Introduction

The aim of this article is to show how a narrative hermeneutic understanding of temporality can extend the concept of meaning beyond biosemiosis, while simultaneously clarifying the relationship semiosis and agency have to this extended concept of meaning. This argument will be made in the context of life’s emergence, abiogenesis, as this is where the simplest and clearest relationship between meaning and time can be theorized. Because at this point semiotic relations are not yet as muddied by a long and contingent evolutionary history creating semiotic relations which are more conventional than necessary.

The first thesis in Theses on Biosemiotics: Prolegomena to a Theoretic Biology states that “The semiosic–non-semiosic distinction is coextensive with the life–nonlife distinction” (Kull et al., 2009, p. 168). In consequence, abiogenesis can be understood as the emergence of meaning-making from non-meaning making processes. This question– how does meaning-making come into being from what it is not– contains the issue of how it might be possible that while there is nothing for which something is meaningful there is pressure for meaning-making to come into being in the first place. In other words, why would a decision be meaningful if there is not something for which it matters?

The development of this problem thus straddles an uneasy twilight zone between meaning-making and meaningless physicality, a threshold which resists pinpointing. In relation to this tension, the discussion of the first thesis states:

Often the emergence of life is seen as a sudden transition where the many properties defining life arise together or are tightly interconnected (like self-replication, autocatalysis, function, and cellularity). However, this appears to be both too simple and implausible. There is no simple dividing line where all the interconnected properties of living systems, as we know them, emerge. Instead we observe what we call a threshold zone, probably involving incremental stages in which different component processes emerge (Kull et al., 2009, p. 168).

An explication of this can be found in Terrence Deacon’s theoretical model of life’s emergence aimed at describing “a simplest possible molecular model system which only assumes known physics and chemistry but nevertheless exemplifies the interpretive properties of interest” (Deacon, 2021, p. 537). Or more recently, in terms of molecular evolution, “how semiosis can be understood in terms of molecular evolution, without invoking any atypical physical-chemical properties or taking an extrinsic observer perspective” (Deacon, 2023, p. 2). In doing so Deacon describes a physicochemical dynamic capable of organizing itself in such a way that it produces relationships capable of exhibiting processes containing exhibiting the affordances associated with semiosis.

Some commentaries on Deacon’s target article regarding this issue, How Molecules Became Signs (Deacon, 2021), argued that since the theorized model did itself not harness energy as a method of internally driven reactive intervention it is not actually representing something for itself and as such calling it semiosis would be a stretch, nor would normativity in this semiotic sense be possible (Favareau, 2021; Froese, 2021). Deacon responded that his model “demonstrates that ‘intrinsic activity’ is not essential to normativity, so long as there is an intrinsic disposition to counter an impending threat to its organizational individuation” (Deacon, 2023, p. 5). Additionally, in his original article, Deacon explicitly mentions that in referencing the autogenic process he “will use this hyphenated version of the term representation in order to avoid any implicit psychologism and instead to highlight the more basic sense of being presented again in some other form” (Deacon, 2021, n. 1).

The core of this disagreement arises from the question of what kind of process could be considered interpretation. Semiosis, as the process of meaning-making/interpretation, is understood by the commentators to be necessary for meaning insofar that, for something to be meaningful, it requires an interpreter which is interpreting. Yet, in the context of the emergence of semiosis it should be asked; what pressure underlies this emergence of meaningfulness interpreted if that for which it is meaningful is only that which is emerging at that point? This would be a meaningfulness emerging as “sudden transition” which “appears to be both too simple and implausible” (Kull et al., 2009, p. 168). As such an uneasy disagreement can be seen between on the one hand Deacon’s claims of interest and semiotic structure in physicochemical processes and on the other hand the more orthodox semiotic– and hermeneutic– position that for something to be meaningful it requires someone to be interpreting at that moment.

The difference in these positions can also be considered as whether meaningful relations are necessarily internal processes of recognition and action or if these could also be purely structural and passive. Or, in light of its temporal dimensions, whether an interpretant can only have an object referent intrinsic to an act of durational semiotic recognition or whether this object referent can also be understood as being temporally displaced from the interpretant in a processual form of interpretation devoid of any phenomena or semiotic act. This latter temporal analysis requires a split between temporal relations associated with orthodox semiosis/meaning-making, which will be called temporally distended relations, and temporal relations not orthodoxly understood as semiotic yet relevant for a system insofar it can be understood to be organized towards some goal, which will be called temporally displaced relations– stemming from the fact its meaningful structure is not grasped within a moment or duration but displaced over-time.

The relationship between time and meaning has a long history in the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics. In hermeneutics time plays a pivotal role as prerequisite and all-pervasive structure for the concepts of understanding and meaning in general. Philosophers in this tradition — like Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricœur — developed an ontological relationship between being and understanding — Being (with a capitalized B) in this context becoming a general concept of that which is questioning/understanding itself in asking the question to begin with. In doing so they sought a road out of metaphysics by way of understanding the pre-requisites of understanding — Being itself — while coming to grips with the fact that they were already in the process of understanding while doing so.

The question of abiogenesis mirrors the hermeneutic goal to find a kind of ground for meaning in that, for both, this is found in the existence of that for which this meaning is meaningful (organism/Being). The two differ insofar as the question of abiogenesis has a non-self/non-meaning from which it can extract explanation while the more philosophical approach remains within the framework of meaning as its frame is meaningful Being itself as something which investigates itself. This difference is also why the temporality of hermeneutics will have to take the temporality of meaningful experience (part of distended time relations) and extract from it a temporality of meaningful dynamics (displaced time relations). For this, Paul Ricœur’s narrative temporality will prove useful as his explication of narrative time will be shown to be recognizable even in the simplest forms of meaningful organization. To make this point however, first Deacon’s theoretical model of life’s emergence must be introduced and narrativized. Only then can Ricœur’s temporal dimensions of narrativity be dissected, split in two, and used to show why meaning does not need agents in the orthodox sense of the word.

