semiosphere

the semiosphere is an idea in biosemiotic theory proposing that, contrary to ideas of nature determining sense and experience, the phenomenal world is a creative and logical structure of processes of semiosis where signs operate together to produce sense and experience.

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/semiosphere

as a methodological abstraction, one may imagine language as an isolated phenomenon. However, in its actual functioning, language is molded into a more general system of culture and, together with it, constitutes a complex whole. The fundamental “task” of culture, as we will try to show, is in structurally organizing the world around man. Culture is the generator of structuredness, and in this way it creates a social sphere around man which, like the biosphere, makes life possible; that is, not organic life, but social life.

— lotman & ouspensky, on the semiotic mechanism of cultures, 1978 (scihub)

new information in the semiosphere can be produced only as a result of a dialogue between different codes, by which he understands not simply different human or artificial languages,but different ways of organizing reality into coherent cognitive structures,or different ways of making reality conform to our understanding […] it is important that we see the semiosphere not merely as a network of human and artificial intelligence, a kind of world-wide technological exchange but, in keeping with lotman’s view, as a membrane of human conscious acts, which makes communication possible, but cannot be reduced to mere communication and exchange of ‘know how.’”

— lin steiner, toward an ideal universal community: lotman's revisiting of the enlightenment and romanticism, 2003 (scihub)

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