expression

Although a characteristic of all beings,, expression is generally considered as referring to states that are almost exclusively human. The ubiquity and relevance of extended and embodied cognition is then overlooked, and the psychological correlate of expression in human beings considered as technique.

The term expression is used here more widely than normal to refer to semiotic communication — the making, recognizing, interpreting, using, and responding to signs; whether these are made through, for instance, auditory, visual, mophological, or behavioural media.

External or internal, conscious or not, a being's expression develops in response to the meaningful internal representations generated from the expressions of their sense systems. expressionthen is recursive. It is predicated on elementary, inherited rules, or behavioural modules. For instance, a being's physicality and markings are perceived by others as meaningful, whether through experience or association, and choices are influenced; selection and inheritance then follow.

awareness arises from differentiated sets of mental activity — temporary foci around which orbits, for instance, our own cognition. Conscious expression is then a linear organization of the elements of these foci, and fluency the semiotic competence with which they are identified and translated into a stream of signs.

language is the recognition of a set of signs, the meaning of which has been informed by the macrocosm of metalanguage within which it has developed — cultures are metalanguages within which human languages develop. Languages then drive the development of cultures.

The expression we develop within the cultures of our ontogeny is foundational. Together with other elementary, cognitive and bio-mechanical capabilities, the fluency we acquire then is formative, as in later life, engaging with expression in other cultures, it commensurately founds our expression within these too.

expression

expression refers here to any signal, sign or symbol, that a being generates, whether external or internal to itself, and whether or not it is consciously or deliberately generated. Its transmission may be through a biophysical channel e.g vocal, luminescence, neural, etc.; a virtual channel e.g text, artefact, smoke, etc.; or a bio-virtual channel e.g telephony, video, etc. It is the effective response of a being to its perception of an external and internal event, constructed from the meaningful internal representations it generates from the chemical, electrical, or electro-chemical expressions of its sensory mechanism.

Mind can be defined as a causally effective inner state.

The endocrine apparatus (the hormone system) .. should not be seen as an isolated regulatory system .. but rather as an integral part of both the immune system and the nervous system. Together, .. these endosemiotic tools are collectively responsible for the interaction of the organism with its social and physical world and constitute the fundament out of which so-called psychological reality, if any, of the organism will emerge.

from "The Great Chain of Semiosis. Investigating the Steps in the Evolution of Semiotic Competence." Jesper Hoffmeyer & Frederik Stjernfelt, 2015, Biosemiotics 9(1) DOI:10.1007/s12304-015-9247-y

..unlike non-living processes, the categorization of substances through processes of molecular recognition, as exhibited e.g. at the level of bacterial chemotaxis, already realizes the split between objects and properties. In many cases, several different compounds may serve exactly the same functional end implying that the process is fallible (while it makes little sense, by contrast, to conceive of pre-living processes as fallible) - in the sense that certain other compounds recognized and "approved" by the bacteria may nevertheless fail to support survival. E. coli is able to swim upstream in a sugar gradient due to its ability to recognize a range of carbohydrates (objects) from the partial shape of the perimeter of the molecules (properties) and, for the same reason, they will be deceived by artificial sweeteners with the same partial shape property, just like human beings will be so deceived. Molecular recognition may fail, leading the organism to accept irrelevant or even poisonous substances, a failure which is objectively measured through its consequences for survival.