Deacon’s Autogen, an Elementary Narrative

In his book Incomplete Nature (2013), Deacon theorizes a simple dynamic capable of creating a proto-evolutionary lineage of increasing complexity, which tends through its own self-propagation towards a local dynamic movement opposite to the general tendency of thermodynamic dissipation present in other dynamics. Deacon calls this teleodynamics, inspired by the fact that as a dynamic, it tends toward complexifying self-propagation as its telos– goal. The particular teleodynamic process that Deacon theorizes to demonstrate how such a dynamic might emerge he calls the autogenic process. According to Deacon, the emergence of a simple autogenic process could be the result of two distinct yet common dynamics. The first of these is autocatalysis, which is a catalysis “in which a small set of catalysts each augment the production of another member of the set, so that ultimately all members of the set are produced” (Deacon, 2013, p. 293). The second dynamic, self-assembly, is a process by which certain molecules self-assemble in such a way that they create a container, or barrier, between their inside and outside. In interaction these two dynamics interplay in such a way that, through the process of self-assembly, a containment is created which separates part of the substrate in which the containment came about. This now internalized substrate then autocatalysis within this containment, creating more of the reactants which are required for both self-assembly and autocatalysis until the energy runs out within this contained space. If then the containment is breached, the innards of the autogen spill out into the larger substrate, and since these innards are made up of the initial conditions in which the autogen came about, new autogens can self-assemble while the initializing autogen might be repaired through this process also. Because the spillage and self-assembly happen in the larger substrate the dynamic is opened up to the introduction of foreign elements, hence introducing a functional precursor of mutation into the now emerged concept of lineage. In narrativizing this minimal teleodynamic process it is also apt to find the minimal form of narrative.

In his article The Logic of Narrative Possibilities (1980) Bremond simplifies narrative to what he sees as its very elementary form. Bremond characterizes this elementary form of narrative to require three parts. (1) a virtuality– potentiality– for a goal to be attained, (2) the actualization or non-actualization of the act necessary for goal attainment, and (3) the eventual attainment or non-attainment of said goal. As such any potential process of actualization towards a goal can be recognized as containing an elementary narrative. For Bremond this still requires social conventions, genres and other conventions to become a proper narrative, just as any structure of semiosis requires convention, but this can at least be understood as its elementary logic.

Bremond’s three-step logic can be transposed onto Deacon’s autogenic process as follows: (1) The autogen as molecular structure contains the potentiality to self-replicate through the autogenic process which it embodies in relation to its milieu, (2) the autogen’s containment structure can be broken open to actualize the process necessary for self-replication, or not open and “maintain this potential across vast epochs of time” (Deacon, 2013), and (3) in having spilled its innards into the substrate the resulting process of self-assembly contains the attainment or non-attainment of the potential recognized as the end which its dynamic is directed at– self-replication and the potentiality of returning to (1) and start the cycle anew.

From a hermeneutic lens Ricœur is critical of Bremond’s approach and states that “plot stems from a praxis of narrating, hence from a pragmatics of speaking, not from a grammar of langue” (Ricœur, 1985, p. 44). In this sense, narrative for Ricœur can only fully be taken in its function as already grasping all of these parts together selectively and adding to them signification, structural features, and temporal ordering (Ricœur, 1984). Not unlike the semiotic critique of Deacon’s autogen not being an interpreter and thus not actively containing semiosis, Ricœur sees narrative also as requiring interpretative meaning-making, namely narrative understanding. This only happens in a spirallic hermeneutic process of cultural organization in which interpreters, together, create constellation of meaningful relations (bonds, experiences, cultures) from within which interpretation takes place always already steeped in the history of these conventions. To move beyond this critique means to show how meaningful organization does not require an agentic/phenomenal interpreter and how something non-agentic might still be goal-directed.

Temporal Thickness, Zeroth Agent

In the article Mind, Agency, and Biosemiotics, Alexei Sharov differentiates between two types of agents such that “[p]rimary agents are self-reproducing, whereas secondary agents are produced by primary agents or other secondary agents” (Sharov, 2018, Fig. 3). Primary agents are described as ranging from organs, to trees, to populations. He notes that these primary agents need to be autonomous, have informed choice (free to make a decision), and goal-directed. Secondary agents are autonomous constructs borrowing their goal-directedness from the primary process which produces them, such as autonomous machines or ribosomes. These secondary agents are therefore autonomous, have informed choice, but are not goal-directed for themselves (no self-replication). More generally, “[a]gents can be distinguished from the merely physical world by recognizing productive, regulatory, and epistemic relations: (i) with the exception of primordial agents, all agents are produced only by other agents, (ii) agents have the power to control some physical processes in their bodies and in the environment, and (iii) advanced agents develop internal models of the world” (Sharov & Tønnessen, 2022, p. 343). Following this analysis, the autogen is very clearly not an agent, neither primary nor secondary.

Recognizing why the emergence of meaning can still be found in the non-agentic process of the autogen requires not the search for a primary agent, but for the “temporal thickness [that] results from connecting traces of the past experiences of agents (e.g., genes, memories, and habits) with their goals in the future” (Sharov & Tønnessen, 2022, p. 157). This temporal thickness can however not be found in the experience of an agent as the autogen has no experience. Instead, it is the process which the autogen is functionally and normatively involved with where such thickness is realized.

Deacon’s concept of ententionality is useful here as a generic adjective for “all phenomena that are intrinsically incomplete in the sense of being in relationship to, constituted by, or organized to achieve something non-intrinsic” (Deacon, 2013, p. 27). In practice this means that there are aspects of reality which cannot be reduced to their physical make-up such as “functions that have a satisfaction condition” or “adaptations that have environmental correlates.” Deacon associates this with the concept of zero in mathematics, claiming that just as mathematics required a capacity to deal with what is not there, biology also needs to be capable of dealing with what is absent. Following Deacon’s concept and applying it to agency, it is a zeroth agentFootnote 1– an agent incomplete unless analyzed through aspects not present in, in this case, the autogen itself– that will be considered as involved in autogenic meaning.

To find this zeroth agency in the autogen requires a focus on its function in “connecting traces of the past […] with […] goals in the future” (Sharov & Tønnessen, 2022, p. 157). It is this connecting that stands for the possibility of finding the functional conventionalization of interests for a historical lineage in a passive autogen. For example, although the penguin’s flipper wings relate more to the flippers of turtles and seals in function, the flipper as functional conventionalization of aquatic locomotion is in evolutionary history a wing. The penguin’s flipper is therefore both functional and historical, there is no evolution ex-nihilo so even evolutionary convergence contains historical constraints of the lineage, useful or not (Gould & Lewontin, 1979). The autogen in this same sense has a historical function as long as it is not the first in the lineage. Unlike the penguin however, the autogen doesn’t use these historical conventions as an organism would, instead the autogen’s existence as body in the world is itself the expression of functional conventionalization of previous successful replication, even if the heritability of such a process is much more volatile than is familiar from evolution and the novelty of its proto-mutation is effectively normatively curated randomness. Note that the “use” of convention is in this sense for the autogen not a functional tool for an agent in an environment, but instead a functional body of the zeroth agent influencing the result of being affected passively by its environment in a process which brought it about.

As a zeroth agent, the autogen therefore expresses its goal-directedness only insofar it is itself the conventionalized functionality in relation to its environment. The autogen itself is the trace of a past for a purpose it embodies passively as it is affected by its environment. A self in the very minimal sense of being historically situated. This is a goal-directedness more associated with the autogenic process than the autogen itself.

