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OverviewsThe controversial sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson (1984: 60) writes, As the cerebral cortex grew from apish dimensions through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, it was forced to rely on tricks to enlarge memory and speed computation. The mind therefore specializes on analogy and metaphor, on a sweeping together of chaotic sensory experience into workable categories labeled by words and tacked into hierarchies for quick recovery.In theory, then, one ought to have two distinct nervous systems [in any one animal]: one of them predatory, charged with attracting and capturing prey; the other prey, charged with evading or repelling would-be predators ..

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We present several existential-like graphs and models of the ontological links found along a continuum from physiosemiosis to anthroposemiosis. Our models derive from our rereading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's theories of the symbol and of his notion of the ''outness'' of mind in terms of Charles Sanders Peirce's ''semeiotic,'' a rereading by which we introduce an ecocritical and pansemiotic mode of literary ecology called Renewable Historicism and argue for a new, distributed understanding of intentionality, one that connects the self-organization of rocks in the lithosphere to that phenomenon whereby inanimate objects (such as rocks) get themselves transformed into human objectives.