Anton Markoš
Charles University, Prague
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
Anton Markoš, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Philosophy and History of Science, Charles University in Prague, is a leading voice of biosemiotics, the program that treats living systems as sign-interpreting beings rather than machines executing programs. His book Readers of the Book of Life, Contextual and Developmental Interpretation of Living Systems and his papers on the hermeneutics of the cell argue that organisms construct meaning through interpretation of their own internal states and their surroundings, a process with no analogue in symbol manipulation (recorded on Zenodo among his collected works).
The position matters to this site’s debate as the most articulate biological objection to the machine metaphor itself. Where the cellular consciousness camp locates sentience in cells, Markoš locates interpretation, and his claim is that the machine pictures dominating both biology and AI are inherited metaphors, not discoveries. A computer executes what is specified; a cell interprets what is not.
For artificial consciousness, the biosemiotic argument cuts deeper than substrate claims. If mindedness requires hermeneutic openness, then the closed specification of a machine, however complex, lacks the condition. The site tracks this position as the philosophical wing of the life-agnostic camp, alongside Lyon’s basal cognition and Keijzer’s action-first account.
Known for. Biosemiotics, hermeneutics of the living cell, Readers of the Book of Life, criticism of machine metaphors in biology
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Anton Markoš is listed with the other biological naturalists, who hold that consciousness requires living metabolic hardware. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.