The short answer, for me at least, is yes. It is a game for me to see if we or I can come up with the best story of how chemicals brought themselves to the coffee table. It's as simple as that and it's great fun. — MikeL

I thought so. I believe it is like this for many others as well. I actually have so many other things I am doing and would like to do in my life, that I am primarily looking for truly new insights that allow me to have a better grasp of nature.

Thanks for your forthright reply.

I have the converse problem that you have Rich, I can't see how mind explains anything. How should we investigate it? What should we investigate? What are your definitions? What is the world that you are trying to show us, Rich? — MikeL

To understand this, it is necessary to put a philosophy to practical use:, e.g. health, relationships, value system, sense of life, etc. Then one understands Why Philosophy? Otherwise, it does become just another game that one can play in lieu of Rubiks Cube or chess. Living the last 35 years of my life in a very healthy state without any need to see a physician (or scared into seeing a physician) is a direct result of my my very real and practical philosophy. One that I truly embrace and use. It is not a game for me not is it a career. It is me.

The short answer, for me at least, is yes. It is a game for me to see if we or I can come up with the best story of how chemicals brought themselves to the coffee table. It's as simple as that and it's great fun.
— MikeL

I thought so. I believe it is like this for many others as well. I actually have so many other things I am doing and would like to do in my life, that I am primarily looking for truly new insights that allow me to have a better grasp of nature. — Rich

Just to respond to that, it is through directed games such as this one that fundamental truths (at least to satisfy our own logic) can be discovered and new insights revealed.

My understanding of philosophy and theories is that it is an indulgence of the imagination based on inconsistencies in our world view. It allows us to examine these through the lens of examples, stories and sometimes mathematics, but it is a game, not a creed. I am happy to jump from one side to another and argue just as strongly.

Just to respond to that, it is through directed games such as this one that fundamental truths (at least to satisfy our own logic) can be discovered and new insights revealed. — MikeL

If you play chess, you will understand that a player does not calculate each possible move in some equal manner. Based upon experience and intuition one quickly narrows down possible moves into a few candidate moves otherwise a single move can take a lifetime. This idea that chemicals evolved in such ac way that they have to eat a whole bag of potato chips and then bemoan it because of the weight they gained is equivalent to moving my Queen to a square where it can be taken by a pawn. It is so bad, that it can be immediately eliminated.

But if one doesn't care about these things, which is perfectly permissible, then one doesn't care. However, there have been great practical rewards for me by understanding nature. Ditto for the Daoists.

This idea that chemicals evolved in such ac way that they have to eat a whole bag of potato chips and then bemoan it because of the weight they gained is equivalent to moving my Queen to a square where it can be taken by a pawn. — Rich

That's right, its a crazy thing to do, but it can be understood logically. The immediate satisfaction of eating the chips outweighs the possible future result of putting on the pounds. It is only when the immediate satisfaction is satisfied that the much lower weighted future consequence remains.

But if one doesn't care about these things, which is perfectly permissible, then one doesn't care. — Rich

Sorry, Rich, I've missed your point again. Care about what things? I was following your chessboard analogy until the bag of chips. If you can back up to the chessboard again and take another run at it, I would appreciate it.

If one doesn't care about experimenting with what happens after their Queen is v eaten. Most players would consider such an experiment as a poor experiment but it is possible to spend a lifeime sacrificing a Queen, lose every game, and learn nothing other than losing a Queen means losing the game.

I personally wouldn't want to spend any part of my life investigating how chemicals got together to sing in a choir out of tune. Maybe if I was trying to come up with a new sci-fi genre.

So are you arguing that irrationality undermines the premise that life evolved along logical and predicable lines?

Logic is just another game that leads no where. You set up a premise. You argue to a conclusion, and then the fun begins: everyone disagrees with the premise and thus also the conclusion. 2000 years ago sooner fellows made a living from this. People like to argue over things like this. Nothing wrong with it, unless someone starts marketing it as some path to the truth, which it isn't.

Life evolved exactly as you observe. Life experiments, learns and changes and follows many, many different paths. Just observe. It's all there.

Life evolved exactly as you observe. — Rich

But I observe it evolving logically. If someone stands on a tree branch that is too thin, it will break, they will fall.