To recap, the zeroth agent found in the autogen does not have control, autonomy, nor informed choice, yet the process which it is a part of did normatively curate its body such that in relationship to its environment it tends to result in goal-directed outcomes more so than random chance. While the autogen has no active internal model of the world it acts upon, the autogen does contain a model of the world it came about in that functionally relates to its replication.

These are the reasons why the autogenic process, without agency in the primary and secondary sense, can still be considered in the search for the emergence of meaning. The autogen’s temporal thickness is found in the manner it, as trace of the past resulting in future goals, historically functions in relation to the goal-directedness of its process. This is however not the type of temporality that is known from primary agents. To differentiate how the zeroth agent and primary agent are temporally different requires a distinction between displaced and distended temporal relations.

Temporal distention is, as related to a phenomenological understanding of temporality, those temporal aspects directly involved in the semiosis of primary and secondary agents. It is that aspect of meaning-making which requires some duration in which the interpretative process can be sensed and interpreted– including the temporal ordering this involves. That agentic action which creates a temporal thickness through a functional cycle (Kull, 2015). The word distention is used here in reference to Augustine’s insight (discussed in the next section) that an agent deals with time beyond its grasp by being stretched (distended) between the future and past in present by way of attention to memory and expectation. This therefore includes everything from the historically situated human time experience to von Uexküll’s tick registering the butyric acid as impetus for action (von Uexküll, 2010). For the simplest form of agentic semiosis however, it could be radically theorized that distended time might be found in the mere duration of a reaction triggering process. Whether these contain some form of phenomenal content is however not within the purview of this paper. Distended time relations are in this sense at a minimum the temporal structure that is part of any process of acting, interpreting, or distinguishing that an agent has to reckon with given some intentionality.

Temporally displaced relations are those temporal relations not intrinsic to (distended) agentic processes, yet which nonetheless relate the past to the future through an entity part of a process that is goal-directed for itself. A human can for instance understand itself historically, which would be a distended relation to past, present, and future, but at the same time the capacity for such understanding is itself only possible because it is part of a very long lineage of evolutionary history not fully caught in understanding, yet which is prerequisite to it. The autogen as zeroth agent is in this sense recognizable as agent not because it is agential as itself, but because its process establishes the type of pre-requisite time relations associated with meaning-making processes even if the role of interpretation and meaning-making is taken up by its environment.

The aim of this distinction is to eventually show how distended semiotic agency might emerge from meaningful relations in displaced processes. This is necessary because well-worn ideas such as those of understanding begets understanding, semiotic-chains, or agents from agents, cannot be coherently argued without referencing that which it seeks to explain. First it is necessary to discuss how meaning might be recognized by its temporal structure beyond the simple thickness of past and future. This will be done through Augustine’s thee temporal aporia which will be developed by Ricœur in such a way that its analysis shows continuations between the autogenic process and the hermeneutic concept of narrative understanding.

Temporal Aporia

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know” (Augustine, 2001, bk. XI). With these words, Augustine confesses his struggle in understanding the nature of time. While earlier questions surrounding time had already surfaced in works such as Plato’s Timaeus and Parmenides, it is in The Confessions (Augustine, 2001), written at the end of the fourth century, that time is established as a central and lasting concern for hermeneutics. How can it be, so asks Augustine, that time is contemplated differently and aporetic to itself, breaking its unity? Aporia meaning a contradiction resultant from a process of understanding or interpretation. Three main temporal aporia are confessed by Augustine, below given names for clarity’s sake:

  1. 1.

    The Aporia of Eternity Eternity is for Augustine the ungraspable yet absolute still eternal presence of time as expressed in god who is not in time but encompasses all of it. Humans in this sense are not be capable of understanding time in its absolute unity and stillness in god anymore then they are capable of grasping god’s omnipotence. Instead the human soul is limited by the continuous movement of time in which it is caught. This breaks the unity of time as seen in god.

  2. 2.

    The Aporia of Individuation Much like the subject-object gap, the inability to equivocate the time one lives through in everyday experience with the time that is shared with the world one lives in seems to break time in two. For Augustine this is expressed by the fact that on the one hand he might define time as the movement of the cosmos, which is a world shared with others, yet he can also conceptualize himself experiencing a time moving forward when all this shared time stops moving. This incongruence stems from the fact that the subjective experience of living through a time is never exactly mappable on the physical structures by which time is measured in the world is understood by others whose experience might differ yet is shared with ours.

  3. 3.

    The Aporia of Immediacy In attempting to grasp the past, present, and future Augustine notes that the past is no longer, the present is fleeting, and the future is not yet here. As such our existing in the immediacy of life seems incapable in pinpointing any of these. Augustine’s solution is to reconceptualize past, present, and future in terms of memory, attention, and expectation. In doing so Augustine effectively thickens the immediate/momentary conception of the present by imagining the soul as being stretched (distended) between a past and a future through the presence of attention to memory and its use in garnering expectation. Yet, the past, present, and future remain referenced in absentia.

For Augustine these (distended) temporal aporia are acceptable by reference to the Christian god. Human experience of time is in this sense a fallible grasping of god’s eternal presence by a soul woefully ill-equipped to the task. Time’s non-unity and difference from itself then results ultimately from the limitation of the part (soul) grasping at an eternal unity of the whole (god). These Augustinian issues with time would later also inspire Heidegger’s work as what in part he saw as the failure of metaphysics to coherently deal with the concept of time (Coyne, 2015).

In Being and Time (2008) Martin Heidegger most notoriously set out a program which sought to center the question of Being as a ground for meaning. In doing so he deals with the aporia of time by conceptualizing it as the meaning of Being itself, dragging the concept of time into the structure of understanding itself. For Heidegger the differentiation between a clock time (shared with others) and psychological/phenomenological time (lived through) is therefore made within Being as authentic Being– roughly recognizable as phenomenological time– and an inauthentic public time of being– clock time, which is that time associated with being swept up in the world and talk of others (being-with-others). In doing so both types of time have a place in Being as the ground of meaning/understanding which precedes the capacity for analyzing time as something outside Being. As such, Heidegger managed to close the gap left open by Augustine by diffusing the aporia in a philosophical ontology of Being.

For the purposes of this article’s argument the connection between time and Being remains of importance. Like any process, interpretation does not just take time, recognition takes place in time. Semiotically this co-extensiveness of Being and temporality as grounding for meaningful experience is productive in that it mirrors the earlier mentioned co-extensiveness of biology and semiosis. Yet, by dragging Augustine’s aporia completely inside Being, Heidegger complicates the use of these aporia in explaining abiogenesis from the perspective of time relations. It is Ricœur’s critique which re-centers the aporetic nature of time while retaining much of the ontological relation between time and Being, which will prove productive in analyzing the temporal dimension of the autogenic process.

