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... Many scientists may think that these ontological commitments puts biosemiotics far apart from decent natural science. And yet, recent interpretations of the second law of thermodynamics seem very close to the assumptions of biosemiotics. Thus according to the maximum entropy production principle suggested by Rod Swenson (Swenson 1989), thermodynamic fields will behave in such a fashion as to get to the final state - minimize the field potential or maximize the entropy - at the fastest possible rate given the constraints. This implies that “progressive evolutionary ordering entails the production of increasingly higher ordered states.” The point is this:

Every time an ordered state is produced in some system, implying a lowering of the entropy at that location, there must be produced even more entropy at other locations in the world in order to obey the thermodynamic dictate to always increase the total entropy in the universe. For this reason it appears that the best way to produce entropy as fast as possible should be by producing order as fast as possible. Or in the words of Swenson and Turvey:

“The world is in the order production business, including the business of producing living things and their perception and action capacities, because order produces entropy faster than disorder.’ (Swenson and Turvey 1991, 345).

Now, as Swenson and Turvey goes to great detail in showing, “perception and action cycles”, which are of course key processes in the semiotic dynamic of living systems, are even more instrumental than physical systems in furthering the entropy production:

“Living things with the capacity to perceive how and where they are moving, and with the coordinate capacity to move in ways that allow them to perceive more and to perceive better, expand the patches of the planet in which energy degradation can take place. In the terms introduced above, they expand the Earth’s dissipative space. Thus the purpose of living things are differentiations or productions, literally higher order symmetry states, of the environment itself towards its own ends”(Swenson and Turvey 1991).

Biosemiotics suggests that our universe has an built-in tendency (originating in the 2. law of thermodynamics) to produce organized systems possessing increasingly more semiotic freedom in the sense that the semiotic aspect of the system’s activity becomes more and more autonomous relative to its material basis (Hoffmeyer 1992; Hoffmeyer 1996). The semiotic dimension of a system is always grounded in the organization of its constituent material components, and cannot exist without this grounding, but evolution has tended to create more and more sophisticated semiotic interactions which were less and less constrained by the laws of the material world from which they were ultimately derived.

It seems obvious to this author that science must somehow come to terms with the necessity of "understanding our universe in such a way that it is not absurd to claim that this universe has itself produced us", to quote Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Accepting the Peircean idea that semiosis as a general aspect of our universe, or in his own words, that nature has a tendency to take habits, seems like a modest step to take in order to produce a description of the world which do not preclude our own existence as real persons, as "I's", in it. ...