Arguing over the premise doesn't discount the logic between the premise and conclusion. It is not false logic, just a false premise. Logic may not lead to truth, but it leads to insight. Insight leads to a relative truth when we reflect it out against the world and get the right echo back. Relative truth leads to predictions which lead to a stronger truth in our frame of being if proven true.

Life experiments, learns and changes and follows many, many different paths. Just observe. It's all there. — Rich

Would I be right to say that this is the crux of your argument? That sentience is denied by logical progression? There is no choice is everything is a consequence?

But I observe it evolving logically. If someone stands on a tree branch that is too thin, it will break, they will fall. — MikeL

You have to keep observing. The world is a wild West show. The best place to get a bird's eye view of human nature is Central Park on a Saturday afternoon, or better yet, a political rally.

I really don't have any arguments, since that is not my game. Just relating my own observations of life and seeking interesting new observations.

I really don't have any arguments, since that is not my game. — Rich

Yes you do. :)

I do understand what you mean by creativity expression in the world. No two people are alike. I am still not clear on the reason for you position though that the truth should be a creed and not a game. Not to worry, its good to get a diversity of creative opinion.

Pan-semiosis is then a further speculative metaphysical project where dissipative structure is also understood as a generalised sign relation. It connects to the mainstream of current physics now that it has turned productively from talking about reality in terms of particles to bits of information. — apokrisis

Perhaps you could explain this, because it appears to be the missing link which serves as the foundation of your metaphysics. How are sign relations inherent within a dissipative structure? I can understand how dissipative structures are interpreted and understood by observers through the means of sign relations, but how would sign relations be inherent within the dissipative structure itself?

By the same token, mind enters the picture right from the start. As soon as there is the vaguest speck of semiotic mechanism in play. — apokrisis

OK, so this is the issue I have. How do you interpret a common inanimate dissipative structure as having a semiotic mechanism at play?

I only have the advantage that my paradigm is thoroughly supported by scientific investigation. — apokrisis

So, point to this scientific investigation which provides evidence that a common inanimate dissipative structure has semiotics at play.

Yes, the striking thing that comes through from Hoffman is that the basis of life is way more mechanical than we knew. It is all a bunch of little switches and rotors and pumps and chains and conveyor belts. So out of utter instability, a little bit of genetic information can conjure a fantastic apparatus. We used to think metabolism was a chemical soup. The cell was a bag of reactants. Now we can see it is a factory with structure.

So the explanation of life back a decade or two was focused on genetic information and metabolic reactions. At school, we all had to learn a bunch of chemical equations like the Krebs cycle. Now there is this third intervening level of mechanical organisation.

That is a huge realisation in terms of the metaphysics of life. No one was predicting that ATP production would actually involve a proper little rotating spindle device. That is just so outlandish. — apokrisis

What this really indicates is that life is much more complicated than earlier imagined, not the opposite.

Hoffman's book also makes it clear how just the tiniest, simplest scrap of mechanical structure can have outsized impact at the nanoscale. And that is key to the abiogenesis issue. It is much less of a step from nonliving to living than we imagined. — apokrisis

Au contraire. This indicates that the step from non-living to living is much bigger than previously imagined. The levels of animated mechanization go far deeper then previously imagined, and as we delve deeper and deeper, that mechanization is seen to diverge further and further from the inanimate (unmechanized) at the same level.. People used to think that the mechanics and biogenesis of mitochondria was fascinating, but now these are seen as just the tip of the iceberg.

Nick Lane's book then comes from the other side and talks about how - with alkaline sea vents - the nonliving world closes the gap to make it a much tinier leap than we ever previously imagined. In terms of a chemical soup (with no biological machinery), there can be a dissipative energetic process in full swing. — apokrisis

I think that what you are saying is that since there is a vast realm of unknown, at the micro level with respect to the inanimate, and a vast realm of unknown at the micro level with respect to the animate, we can class these two together, and say that they are similar, each unknown. But this is not a real similarity, it is just an unknown within our minds.

Now we can see that if the nonliving metabolic cycle already exists, all the first life had to do was take away the possibility of that metabolic cycle collapsing. — apokrisis

What name would you assign to that thing which would take away that possibility, "soul"?

We know substance dualism can't work in any sensible causal fashion. — apokrisis

Oh we know this eh? We know it because our prejudice tells us that dualism ought to be avoided. Therefore we ought to conflate formal cause and final cause, as you do, because to properly distinguish between these two and produce a real causal understanding of reality would undermine this prejudice.