Ricœur’s Narrative Intervention

In response to Heidegger’s non-dealing with Augustine’s aporia, along with his general interest in the concept of self, the French philosopher Paul Ricœur wrote the three volumed work Time and Narrative (Ricœur, 1984, 1985, 1988). For Ricœur one of Heidegger’s weaker arguments was that by relegating the shared time of the clock to the hierarchically subsumed inauthenticity of Being, Heidegger ignores its aporetic relation with phenomenological time and therefore doesn’t fully engage with Augustine’s aporia. In agreement with Augustine, Ricœur did not think that the aporetic nature of time ought to be solved to gain a congruent concept of human understanding and its relation to time. In disagreement however, Ricœur did not consider the reference to god and the function of memory, attention, and expectation to be a sufficient explanation. Subsequently Ricœur asks himself what process of understanding might allow such a heterodox mismatch of aporia to come to a concordant whole in understanding.

The first move Ricœur makes in Time and Narrative (Ricœur, 1984) is to take inspiration from Aristotle’s Poetics. Particularly he takes up and transforms Augustine’s concepts of muthos– emplotment– and mimesis– the aesthetic act of imitation. First, in the activity of emplotting a tragedy, Aristotle noted that in this poetic act is found the triumph of concordance over discordance. Ricœur states that in this sense emplotment stands across from Augustine’s soul which is incapable of resolving the aporia of time by taking these discordant aporia laden time frames and making them meaningful together nonetheless. Poetic emplotment then functions as the creative mediation of discordant heterogenous aspects into a discordant concordant whole capable of being understood. This creative mediation of aporia doesn’t claim to resolve the aporia, instead it makes them productive in the sense that their aporetic discordance can be understood in light of each other even without deductive closure. This analysis implies that the presence of temporal aporia for an interested party creates an impetus/necessity for productive creativity. It is this impetus from aporia which in later sections will be developed as a temporal indicator of meaningful dynamics.

Ricœur then takes up mimesis as a kind of hermeneutic creative recurrence. Ricœur divides this process into three moments of mimesis which together create a spirallic cycle. The first mimesis considers the prefigurative competence of narrativization, this expresses the necessary fact that understanding is always already done from a particular place, tendency, habit, and capacity to understand. This first mimesis is much akin to the idea that semiosis/meaning never arrives ex-nihilo, instead always requiring some position from which it is capable of departing. The second mimesis is considered the act of configuring the plot. This is the act of creating understanding in narrative form by ordering and bringing in relation heterogenous aspects as cohesive whole. The third mimesis is the refigurative aspect which takes what has been figured and restores it to the world of action through understanding and the integration of this understanding into one’s life. In doing so this third mimesis explicitly rejects the concept of textual meaning without reader as only an interpreter can further the cultural spiral of interpretation. To recap, Ricœur centers hermeneutic recursivity as a process which starts with; (1) the contingent competence for meaning-making, (2) expressed in the process of figuring meaningful heterodoxy into a discordantly concordant whole, and (3) folding it back into itself by showing how what was produced as understanding has an impact on the interpreter whose contingent competence for future meaning-making is invariably impacted by the integrative and social role of understanding. Since this hermeneutic recursivity is a process of narrative understanding, it is worth pointing out that the threefold mimesis is naturally mappable on the earlier discussed elementary form of narrative set out by Claude Bremond.

Hermeneutic narrativity can as such, just like an autogenic process, be described as a process of creative recurrence and iteration. A recurrence recognized by its creatively productive– not random– directionality. To recognize this hermeneutic spiral of meaning in a temporally displaced autogen is then to find the mediating impetus present in each temporal aporia, as well as their conventionalized mediation, in the autogenic process itself.

The Aporia of Eternity, Interested in Remaining

Unlike the role of eternity as found in Augustinian’s eternal unity of god– an eternity of stillness– Ricœur’s eternity is better understood as relating to a mediation between Heidegger and a Christian hope of resurrection. Heidegger in his concept of Being-towards-death, significant because death is both a deterministic necessity yet at the same time a not-yet undetermined in the potentiality of life. Christian hope in that he recognizes a “hope stemming in one way or another from faith in the Resurrection” (Ricœur, 1988, p. 136).

The most topical example of this eternity can be found in Ricœur’s analysis of The Magic Mountain (Mann, 1996), a novel in which a story is told of a man who retreats from hectic public life to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. The analysis describes two eternities. One an almost timeless life in the sanatorium high up on the mountain where “[t]he fascination with sickness and corruption reveals an eternity of death, whose imprint on time is the sempiternal repetition of the Same” in which “the contemplation of the starry sky spreads a benediction of peace over an experience in which eternity is corrupted by the ‘bad infinity’ of endless movement” (Ricœur, 1985, p. 130). For the purposes of this article the aporetic of eternity is understood as mediating between this eternal repetition of wanting to remain still “the Same” while finding itself rudely awakened by the time which exemplifies the incessantly changing world actively asking for action to be taken. A call to action which, if ignored, unceremoniously breaks the eternal repetition of the same as eternal recurrence. In other words, to remain the same, the only option is action. Action which stands towards-death but can only find eternal remaining (non-dissipation of form) in a resurrection of self only graspable through the unending repetition of self-replication.

The autogen, as minimal example of a teleodynamic system, embodies this aporia of eternity as far as teleodynamics is understood as that dynamic which makes possible this remaining the “Same” through the replication of form. The capacity of the autogen to form new yet similar structures through self-replication is exactly what Ricœur more symbolically recognizes in the “Repetition of the Same” but understood for the autogen as remaining continuously in its cycle of replication. The reality of an infinity of thermodynamic degradation and foreign interference can only result in a remaining of its type of dynamic/structure by a process of continual change through “resurrection”– self-replication/repair. This mediation between the interest of an autogenic process to remain and the continuous necessity to change is what make teleodynamics different from what came before– systems aimed at efficient self-degradation. The continuous degradation of difference through thermodynamic work present in most thermodynamic processes is exactly the bad infinity which makes everlasting repetition impossible as the world at large comes knocking. The interplay between self-replication and the productive integration of foreign elements into the autogen process as a form of mutation can as such be directly related to the productively creative recursion found in a hermeneutic spiral.

