Life Is Not Meaning: Biosemiotics Under Constraint — 5 Continuity Without Collapse: Why Life Does Not Gradually Become Meaning

Biosemiotics is, at its core, a theory of continuity.

Against sharp divides, it proposes:

• no sudden emergence of meaning,
• no privileged threshold,
• no categorical break between life and semiosis.

Instead:

meaning is continuous with life.

From simple organisms to complex symbolic systems, the difference is taken to be:

• one of degree,
• not kind.

This claim is not an afterthought.

It is the condition that allows:

• signs to be extended into biology,
• interpretation to be generalised,
• and code to be treated as semiosis.

Without continuity, the entire framework fractures.

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1. What Continuity Does

Continuity performs a specific function.

It allows:

• biological responsiveness to be read as proto-meaning,
• functional organisation to be read as proto-semiotic,
• and simple systems to be placed on a trajectory toward full semiosis.

In effect:

continuity turns difference in organisation into difference in degree.

This is how value becomes meaning—quietly, incrementally, and without explicit transition.

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2. The Constraint: No Gradualism Across Categories

Under constraint, this move cannot be accepted.

Because it assumes:

• that value and meaning lie on a single continuum,
• that one can become the other through incremental change.

But if:

• value = organised selectivity,
• meaning = organised construal,

then they are not:

• higher and lower points on the same scale,

but:

distinct organisations with different conditions of possibility.

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3. The Problem of the Threshold

Continuity avoids a threshold.

But in doing so, it avoids a necessary question:

under what conditions does meaning exist at all?

If there is no threshold, then either:

• everything is already semiotic,
  or
• nothing is.

Biosemiotics chooses the first option.

But this comes at a cost:

the concept of meaning becomes so general that it loses its specificity.

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4. Gradation Without Transformation

It is entirely possible to have:

• gradations in complexity,
• increases in organisational sophistication,
• and richer forms of responsiveness.

But none of these, by themselves, produce:

construal.

A system can become:

• more sensitive,
• more adaptive,
• more complex,

without ever crossing into:

• meaning.

Because:

no amount of value produces meaning unless the organisation itself changes.

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5. The Missing Discontinuity

Continuity narratives suppress a critical fact:

a change in kind cannot be explained as an accumulation of changes in degree.

If meaning requires:

• construal,
• internal differentiation of sign relations,
• and “as”-structure,

then its appearance marks:

a discontinuity in organisation.

Not an absolute break in the sense of separation—

but a shift that cannot be described as gradual accumulation.

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6. Continuity Reinterpreted

This does not require abandoning continuity altogether.

But it must be reframed.

Continuity can describe:

• variation within an organisation,
• or patterns across instances.

It cannot:

• convert one organisation into another.

Thus:

continuity holds within value, and within meaning,

but not across them as a single scale.

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7. Coupling Without Gradient

We already have a way to relate distinct organisations:

coupling.

Instead of:

• life gradually becoming meaning,

we have:

biological organisation (value) and semiotic organisation (meaning) co-present and mutually constraining without collapsing.

This avoids:

• reduction (one into the other),
• and continuity (one sliding into the other).

Relation is preserved.

But distinction is not lost.

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8. The Residual Temptation

The appeal of continuity is strong because it promises:

• unity without dualism,
• relation without separation,
• and emergence without rupture.

But under constraint, this promise cannot be fulfilled without cost.

The cost is:

the loss of the distinction between value and meaning.

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Closing Formulation

Life does not gradually become meaning.

No increase in sensitivity, complexity, or adaptation

produces construal.

Value and meaning are not points on a continuum.

They are distinct organisations

that may be coupled,

but do not transform into one another.

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With this, the final support of biosemiotics has been removed:

• expansion (life as semiotic)
• sign (without construal)
• interpretation (as response)
• code (as encoding)
• continuity (as gradient)