Keith Farnsworth

This is an un-reviewed, unpublished pre-print of a paper written for a special issue of BioSystems on Code Biology. It explains why biological codes are essential for life to be autonomous. The first reason is that autonomy requires freedom from exogenous control (cause-effect) and this is achieved by stripping the force from efficient causes using transducers at the organism boundary (e.g. cell receptors) so they become signal-response: contingent influences, rather than controls. All transducers embody a cypher or a code. The second is that evolvable reproduction requires the maintenance of a separate formal information store (from Von Neumann’s replicator theory), which must be causally isolated from the rest of the replicating system. This is achieved by storing the information in a form that does not correlate with the rest of the system, hence it requires code-translation to become causal. These explanations rest on the idea of efficient cause being the result of empowering formal cause with a physical force-field (Farnsworth 2022 – BioSystems). They also provide a new and powerful way of understanding semiotic communications in general.

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