“Human, all too human”
Language is still a subject of serious investigation since the beginning of the 20th century. The central topic is its relation to the world. Language inherently does not exist as part of the physical world, its a representation, a means of communication, a collector of pointers.
Science use mathematical language to describe processes. While the aim of science and the Faustian soul is to map the whole of our materialistic reality, scientific language does not engage (at least not directly) what is not measurable : qualia, emotions, desires, instincts, sensuality, art, myth, imagination, values, judgment, irony, humor, play, ineffability – that which resists articulation altogether.
Writing styles such as the poetic and aphoristic, engages with the non-measurable, although they can definitely represent many types of truths, although non-measurable truths.
The more-than-human does not speak in words. If language does exchange information and contains intelligible information, then nature can speak in rhythms, gestures, songs, movements, images. The stars can tell us a story about a beginning of the world, through myth and or science, icebergs, oceans, tree and bees about our future.
Language can be descriptive, engaging, even summoning. We will engage with the different aspects of it in this article and on other ones.
Biosemiotics
Biosemiotics is an interdisciplinary field that studies signs, meaning, and communication in living systems. It brings together biology, semiotics (the study of signs and meaning), philosophy, and linguistics. Organisms receive and send signals and meaning from their environment. Semiosis (meaning making), emerge in the process, these could be for example signals of food or danger that support life of organisms, if signs make a life/no-life difference then they are meaningful for the organism.
This shifts the perspective from life as machine (mechanistic biology) to life as meaning-making system. It is deeply rooted in older cultures, and it opens the door to many other interesting possibilities for humans. Our bodies and senses again become a very important factor in value and meaning making, because they are the recipients and senders of this ecological communication.
Forests, wind, ravens, water, rivers, fire, smells, textures, are all connected to each other and to us if we only pay attention to them. Every sound, shadow, and breath can be read as a semiotic exchange.
We are used to using mostly an objective language, which is human and inanimate while biosemiotics is about relational language, which is natural and animate. It is about understanding relations and movements instead of static and fixed frame of thoughts. It would be useless to try to argument why such biosemiotic language is important to us using written language, because its own movement is not fossilized letters words and sentences, they are movements, in time, through senses, through nature and the non-human, believe it or deny it, that was once clear to every human until the written word began to eclipse the living sign, and we mistook the shadow of meaning for its source.
Umwelt
“Umwelt” is a concept from biology and philosophy, It means the subjective world that each living being inhabits. Every organism perceives and interacts with the world through its own senses and bodily capacities. The umwelt is that organism’s lived reality. Humans and animals all exist in the same physical world, but our umwelten are radically different because we sense and interpret different signals. Perception and action can be described as loops: an organism picks up certain signs (like smells, vibrations, light), and these guide its behavior in a self-contained meaningful world.
This connected to phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty) and semiotics (signs and meaning in life. umwelt becomes more than biology — it’s a way of thinking about subjectivity, perception, and the limits of worldhood. Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) already implies that each being has its own horizon of significance. Every creature’s world is finite, structured by its way of being. The world is a mosaic of overlapping umwelten. Reality is not “the” world, but countless worlds folded together, and not only the human ones.
For humans, language and culture radically extend our umwelt, shaping what counts as meaningful.
Perception is not passive but world-constituting. Animals doesn’t just receive data, They live in a network of meanings (signals, signs, affordances). For humans, language and culture radically extend our umwelt, shaping what counts as meaningful. We can never fully inhabit another being’s umwelt — we can only imagine it, this highlights alterity: the irreducible otherness of beings. Our umwelt is not fixed: tools, technologies, languages, and cultures expand and reshape it.
Whatever is profound loves masks —Nietzsche
If you gaze long into nature, nature gazes into you
Well, more precisely, nature looks through you. We are always relational, and in and part of nature. We embody the view, thoughts, interests of nature. Many things we do are not for the sake of our own (ego) survival : having children, have instincts, having urges. This is nature embedded into us in a way that contradicts the ego, calling the shots’ for its own survival : aspects of our being and personality stand in contradiction of the concept of the identity of the self. We embody different voices in one consciousness : if one voice says “I’m going for a 10km run” the other one says “Please don’t, maybe stay home and watch a film, it’s anyway rainy outside”.
It is important to say that at this point in the development of the evolution of human consciousness, we are no longer bothered with basic survival or managing resources for the sake of survival (in the west). This fact frees up the mental space to be able to think about the role of consciousness when its not bothered with survival. The role of instincts and our place in nature changes completely.
Symbiogenesis
We have the luxury to be able to design our future through Symbiogenesis. Symbiogensis means re-defining our long-term symbiosis with all other organisms. We can do it through developing our (integral) consciousness and through technology. Technology doesn’t have to be the disaster that it is today, as much as industrialization is not what it was in the beginning : an apocalyptic complex.
Symbiogenesis, first proposed by Lynn Margulis, is the process by which cells incorporate environmental elements driving evolution. Its purpose is to maintain energy homeostasis across time, visible as adaptation through ontogeny (individual development) and phylogeny (species evolution). Both are cellular communication mechanisms responding to stress and genetic change.
Through this process, life has not only adapted physiologically but also make the mathematical order of the cosmos. We see it in patterns like the Fibonacci sequence and in the “fine-tuning” of physiology to the environment. Gravity, quantum mechanics, and stellar nucleosynthesis are tied into this story, linking physics and biology as co-determinants of evolution and patterns.
Ultimately, the cell stands at the center—integrating environmental factors, elements from stars, and energetic balance—producing both biological complexity and consciousness as an emergent property, with the cell itself acting as both observer and observed. The cell isn’t just passively adapting to the environment (observed) but is also shaping and defining the environment through its responses (observer). In that sense, consciousness (in this framework) emerges because life is simultaneously the thing being acted upon and the thing perceiving/acting.