Communication

This note is about the concept of communication and its role in cognition, agency, and decision-making across living and some nonliving systems.

Cf.

Refer to the Urban Assemblage paper for some ideas and the discussion.

Definitions

Communication is "the evolution of physical, biochemical, cellular, community, and technological information exchange".

Language is "community communication whereby the information exchanged comprises evolving individual and group-constructed knowledge and beliefs, that are enacted, narrated, or otherwise conveyed by evolving rule-governed and meaningful symbol systems, that are grounded, interpreted, and used from within evolving embodied, cognitive, ecological, sociocultural, and technological niches".

Gontier, Nathalie. ‘Defining Communication and Language from Within a Pluralistic Evolutionary Worldview’. Topoi 41, no. 3 (2022): 609–22. https://doi.org/10/gsdmqx.

Communication depends on evolved biological functions that support communication. The sender should have evolutionary adaptations for communication.

Frick, Ramiro, Leonardo Bich, and Alvaro Moreno. ‘An Organisational Approach to Biological Communication’. Acta Biotheoretica 67, no. 2 (2019): 103–28. https://doi.org/10/gssp7m.

Communication is a physical interaction with information flowing from one system (sender) that is in a state that constrains the possible states of another (receiver), and the receiver's later state depends probabilistically on the sender's earlier state.

Whether an interaction counts as communication depends on there being some observer (which can be another physical system, not necessarily conscious) for whom the interaction reduces uncertainty about something. A reduction of uncertainty requires work/effort/energy.

This extends to biology at every scale: cells, tissues, and organisms all "communicate" in this sense whenever one system's state changes constrain another's, whether via molecules, bioelectric signals, gene transfer, or quorum sensing. The language of communication, inference, and information processing are more useful than the language of causation to describe the interactions of living systems at any scale. Such interactions can also occur in abiotic and engineered systems, and between living and nonliving systems.

Meaning depends on communication: communication and shared external references are needed for shared meanings within a community, whether that's molecular signalling within an organism or human language. Communications such as horizontal gene transfer or quorum sensing can change the allocation of salience (what stands out as important) and attention by the recipient. Diversification of communication signals may be a driver of speciation or other forms of community differentiation.

Fields, Chris, and Michael Levin. “Scale-Free Biology: Integrating Evolutionary and Developmental Thinking.” BioEssays 42, no. 8 (2020): 1900228. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201900228.

Fields, Chris, and Michael Levin. “How Do Living Systems Create Meaning?” Philosophies 5, no. 4 (2020): 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies5040036.

Key Concepts

All living beings sense and communicate.
All have subjectivity.
Abiotic systems also exchange information.
Artificial and technical systems become integrated into ecosystems, places and communities and modify existing sensory exchanges, sometimes for the worse.

Cf. Weston Anthony

Communication, Cognition, and Agency

Cognition, agency, and intelligence are graded capacities that occur at all scales, from molecular networks to societies. Communication produces the larger agents: signalling binds cells into tissues, organs, organisms, and collectives that can pursue goals none of their parts can represent alone. Collective intelligence is not a metaphor borrowed from human groups but the basic mode of biological organisation.

McMillen, Patrick, and Michael Levin. “Collective Intelligence: A Unifying Concept for Integrating Biology across Scales and Substrates.” Communications Biology 7, no. 1 (2024): 378. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-024-06037-4.

Levin, Michael, and Richard Watson. “Machines All the Way up and Cognition All the Way down: Updating the Machine Metaphor in Biology.” Seminars in Cell & Developmental Biology 177–178 (2026): 103668. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.semcdb.2026.103668.

The scale of the goals a system can pursue (its cognitive light cone) depends on how far and how reliably its parts communicate. Better communication expands the boundary of the self that can hold a goal. Breakdowns of communication shrink agents back into smaller, more selfish units, as in cancer.

Levin, Michael. “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds.” Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 16 (2022): 768201. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201.

Engineered matter can also sense, retain information, and respond to its environment, so communication in this minimal sense extends to designed systems.

Kaspar, C., B. J. Ravoo, W. G. van der Wiel, S. V. Wegner, and W. H. P. Pernice. “The Rise of Intelligent Matter.” Nature 594, no. 7863 (2021): 345–55. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03453-y.

