in Code Biology, Olomouc, Repubblica Ceca, 7-11 giugno 2022
Relazione del socio Valerio Marconi dal titolo:
"Synechism in the light of Code Biology. A bio-logical view of personhood"
Abstract:
Despite their departure, Code Biology and Biosemiotics share a trivalent analysis of the sign, yet it can be shown that – contrarily to what is entailed by Peircean Biosemiotics – organic codes are not a special case of mental codes since their triadic structure can be reduced to dyadic relations (see V. Marconi, Tra filosofia, semiotica e strutturalismo, Treviso 2020: 241-263). Consequently, organic semiosis and mental semiosis are both trivalent processes, but only mental semiosis counts as an irreducibly triadic action. Thus, Peirce's synechism cannot be true: "all phenomena are of one character, though some are more mental and spontaneous, others more material and regular" (EP2: 2). Not all living matter is mental. Relying also on Giorgio Prodi's work, it is possible to sketch a restricted view of Peirce's synechism and to delimitate its scope to the cognitive systems of second and third type (see M. Barbieri, Code Biology, Cham 2015: 126- 127), namely the minds of interpretative animals and humans. A first outcome of this conceptual operation is to introduce the hypothesis of a personal code such that personhood, i.e. a remarkable and unique feature of human mind, could be regarded as a peculiar case of cultural code. Prodi's Biosemiotics is much closer than Peircean approaches to biological methods while critically assessing and reshaping many Peircean ideas (see F. Cimatti, A Biosemiotic Ontology, Cham 2018). He wrote: "Were a man deprived of his [relational] term 'other man, network of others', this man would not simply be missing something: such a man does not exist [ . . . ]. To sum up by means of a motto: love your neighbor since he is yourself" (G. Prodi, Gli artifici della ragione, Milano 1987: 167). From this, we can infer that personal identity does not follow different paths from cultural identity: personal connections between cultural objects and cultural meanings cannot be severed from social connections among different domains in cultural codes, so that each person is a community in constant exchange with other personal communities and wider interpersonal communities. Indeed, a consequence of Peirce's synechism seems to be true: "In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself [ . . . ]. In the second place, all men who resemble you and are in analogous circumstances are, in a measure, yourself" (EP2:2).