Cassirer's challenge: On semiosis and systems - Jesper Hoffmeyer

What makes a self become itself? Jesper Hoffmeyer reframes individuation not as fixed genetics but as a lifelong unfolding of meaning. Living things become themselves through learning—reading signs and weaving them into stories. Humans inhabit a double world: the virtual narratives we spin and the stubborn reality pressing back. Here, biosemiotics meets Ernst Cassirer’s old hope of healing biology’s mechanist-vitalist rift. What emerges is staggering: each life as one improbable outcome among infinite semiotic possibilities—with free will, perhaps, buried here. - Original video footage from: https://uttv.ee/naita?id=20983&keel=eng