Cf. Cognition, Agency, Intelligence

Communication and Decision-Making

Decisions at any scale depend on communicated information. Alongside food webs, ecosystems contain information webs that connect senders and receivers within and across species. Rapid anthropogenic change degrades these webs and thereby undermines the ability of organisms to choose well, with far-reaching consequences for ecosystem function.

Szymkowiak, Jakub, and Kenneth A. Schmidt. ‘Ecology of Information Enters the Anthropocene’. Oikos 2022, no. 10 (2022): e09677. https://doi.org/10/gsm5w9.

Decision-making in more-than-human worlds is distributed across humans, other living beings, and, increasingly, artificial systems. Participation in such decisions depends on whose signals can travel and be interpreted, so the design of communication channels distributes decision-making power.

Roudavski, Stanislav, and Douglas Brock. “From Dingoes to AI: Who Makes Decisions in More-than-Human Worlds?” TRACE ∴ Journal for Human-Animal Studies 11 (2025): 56–96. https://doi.org/10/g89xj8.

Cf. Decision Making

In Design

Research in postcolonial studies suggests that respect alone is not enough: better relationships require better communication. This matters for Design because animals and plants act as coordinators and co-operators in the construction of niches.

Nonhuman participation in design therefore depends on communication infrastructures that capture, translate, and give standing to nonhuman expressions. The ladder of more-than-human participation provides a framework for assessing the degrees of such participation.

Roudavski, Stanislav. “The Ladder of More-than-Human Participation: A Framework for Inclusive Design.” Cultural Science 14, no. 1 (2024): 110–19. https://doi.org/10/g8nn27.

Interfaces that translate plant growth and behaviour into design proposals demonstrate that such communication can redirect decisions about futures.

Rutten, Julian, Alexander Holland, and Stanislav Roudavski. “Plants as Designers of Better Futures: Can Humans Let Them Lead?” Plant Perspectives 2, no. 1 (2024): 92–139. https://doi.org/10.3197/whppp.63845494909729.

Cf. Voice

Biosemiotics

Cf. Biosemiotics

Otálora-Luna, Fernando, and Elis Aldana. “The Beauty of Sensory Ecology.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39, no. 3 (2017): 20. https://doi.org/10/gkdwsp.

Sensing has no intrinsic meaning outside the context of an entire system, which is always circumstantial.

We do not know, nor have we any means of knowing, whether our conception of the environment is in conformity with reality (Hertz 2003) any other than in a subjective respect. However, what we know is that sensing produces objective records of such subjective reality. It is not necessary that such symbols be in strict conformity with matter because they only represent part of the reality and furthermore, because they are subject to diverse interpretations, which depend on aesthetic criteria.

Biocommunication

For any complex system to behave as a purposeful whole, there needs to be effective communication between both the different components of the system and with the outside environment.

Modules that enact communication are signalling pathways.

For example:

hormones such as the insulin that regulates your blood sugar.

Signalling pathways transmit information within cells, between cells, between organs, between whole organisms, between populations of organisms and between different species across whole ecosystems.

Nurse, Paul. What Is Life? Five Great Ideas in Biology. New York: W.W. Norton, 2021.

There is broad literature on communication at all biological levels.

Frohoff, Toni, and Elizabeth Oriel. ‘Conversing with Dolphins: The Holy Grail of Interspecies Communication?’ In Biocommunication: Sign-Mediated Interactions between Cells and Organisms, edited by Richard Gordon and Joseph Seckbach, 575–97. Singapore: World Scientific, 2015.

Communication with Other Animals

Human-Nonhuman Communication

Communicating with animals via music, recommended by Weston Anthony

Nollman, Jim. Dolphin Dreamtime: The Art and Science of Interspecies Communication. Toronto: Bantam, 1987.

Communication with Alien Lives

References

On the importance of touch:

Mondémé, Chloé. ‘Touching and Petting: Exploring “Haptic Sociality” in Interspecies Interaction’. In Touch in Social Interaction. London: Routledge, 2020.

On animal minds, including mind reading and communication:

Andrews, Kristin, and Jacob Beck, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.

Subnotes