The reason why Peircean semiotics impresses me as the most developed model of systems causality is because it turns things around.
...

This is the pansemiotic hypothesis that Peirce dubbed objective idealism. — apokrisis

I've repeatedly told you that your position is backwards. You seem to recognize that now, with this statement. Why attempt to maintain a backward metaphysics? And why would you think that a metaphysics which "turns things around" from accepted metaphysical principles is the most developed? All this really does is compromise strong, consistent metaphysical principles in order to make them consistent with mistaken theories.

Perhaps you could explain this, because it appears to be the missing link which serves as the foundation of your metaphysics. How are sign relations inherent within a dissipative structure? I — Metaphysician Undercover

I said they were external, not internal. That would be the difference. The water of the river knows which way to go because a channel carved over time points the way downhill.

There are no hidden mysteries here. It is quite prosaic. Until you get into foundational physics with its talk of holographic event horizons or wavefunction collapses.

I would characterize what I have are concerns. Economic motives are always present in any discipline. One side trying to characterize people as computers. Another side characterizing people as some fated blob of chemicals with an existence comparable to sand on a beach.

My concern is that there is a huge downside for everyone, even for those who don't buy into these empty views of life. It's tough to avoid the consequences of this tidal wave fed by economic interests. For many, it is a nightmare that they would like to wake up from. I talk to these type of people every day and they just want it to go away.

It's not the very fact of explanation that I'm objecting to - it's the purported explanation being that the reason for life is the quickest route to non-existence. Worldly existence is not the portal towards a higher life, but a temporary diversion on the way to non-being. Life really doesn't exist for any reason, it is simply perturbations in the overall tendency towards maximum entropy. So ultimately, any 'reason' which Apokrisis' philosophy offers is subjective i.e. dependent on what I decide, what I designate as real or important. He has acknowledged this earlier in this thread.

My tentative understanding is that the whole rationale of the spiritual life is to 'awaken to an identity as that which is not subject to death'. That is communicated differently in different traditional and philosophical systems. In Christianity, it is the idea of Life, capital-L - a sense of awakening to the 'life of the spirit', which is nowadays, and lamely, understood in a rather 'pie in the sky' sense of being 'going to heaven when you die'. But properly speaking, the life of discipleship is living in that light, whilst still in ordinary existence. Of course, there is also a sense in which this is a hopeless quest, an utterly quixotic undertaking. But one has to persist, regardless.

The reason is sounds like nothing or a non-explanation to you, is because you have no comprehension of it, as we're both products of a culture which is devoted to undermining such an understanding. It's just that some of us are resisting, and some are complacent. — Wayfarer

A bit late of a reply, but I actually have very little problem with that kind of spiritual understanding of life. Power to you if you want to believe in it. But what I don't understand is why you continually invoke this understanding to say that, as a consequence, science cannot explain abiogenesis. I mean, what is the fundamental conflict between understanding life as arising naturally, while being a matter of 'discipleship in spiritual light'? I mean, the two understandings of life seem to occupy such different planes entirely that they don't even seem to be trying to 'explain' the same thing. The conception of life at stake in each seem entirely unrelated to each other. So your hostility to a naturalist account of abiogenesis - even if you want to subscribe to the spiritualist understanding of life that you do - is somewhat puzzling to me on a conceptual level. Even though, yeah, I get it, you have a kind of visceral reaction to the idea of anything to do with 'naturalism'. But it is warranted here, conceptually? And if so, why?

What's missing, and why they're at odds is the absence of the hero. The true triad as sameness, and difference, with their impossible fusion, which is the individual thing, which is the hero. Whether talking of society, or biology, or physics as influential, or formative, something becomes the interplay of general forces, not them, and out of their control. On every step of that sort of story, the hero is depersonalized, and stripped of potency.

The question keeps arising about when the personal comes in, where the potency and significance of the individual goes, because it genuinely is entirely evaporated in simplistic general, external, objective accounts of history.

I said they were external, not internal. That would be the difference. The water of the river knows which way to go because a channel carved over time points the way downhill. — apokrisis

So this is the semiotics of dissipative structures? The water sees the channel as a symbol, and interprets the meaning of this sign as "go this way". By what method does the water interpret the meaning of the sign? By what force does the water empower itself to go where it wants (where the sign tells it to go). Do you think that the water has the capacity to decide not to follow that sign? What if the water saw conflicting signs, how would it decide which one to follow?

