Sensitive Souls and Biosemiotic Agency as Emergence

Biosemioticians seldom discuss consciousness. Whether that was a conscious decision or not, semiosis rather than consciousness has been our domain of research. We replace some of the problems associated with cuts in the differentia specifica of consciousness with other capacities, namely, the capacity to interpret according to species-specific constraints. Agency has been variously defined in biosemiotics (Tønnessen, 2015), but instead of being an on-or-off switch, it is viewed as having stages or gradations (Deacon, 2021; Sharov & Tønnessen, 2021). Hofstadter (2007) has hypothesized that like agency, consciousness is a more/less property (see Fig. 1). More radically, consciousness may have certain zero-sum properties unapparent through behavioral observation alone. That is, an ethology of consciousness may be hopelessly constrained by the consciousness of the observer (or willingness of the consciousness of the observer to stretch, bend, reduce, or change their own attachments to what consciousness is and does).