The recognition that the mediation of eternal remaining with eternal degradation requires death and creative integration shows that the aporia of eternity is recognizable even in simple teleodynamic forms of organization like the autogen. This presence is however in a temporally displaced sense instead of a temporally distended one. In a temporally displaced sense the autogen, as embodied molecule, is in relation to its process tending towards an interest of remaining eternally. This interest is policed by the very simple fact that if an autogen fails and does not remain by way of self-replication it disappears and is as such no longer a lineage for which the process is relevant. For this it needs no action, yet it does, as process, fall towards the mediation necessary for remaining as any which remains does so by integrating its success in its replicants. A process spread out over time, a meaning and interest displaced from the autogen itself yet inherently part of why and what it is. As temporal dimension of interest the aporia of eternity thus shows, not unlike Augustine’s god, that the eternity which is strived for cannot be attained. This aporetic impossibility leads to mediation expressed as change through creative/mutative self-replication. This self which is interested in remaining thus leads into the next aporia.

The Aporia of Individuation, a Self in Context

Where the aporia of eternity recognizes a general mediated relation between the interest to remain “the Same” and the necessity for change to attain this end, the aporia of individuation arises from the emergence of an individuated interest of something which can be recognized to embody this interest in some way. For Ricœur and Augustine the aporia of individuation is expressed in the distended aporetic relation between phenomenological and clock time– the fact that living through time cannot be understood to be equated with the time that is measured and shared with others. For Ricœur this aporetic relation is mediated by the fact that living through time is always co-extensively done in a time shared with others. This might more generally be recognized as the simple fact that a boring and interesting talk differ in length for an interpreter even when both are 30 min long. Just as with the aporia of eternity however, a phenomenological analysis cannot be made with regards to an autogen.

Teleodynamics is differentiated from other dynamics in part by the fact that it constrains the dissipative tendencies of thermodynamics towards its own self-replication (Deacon, 2013). In the autogen model this is exemplified by the self-assembly creating a container which separates part of the substrate in which the autogen came about to autocatalyze the reactants necessary for eventual attainment of self-replication. Insofar that teleodynamics is understood as this temporal recursive patterns which as a dynamic is mediating the interest of remaining– referencing the displaced aporia of eternity–, the functionalized interest related to this autocatalyzing is to prepare for a future possible breach and kick-start the self-assembly of new autogens necessary for attainment of interest. To recognize here the temporal aporia of individuation it is useful to consider an autogen in three similar yet slightly distinct situations.

Situation 1, an autogen after having self-assembled spends X (measured) time floating around autocatalyzing. The autogen’s containment is breached, its innards spill out, and self-assembly successfully takes place in the greater substrate, resulting in the attainment of self-replication. Situation 2, consider that another autogen also spends X (measured) time floating around autocatalyzing in exactly the same manner as the autogen in situation 1. However, when this autogen is breached, it breaches in a part of the substrate which is full of encroaching foreign substrate catalysts which immediately make the process of self-assembly impossible by reacting with the autocatalyzed reactants. In situation 3 the autogen spends much less time autocatalyzing, so short in fact that for most other autogens this moment of breaching would result in failed self-assembly. Yet, because this autogen spills its innards near other autogens who are also in the same process, its self-replication is successful as others who spilled provide additional reactants, saving an otherwise doomed lineage.

The aporia here lies in the fact that insofar an autogen is an individuated molecular self with a body functionally related to remaining through self-replication, the exact same process in the exact same (measured) time can both be too long or too short as soon as it is brought in relation to the outside where the spillage triggers the final process required for goal attainment– self-replication. The point being that the temporal aporia of individuation, while not distended, can still be found displaced insofar the autogen as interested process has its temporality cleaved between an inside and outside– containment and substrate. Yet, neither the time of the substrate nor the time in the containment is enough to know whether it was too long or too short. In light of its interest a full understanding of the meaningful time requires the mediation of both the time autocatalyzing in the containment and the time outside as it is shared with others and milieu. Moreover, this allows the consideration of two times of exactly the same (measured) length which are meaningfully different insofar both are for interested structures in which the process relativizes time meaningfully in relation to the attainment of goal.

Ricœur similarly argues that phenomenological and clock time must come to be regarded as inter-constitutive. Not as an Heideggerian authentic/inauthentic part of Being, but as a process in which narrativization mediates the discordant aspects of time (Ricœur, 1984). For the autogen this is the time within its containment and the time shared with its environment. The phenomenological is in this sense never without its relation to a time outside of itself because in the process of narrative understanding the two are inter-constitutive insofar there is meaning. This does not resolve the aporia between the phenomenological and clock time but mediates them in historic time according to Ricœur. This historic time is itself recognized in the autogen insofar its self-replication understood as mediation creates a proto-evolutionary history functionally relating the autogenic replicant to the progenitor’s success.

At the core this temporal aporia of individuation shows how, from the interest of remaining present, internal and external time frames form an aporia capable affording subjectively differentiable time for an interested self. This is why time lived through is subjective yet always related to a time shared with others. More generally this displaced aporia of individuation is expressed by virtue of the fact that any teleodynamic process wanting to resist dissipation, and remain eternally as the “Same,” is forced to change in relation to its environment as much as it needs its environment to find energy to constrain and align towards this purpose. For this reason it will always need some form of openness which forces any internalized process to be mediated by some situation external to it to attain this most basic interest of remaining. An interest, as already discussed, directly dependent on a process of continuous self-replication. A process which as recursive pattern unfolding step by step is more appropriately related to the fact that actions and processes happen through time while the autogen is at some moment.

The Aporia of Immediacy, Action

The aporia of immediacy is that aporia which problematizes the fact that the past is already gone, the present is fleeting, and the future is not yet here. In other words, time seems ungraspably distant. For Augustine’s distended analysis it was the soul’s capacity for memory, attention, and expectation which managed to deal with this incongruence. When interpreted as a temporally displaced aporia this seem fairly out of place as the memory, attention, and expectation which make possible intentional action are precisely agential in nature. It is therefore important to dress-down the phenomenological argument and relate action to process in the sense associated with a zeroth agent. To understand the temporal relationship between act, process, interest, and narrative it is useful to start with Augustine’s description of himself reciting a psalm.

I am about to repeat a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my attention encompasses the whole, but once I have begun, as much of it as becomes past while I speak is still stretched out in my memory. The span of my action is divided between my memory, which contains what I have repeated, and my expectation, which contains what I am about to repeat. Yet my attention is continually present with me, and through it what was future is carried over so that it becomes past. The more this is done and repeated, the more the memory is enlarged–and expectation is shortened–until the whole expectation is exhausted. Then the whole action is ended and passed into memory. (Augustine, 1994, p. 203)

In reflecting on the above quote, Ricœur describes this as a relation with past, present, and future, in which “each [is] considered no longer in isolation but in interaction with one another. It is thus no longer a question of either impression-images or anticipatory images but of an action that shortens expectation and extends memory” (Ricœur, 1984, p. 20). The narrativization of this concept lies in the fact that in narrative memory and expectation can be held together as a discordantly concordant whole even though the past is no longer, the present is fleeting, and the future is not yet here. In Augustine’s quote this narrativization of a whole can be found in “Before I begin, my attention encompasses the whole”. Yet, in what follows Augustine describes that in the act of reciting the psalm, he is still required to go through it as one long action in the interplay of memory, attention, and expectation.