There are no hidden mysteries here. — apokrisis

Is that a joke? It looks like pure mysticism to me. You're just saying that inanimate things have a mind by which they interpret signs, and decide to do what the sign tells them to do.

The conception of life at stake in each seem entirely unrelated to each other. — StreetlightX

Don't you see this as a big problem though? If you and I are referring to completely different things when we use the word "life", then how can we have any understanding of each other? We could each cling to our own meanings, and diverge further and further apart in our respective misunderstandings, or we could sit down and try to determine the correct conception. Platonic dialectics.

Even though, yeah, I get it, you have a kind of visceral reaction to the idea of anything to do with 'naturalism'. But it is warranted here, conceptually? And if so, why? — StreetlightX

If Wayfarer apprehends the naturalistic approach as incorrect, then the argumentation is warranted. Two people can be different, and we can respect each others differences, but in relation to conceptualization, differences become inconsistencies which produces incoherency. So if we do not take the time to determine the correct and the incorrect in conceptualization, we remain divided in misunderstanding, and "the concept" is incoherent. The cost of respecting each other's differences, in relation to concepts, is incoherency.

the two understandings of life seem to occupy such different planes entirely that they don't even seem to be trying to 'explain' the same thing. The conception of life at stake in each seem entirely unrelated to each other. So your hostility to a naturalist account of abiogenesis - even if you want to subscribe to the spiritualist understanding of life that you do - is somewhat puzzling to me on a conceptual level. Even though, yeah, I get it, you have a kind of visceral reaction to the idea of anything to do with 'naturalism'. But it is warranted here, conceptually? And if so, why? — StreetlightX

First, on one level, I'm completely on board with the notion that the literal 'genesis event' was a lightning or comet strike. I'm pretty sure that's how life on earth might have started, perhaps augmented by other such events over hundreds of millions of years. But that still is quite compatible with the notion of God 'breathing life into the clay'.

What the motivation behind the exploration of abiogenesis generally is, is that this is something that can be understood on the same level as crystal formation - a matter of chemical necessity, something like a chain reaction, which then just happens to give rise to the 'Darwinian algorithm' - and, here we all are!

Francis Crick, Jacques Monod, Daniel Dennett, and many other biochemical materialists of that kind, regard this as the be-all and end-all, the final understanding of the nature of life and mind, the ultimate triumph of the naturalist project. It is, consciously or otherwise, the attempt to banish any idea of creativity or intentionality from nature; everything is a consequence of dumb luck (as if that actually amounts to an hypothesis!) It is the ultimate 'brute fact' of existence.

This is, as Thomas Nagel said in his 2012 book, the basis of 'neo-Darwinist materialism' which is the backbone of materialist thought on the subject - hence my repeated reference to the abstract of his book:

There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

I see the emergence of life in terms of something novel, namely, the appearance of the subject of experience. Seen this way, the evolution of life is the unfolding of a hitherto-unrealised dimension of existence - conscious experience as a mode of being. That, in my view, is what various forms of creation myth attempt to re-tell, with greater or lesser degrees of success.

Obviously, the ancients didn't know what science has shown to be the literal, physical truth of the matter, and traditionalists have to adjust their thinking accordingly. But I don't believe the scientific discoveries do necessarily undermine their worldview, unless they are interpreting religious metaphors literalistically. Hence the conflict is between religious fundamentalism, which is clinging to biblical literalism, and scientific materialism, on the other side. And they have a lot in common.

But always, on these forums, the de facto view is that now we know that abiogenesis is a final truth about the ultimate nature of life. A lot of people simply take that as established scientific fact, when it isn't.

You didn't answer my question. You were talking about spiritual purpose before, now you're talking about creativity in nature. I didn't ask you about the latter.

Bottom line: If scientists can get away with the completely fabricated story of abiogenesis, they can get away with saying anything. Propagandists refer to this as the Big Lie. As a direct result of the outright dehumanization of people, whether it be describing them as computers or "just chemicals", 50,000 Americans are killed each year by prescription opioids with impunity. If you believe such a situation is OK, that the only thing that happens with these deaths are some computers or some chemicals have moved into their "natural state", then the indoctrination has been successful. There is real human cost to these absurd theories. It could be your loved one.

