Abstract

After Thomas Sebeok’s proposal of global semiotics in the 70s, an attempt to move beyond anthroposemiotics to the realm of zoosemiotics, phytosemiotics, endosemiotics, and, ultimately, to the all-encompassing realm of biosemiotics was made. Semiotics was then established as a serious candidate as the transdisciplinary base of science and humanities –particularly from the triadic and pragmaticist semiotic proposal of C. S. Peirce. However, the semiotic attempt to explain the fundamental aspects of living systems from the standpoint of meaning production and reproduction demonstrate that in order to explain the meaning-making process in living organisms a systemic, biological, cybernetic and informational approach was also needed. The integrative visions have discovered some basic similarities among these theoretical perspectives from which it has been possible to recognize complementarities among them. At the same time, it also made possible to identify variations at the very bottom of each approach, which resulted in a complex task of theoretical integration. Thus, in order to uncover these tensions and complementarities, I will focus my attention in the process of communication in an attempt to move from cybernetics to semiotics and further on to cybersemiotics considering some aspects of biosemiotics, first and second-order cybernetics, Peircean semiotics, and information theory. The goal of this chapter is to overcome the problem of defining the limits and boundaries of communication as a physical, biological, and social phenomena and its nature as an academic field by proposing communication as a transdisciplinary concept from the point of view of cybersemiotics, from which it is also possible to address the process of communication, explained in what Brier considers to be the levels of cybersemiotics, and the consequences it may have for the explanation of meaning-making processes in living systems.