Returning to Bremond’s three step elementary narrative of (1) potential, (2) (non-)actualization, and (3) (non-)attainment. The act of the autogenic process is, as was set out at the beginning of this article, the whole process from (1) containing the potential for self-replication all the way to the (3) attainment or non-attainment of this self-replication. The autogen in this sense embodies this process insofar this process towards this goal is potentially attained by way of what they are in relation to their environment. Where the holding together of the psalm as a whole is a capacity of distended temporal narrativization, the whole of the autogenic process is also existent but displaced from it in time. In other words, the autogen doesn’t hold its action in its attention, but it does hold it in its (1) potential. It can be said that insofar the embodiment of the autogen is its embodied memory towards this induced recurrence that, the more it falls along its autogenic trajectory, “the more the memory is enlarged–and expectation is shortened–until the whole expectation is exhausted. Then the whole action is ended and passed into memory” which in this case is expressed in the embodiment of this success in the replicant. The memory here not a phenomenological kind, but a proto-evolutionary memory in which the interest of remaining has its success grafted in the physical make-up of the autogen as it relates to the potential of the process as a whole to attain. Expectation is in this displaced sense better understood as the tendency of this embodied memory to induce the process to fall successfully towards its end– remaining through self-replication. If the autogen is then understood as a zeroth agent, it is the autogenic process which functions as the act of a displaced agent.

Just as Augustine’s “attention encompass[ing] the whole” implies an understanding of the psalm already garnered, it is in the replicant, and to some extend the repaired autogen, that the historical success of the previous autogenic process is encompassed and possibly expanded upon through the introduction of foreign elements during self-assembly. Insofar that Augustine’s capacity to hold the psalm as whole in his attention was dependent on his capacity to integrate earlier experience of the psalm into his understanding for the future act of reciting, the process of understanding as it relates to the autogenic process is the relation between on the one hand that which was narrated and on the other that narrated which was integrated in the replicant and will influence the next process towards attainment. Having discussed all three aporia it also that semiosis’s relation to narrative that can be explicated more fully for the autogen.

Displaced Iconicity, a Self Displaced

In How Does a Molecule Become a Message? Deacon recognizes a “’zeroth’ level semiotic process” (Deacon, 2021, p. 547) in a cycle of autogenic disruption and self-repair. This because the ”disruption of integrity is a sign of non self and the dynamics that ensues and reconstitutes the stable state is the generation of an interpretant which actively reconstructs this self / non self distinction. So a cycle of autogenic disruption and self-repair treats every form of disruption as indistinguishable from each other—i.e. as iconic—because the system can only produce one form of interpretant ” (Deacon, 2021, p. 547). Not unlike the replicant of the previous section through a temporal lens, Deacon describes how triggered self-repair is indicative of iconicity as a form of self-reconstitution. Yet critically, the focus of his article is different. Deacon focuses primarily on how “interpretive processes make use of different affordances” (Deacon, 2021, p. 547) where this article’s analysis has up to this point been focused on how a zeroth agentic entity can be described as meaningful by way of its displaced temporal dimensions. To then further develop the idea of iconicity in the autogen, it is temporality again which can show a displaced structure in the absence of primary agency.

Sharov and Tønnessen, in their conceptualization of semiotic freedom as component of agency, note that “[s]emiosis creates temporal thickness by connecting different time scales, specifically, the immediate responses of the organism are interrelated with past evolutionary or cognitive changes” (Sharov & Tønnessen, 2022, p. 163). Similarly as with zeroth agency, a zeroth semiotic process must also be recognized not in the autogen, but in the temporal structure of its process. A process which through its normative narrative structure functionalized the autogen such that the autogen itself is the blind response of a displaced process. As was seen in the aporia of immediacy and Bremond’s three part narrative sequence, the functionalization of the autogen has a temporally spread out process with several stages. What is functionalized is therefore not just the autogen as a momentary entity or whole process, but as a process in which the autogen’s passively being affected can at various stages be functionally differentiated.

As zeroth agent, the displaced interpretative process of the narrative cycle has already historically situated the body of the autogen functionally such that the body, as affected by its environment, is positively correlated to the likelihood of replication. Self-repair is thus functionally historicized as a reinstatement of self and its potentiality for replication, iconically affirming the self/non-self distinction found in the aporia of individuation. Displaced semiosis is in this sense a stage within the narrative cycle, meaningful as conventionalization of function. Iconic because it can only reconstitute itself as itself, remaining the “Same.” Self-replication is therefore an expression of iconicity from the perspective of the displaced autogenic agent, not from the perspective of the autogen.

Tom Froese comes close to recognizing the issue as he speculates that “perhaps zero-level normativity first originated along with this whole biosphere, which maximized energy flow via self-production, and it only later complexified in terms of individual perspectives when self-production became partially bounded” (Froese, 2021, p. 662). Here Froese is correct in concluding that the autogen cannot be understood as having meaningful perspectives, instead relating the zero-level normativity more to a process outside of some primitive self. Where this speculation goes wrong however is that central to what makes something meaningful is not just its directionality, but also the fact that a narrative cycle has a normative dimension insofar it fails or attains. Diffusing meaningful organization beyond a bounded self with closure and heritability, however volatile this heritability may be, does away with the concept of meaning because there is no normative process by which a relationship to past for the sake of future is integrated into a self which embodies it– there is no temporal thickness.

The integrative process of a passive normative cycle thus has two parts. A productive part, by way of integrating past success, but also a creative part, by way of mutation. Without failure and attainment this creative aspect could not exist as the inability to fail for some and attain in others results in random development which immediately breaks the historical relation a function has to the interest of the process, this thus removes the temporally displaced meaningfulness altogether.

In this light the value of Deacon’s analysis in How Does a Molecule Become a Message? is not that he finds iconicity as a self-contained form of meaning-making in the autogen, but that he shows how “interpretive processes make use of different affordances provided by the available semiotic media” (Deacon, 2021, p. 547). It is by way of temporal analysis then that the autogenic process can be seen to ground the meaning of its semiotic process in a temporally displaced manner for a zeroth agent.

What makes spontaneous self-assembly fundamentally different from iconic self-assembly is the historicity and future directedness of self-assembly as function to a goal which it embodies as zeroth agent. Historical because the reason for self-assembly is functionally related to the reason the autogen itself ever came into being. Namely, the attainment of interest through a process using the same self-assembly process as inherited by a lineage of replicants. Future directed, or even more radically as function of proto-expectation, in that it reenergizes the potential for goal attainment which historically has led to self-replication and remaining the “Same.”