Dehumanization is ugly and it is more than worrisome that only religious institutions are speaking out clearly against it. How can such ugliest go unchallenged in secular institutions, given that it is just a fabricated story with no evidence whatever to support it? What exactly is going on here? I use to raise my hands in objection all the time in class. I didn't get As but I preserved my self-respect. Great genocides always begin with the Big Lie becoming acceptable and repeated.

You didn't answer my question. — StreetlightX

Can't you see the link between creativity, purpose, and intentionality?

Semiosis is sign processing (a psychological process of cogitation exercised by psychophysical organisms, or conscious agents).

Signs (i.e., representations) have meaning, hence; semiosis is the processing of semantic (i.e., attributive*) information; not mathematical, physical, or biological (i.e., predicative*) information.

"Information" and "semiosis" have become equivocal terms, and are used by apokrisis in a manner which attempts to validate a physicalist worldview (which I alluded to here).

Whereas, ascribing semiotic attributes to anything other than a psychophysical organism is a category error.

*Floridi, L. (2010). Information: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Whereas, ascribing semiotic attributes to anything other than a psychophysical organism is a category error. — Galuchat

Of, course. Any naturalist theory is simply the process of ascribing some traits of the mind to a chemical, whether it be a "selfish gene" or a "information communicating molecule", or otherwise.

All science needs to do nowadays is fabricate a story, use some sleight of hand, call it a done deal, and start teaching it in public schools. No scrutiny in secular institutions. The story is now used in lieu of any evidence. Then it is up to religious scholars (is isn't going to be any secular institution) to pour through the thousands of fabricated words to find the sleight of hand.

The fundamental problem it's that stories are now being substituted for evidence and still called science. No one in academia, other than lone voices such as scientists like Sheldrake, is calling science out. It is a travesty.

I agree.

Whereas, ascribing semiotic attributes to anything other than a psychophysical organism is a category error. — Galuchat

Aside from what you say, that this is mistaken attribution, the point I'm trying to make to apokrisis is that this false attribution gets us no further in terms of ontological principles. All one does with this type of approach is push back the sign reading capacity from the conscious mind, to DNA and other micro elements within the living body, and finally to the inanimate and the basic foundation of substantial existence. At this point we are faced with apokrisis' conclusion that semiotic principles are responsible for bringing into being substantial existence. Therefore we are forced to assume something outside of substantial existence, which reads the signs in the first place, causing the coming into being of substantial existence. Whatever it is which reads the signs in the first place, it cannot have substantial existence.

So all that this approach does, is push the question of what is it within the human mind which gives us the capacity to read signs, back to, and prior to, the beginning of substantial existence. Now by the principles of this approach, we are forced with the conclusion that whatever it is which gives us the capacity to read signs, it is necessarily something which transcends substantial existence.

This is an unreasonable approach because it renders the capacity for reading signs as something unintelligible. Instead of the dualist approach which allows that this capacity has real substantial existence, and therefore it has intelligible existence, it designates the existence of the capacity for sign reading as unsubstantiated and therefore unintelligible.

So all that this approach does, is push the question of what is it within the human mind which gives us the capacity to read signs, back to, and prior to, the beginning of substantial existence. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ultimately either the intelligence (e.g. reading signs, and much, much more) is either ascribed to Natural Laws (aka God) or the chemicals themselves. Science offers nothing else. The words used may change but the the actual trick always remains the same.

The same trick is used in genetics. A few proteins are peeled off and voila, they form in humans, antelopes, ants, or whatever. The details are shunted aside as an homework assignment.

At this point we are faced with apokrisis' conclusion that semiotic principles are responsible for bringing into being substantial existence. Therefore we are forced to assume something outside of substantial existence, which reads the signs in the first place, causing the coming into being of substantial existence. Whatever it is which reads the signs in the first place, it cannot have substantial existence. — Metaphysician Undercover

"It" either reads the signs, or creates them (thinking of the creative power of Hoffman's conscious agents); a conscious agent, or agents, which transcend(s) substantial existence. From a psychological standpoint, that makes sense because that's what human beings do: create things (albeit, in a temporal manner).

In this regard, philosophy had a very substantial role to play in the course of human development and explain. As academic science, outside of some religious universities, refuses to call out their own for the reckless substitution of stories for evidence, it then falls upon philosophers to do this. This has always been an important role for philosophy, to cut through the mirage.

It" either reads the signs, or creates them (thinking of the creative power of Hoffman's conscious agents); a conscious agent, or agents, which transcend(s) substantial existence. From a psychological standpoint, that makes sense because that's what human beings do: create things (albeit, in a temporal manner). — Galuchat

In apokrisis' ontology, the "it" which reads signs or creates them, bringing substance into existence, is a feature of the vague infinite potential of matter, as substantial existence emerges from the infinite apeiron. But this infinite apeiron, or prime matter, as Aristotle demonstrated, is an unintelligible principle.

In relation to substantial existence then, we can follow the principles of Aristotle's cosmological argument, and apprehend the necessity of assigning to this "it" (which reads signs), substantial existence, creating an ontology of substance dualism, or we can adhere to the physicalist's assertions that prime matter is something real, thus leaving the "it" which reads signs as unintelligible within the infinite apeiron of prime matter.

So this is the semiotics of dissipative structures? The water sees the channel as a symbol, and interprets the meaning of this sign as "go this way". — Metaphysician Undercover

You aren't going to be able to follow this as you are insisting on a mentalistic reading of anything I say. But anyway, the river channel is an example of history acting informationally. A whole bunch of individual erosive events in the past add up to tell a story about which way to go. The current flow of water doesn't interact with that past directly, in some material fashion, but it does interact with that past indirectly in seeing the current state of the channel as an informational constraint on its possibilities.

So this is a Bergsonian metaphysics if you like. Or at least what he was on about with his cone of memory. :)

Constraint = information = history. It is the difference between background and foreground, context and event, when it comes to analysing causality.

Then why this is not just metaphysics, but physics, is because science knows how to count both contextual information and material entropy in the same coin these days. At the Planck scale, the two kinds of "construction material" are equivalent and inter-convertible.

This duality allows for powerful new mathematical ideas, like the holographic principle. We have a second way of describing - and more importantly, measuring - reality. We can now get exact results that relate the contextual causality of global constraints to the efficient causality of local material events.

If you don't follow modern physics, you likely have no idea how important this new approach is. But it is why fundamental physics is attempting to rebuild itself on thermodynamic principles like entropy, dissipation and emergence.

One doesn't have to label this pan-semiotics. Physics calls it information theory, holography, thermal, etc.

But also, there is the usual confused variety of metaphysical interpretations of what the discovered duality of information and matter might actually imply. Some folk have taken off with ideas like digital physics - the belief that reality is a literal computation of some kind. Others talk as if the informational boundaries, the event horizons, are the new fundamental reality and all the material events they encode on their branes or holographic surfaces are just now ghostly fictions.

So the new physics works. And its metaphysics is up for grabs, just as was the case for quantum interpretations.

My view is that Peircean pan-semiosis offers the best metaphysical framework for interpreting what this new physics is actually struggling to say about reality.

So you can scoff at the triviality of the river in its channel example. But instead, why not think about it carefully. All those little bouncing H2O molecules knocking off one another. And then the mysterious invisible hand that is their collective past. The events of the moment are being shaped by the information which represents the context of a history. But also each molecule has the chance to rewrite the history of the river bed.

You have two levels of action to account for. Plus the further fact that they form an interaction. Modern physics has the mathematics to formalise these accounts. Peircean semiosis provides the generalised triadic metaphysics which offers the best interpretation.

But if you prefer the idea that reality is a hologram, or a simulation, go for it.

"Information" and "semiosis" have become equivocal terms, and are used by apokrisis in a manner which attempts to validate a physicalist worldview (which I alluded to here).

Whereas, ascribing semiotic attributes to anything other than a psychophysical organism is a category error. — Galuchat

What you are missing is that it is the triadic causality of semiosis that pan-semiosis is generalising.

And I think you don't really get that aspect of Peircean semiosis. This is not surprising if your knowledge of semiosis - as a metaphysical structure - has been shaped by the "Turku crowd". They were pretty mentalistic in understanding semiotics as a theory of meaning making. They weren't working at a level of absolutely abstract metaphysical generalisation.

It was US hierarchy theorists who could appreciate the mathematical bones of Peirce in this fashion.

Peirce himself clearly felt his semiosis applied at the physically and cosmologically general level. He was a scientist - summa cum laude in chemistry at Harvard - so was up with the thermodynamics of his era.

So to the degree that you accept Peirce's triadic scheme, as opposed to Saussure's dyadic one, then it simply can't be a category error. Peirce himself said it wasn't.