Distended Semiosis as Function, Potential Meaning from a Displaced Agent

The previous section conceptualized meaning through displaced temporal relations by showing a historicity of the autogen in light of goal-directed self-replication. On the contrary, this section’s goal not only to argue in favor of this the possibility but also the usefulness of including a displaced concept of meaning into meaning proper from the perspective of the emergence of distended semiosis and primary agency.

Sharov’s concept of potential meaning is useful here because as a concept of non-actualized meaning it relates well to the development of the autogen as a zeroth agent considered from abiogenesis as a necessary background for the primary agent. Potential meanings are meanings “that are not communicated currently or in the past” (Sharov, 2024, p. 137) yet which are “potentially useful for agents” (Sharov, 2024, p. 138). This includes natural resources, which have natural intrinsic properties which make them useful as tools for possible agents, and potential signs, non-proper signs which “signify if they become engaged with certain agents or subagents” (Sharov, 2024, p. 138). A virus is taken as example which, as potential sign, does not signify “unless they get a chance to infect a host cell and signify by making a new generation of viruses,” books and long-term memory can as such also be considered as potential signs (Sharov, 2024, p. 138). This potentiality of meaning is considered as a field in relation to competent agents which open up the potentiality of meaning to be actualized.

In the same vein as potential sign, Sharov & Tønnessen consider the virus as example of what they call a potential agent, “a system (or vehicle) that requires substantial help from other agents to become functional,” capturing Winfried Nöth’s idea “that symbols in a human cultural environment have a life of [their] own” and replicate (Sharov & Tønnessen, 2022, p. 180).

What the concepts of potential agent and potential meaning have in common is that the potentiality is expressed in terms of the possibility of an organism integrating “them into their own goal-directed activities and encode this integration in hereditary or memory signs” (Sharov, 2024, p. 140). For the potential agent and sign, a break is made between the signifying goal-directed act (the host cell or reader) and its integration in hereditary or memory signs (virus and ideas/books). Even though the virus borrows its goal-directedness from an agent displaced from itself, its body’s functional relation to its propagation is here indicative of an environment capable of interpretative hereditary integration.

Following this logic, the autogen is a potential agent and sign only if it is understood to require substantial help of the interpretative narrative process of its displaced agent and in this process the autogen’s body is the hereditary sign to be interpreted, both of which only attain through displaced meaning. Organism or no organism, the integrative normative structure of production and mutation associated with interpretation is what is important for the (displaced) goal-directedness of the process.

No organism implies physiosemiosis, “which assume that interpretation is grounded in physical causation alone” (Sharov, 2024, p. 149). Yet, temporally Deely describes physiosemiosis as linking “the intelligibility of past and future” while biosemiotics “is essentially oriented at once to the preservation as well as the propagation of the units interacting, and is thereby essentially future-oriented” (Deely, 1992, p. 63). The autogen straddles both concepts, not truly physiosemiosis because it is a historicization of a normative process goal-directed in remaining the “Same,” but also not biosemiosis as the autogen itself is no active interpreter. To solve this conundrum it is necessary to not just consider the potential meaning of a resource for an agent to signify, but also the physical constraints of a system which could come about contextually and for which particular resources are actual resources such that the emergence of signification is not a “sudden transition” (Kull et al., 2009, p. 168) but instead a function related to interest already conventionalized for that lineage. Sharov agrees with this in part as “meanings are pragmatic and become corrected through repetition of the corresponding functional cycle” (Sharov, 2024, p. 150), but does not go as far as to consider that “[m]eaning [.] grounded in [primary] agency” (Sharov & Tønnessen, 2022, p. 206) is therefore unlikely from the perspective of emergent functions.

A primary agent can only emerge because the physical constraints of possible historicized functions in a zeroth agent (e.g. autogens) have relations to their environment and its resources such that there is established a normative framework from which meaning is meaningful. Meaning should thus be grounded in intrinsic physical relations between, in the terms of the aporia of individuation, a self, for which normativity attains in some conventionalized manner, and the non-self, which co-extensively contextualizes self with the environment it is open to. Primary agency is a function nested in the (temporally displaced) normative structure of the displaced agent for which interpretation is associated with the environment’s tendency to interpret the zeroth agent’s passive body in a manner functionally aimed at replication. This conclusion is further supported by the role aporia plays in meaning-making.

Kull notes that “meaning-making requires a logical conflict” (Kull, 2015, p. 616). While mechanisms are capable of dealing with congruent operations like “IF a THEN DO [they] are not themselves semiosis” (Kull, 2015, p. 617). It is when incongruence becomes relevant to the process that the value of decision making and semiotic scaffolding comes into being. This because when naïve logical formalism becomes incapable of dealing with the problem through mechanism a pressure towards less rigid forms of reckoning with an environment might be useful. Particularly when logical conflict requires mediation.

To strengthen this point Kull references Ricœur’s The Rule of Metaphor “Le Guern suggest that semantic incompatibility is more than a signal for interpretation, and is in fact a component of the production itself” (Kull, 2015, p. 618). Considering that “The Rule of Metaphor and Time and Narrative form a pair: published one after the other, these works were conceived together” and that metaphor and narrative “belong to the same basic phenomenon of semantic innovation”, the introduction of the Ricœurian temporal aporia can inform biosemiotics’ notion of “the temporal unity of a whole and complete action” (Ricœur, 1984, p. ix). Particularly because it is Augustine’s temporal aporia which Ricœur eventually developed as this incompatibility of signal for interpretation. Kull recognizes this importance of temporality for incongruence as “in order for something to be a sign, there has to be an option. There cannot be any option without a simultaneous alternative option(s)” (Kull, 2015, p. 619). For this to be the case, so introduces Kull, a good base model is Uexküll’s functional circle.

In every functional circle, the perceptual transformation process coexists with an anticipation process (thus providing two representamens). These two may often be in conflict. During a short period (below the fusion threshold) the perception and anticipation coexist simultaneously in the internal now. This means that sequentiality does not hold in this situation — the events are not ordered at that moment; thus various orders can be created, i.e. a decision (choice) made. (Kull, 2015, p. 620)

The capacity of a functional circle here to drag together non-ordered (heterogenous) temporal events and use these to reckon with the environment is exactly what Ricœur recognized as the function of narrativization. It is this dragging together as a form of coming to understand which moves temporal relations into a temporally distended structure of meaning-making. A distended structure because there is now a simultaneity in which the mediating processes of interest can be actively engaged with.

What remains central in the context of abiogenesis is that, in dragging interests together to be reckoned with through a functional circle, what happens is not the immediate emergence of new meaningful relations. Instead, pre-existing temporally displaced relations, and the conventionalized processes which mediate them, are brought into distended relation such that the previously passive or purely mechanical process of mediation is now open to primary agentic intervention. The aporia which were first mediated by a passive process are now brought into simultaneous conflict which requires decisional mediation. This is especially important because when Kull notes that “meaning-making requires a logical conflict” (Kull, 2015, p. 616) it is a conflict arising from a process of interpretation. The difference between the two being that a logical conflict is computational in nature while aporia are, as conflicts of interpretation, initially shown to emerge by way of displaced interest breaking time by making it relative to an interested self. Displaced meaning thus opens up the temporal impulse for distended signification to emerge in the first place as interest creates the very aporia which makes interpretation a valuable strategy to remain the “Same.”

The emergence of a distended simultaneity is the transposition of the displaced narrative cycle into a function which is bounded in the organism. Recognizing therefore that displaced temporal relations ground meaning functionally opens up the analysis of that for which meaning is made and for which potential signs as resources indicate the potentiality of an agent in a displaced sense. In doing so narrative as function opens up in primary agentic action a new moment of normative intentionality first only associated with the death and rebirth cycles, but now within the agent cycling through successive circles. Agentic distention is therefore the first meaningful normativity not displaced from that for which it is meaningful. The intention of this early distended primary agent is only directly related to a function already established, not the end goal of remaining the “Same” as was seen in the general interest of the autogenic process. The primary agent has as such not replaced the already existing normativity of displaced interest, instead finding itself nested inside of it and using already established displaced temporal relations. By emerging to actively reckon with the already existing processes, it is in this distended simultaneity that meaningfulness is dragged into a now in which regular bounded semiosis can start actualizing signs in a distended fashion. A now in which an agent can intentionally reckon as semiotic function for a whole whose interest, for which this function conventionalized, remains displaced. Yet, also a now in which, for the first time, meaning is not only related to the displaced interest of remaining eternally,

Conclusion

The concepts of hermeneutic meaning, agency, and semiosis tend to explain themselves in productively creative spirals of self-propagation. In abiogenesis this argument cannot be made as there is no agency or semiosis that precedes it. Displaced meaning is what needs to be added to show how meaning might emerge without it being a “sudden transition” which “appears to be both too simple and implausible” (Kull et al., 2009, p. 168). Temporally displaced meaning opens up the possibility that, before the emergence of primary agency and distended semiosis, the intrinsic meaningfulness of productively creative spirals of self-propagation could be established in a purely passive dynamic.

Much like potential meaning does justice to the fact that intrinsic physical properties can be expected to be meaningful in relation to certain agents, so a zeroth agent does justice to the fact that physical constraints can show an intrinsic capacity for a system to have or develop a meaningful relations to such a resource. It does so not through simple physical processes, but through a proto-heritability which conventionalizes in a non-linear yet goal-directed manner the interest of remaining the ”Same” eternally. Although this might be considered physiosemiosis by some, it is nonetheless a rejection of the dyadic nature of such a physiosemiosis. Not only that, it is a call to recognize that for everything which makes us biological, being biological is co-extensive with the physical and chemical. The idea therefore that before proper distended biosemiosis, the first carriers of meaning developed functional relations through passively being affected by their environment, fits the nested structure of our own biological make-up and the understanding that semiosis is itself a function.

As a function the spirallic/cyclical process of meaning-making is one of continuous (displaced) interpretation and integration. The three temporal aporia recognized through Ricœur and Augustine can be seen in the autogenic process as very reductively depicted below in Fig. 1. In [1] the general relation to the aporia of eternity shows a goal-directedness assumed by a process transcending any individual autogen. In [2] a (narrative) cycle of interpretation and integration is associated with death and replication. Meaning is temporally displaced from the individuated autogen because at no point does the autogen act or integrate through a cycle. The role of interpretation and integration is fulfilled by an environmental process relative to the autogen and normatively associated with [1]. The aporia of individuation and immediacy are thus established not because of any internalized meaningful time, but because the autogen relates to a displaced process which as a interested process of interpretation and integration contains aporetic time relations in relation to the autogen.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Purely displaced process of meaning making. Each cycle of displaced interpretation and integration takes place through death (seen as red X) and replication (seen as green ball)

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In Fig. 2, seen below, a very simple organismic process is sketched which, in addition to [1] and [2], has in [3] distended cycles no longer dependent purely on death and replication for the integration of normative success or failure. Instead, cycles are biosemiotic and influence future cycles to some extent, the relation [2] has to [1] is no longer exclusive as [3] drags into itself an intentionality. Displaced meaning thus makes possible the development of a carrier that can integrate meaning-making. The autogen is the exemplar of such a carrier, forming the conditions such that actual distended meaning-making can nominally drag the goal-directedness of its process into itself. Giving rise to biosemiosis proper.

Fig. 2
figure 2

As in Fig. 1, but now includes distended cycles within the life of some organism

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To conclude, the idea that meaning-making is preceded by the capacity for something to be meaningfully relevant should be as contentious as the fact that the potentiality of deciding to go to bed is preceded by a need for rest. There is a meaningfully distinct self as zeroth agent who’s agency is displaced from the functionally bounded hereditary sign its body functions as. The memory of this displaced agential process is expressed in the functional relation between the zeroth agent’s body, a trace of previously attained interest. A displaced self whose existence makes it possible for distended semiosis to be about something when it first emerges, precisely a “something non-intrinsic” (Deacon, 2013, p. 27) and temporally displaced.

This is the displaced interest of remaining the “Same” which grounds the possibility of meaning in evolutionary history and processual goal-directedness. Even as the ecological web evolves to be ever more complicated then at the moment of abiogenesis, it remains presently absent and nests all other meaning. To this day, the meaning present in the orange coat of a tiger lies not only in the semiotic processes which grew the coat and maintains it. Nor is it enough to include the environment for whose denizens the coat potentially signifies now and in the future. Part of the displaced meaning of the coat lies in the relation the coat has to the lineage of progenitors and the historical situatedness of this lineage in its similarly changing environment. This is a relation by which the coat, in form, stands partly for the possibility of the tiger’s being-there as instantiation of not having dissipated and being the “Same” as those that came before. This is the displaced meaning of environmental correlates and functions. This is the meaning grounding the possibility of life. It is a meaning temporally displaced from the everydayness of experience, but also the meaning whose structure makes possible the emergence of interest, semiosis, and temporal thickness found in all meaningful processes by which life narrates selves struggling for the “sempiternal repetition of the Same” in a “‘bad infinity’ of endless movement” (Ricœur, 1985, p. 130) and finding attainment only in continuous spirallic mediation of temporal aporia.