**6. By way of conclusion: frames of interaction and understanding**  *functional connectivity and neural networks (DMN and others)*

In the end, it is clear that cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging continue to incorporate important ideas, even if it is more often than not in a nonconscious and unarticulated manner, from a range of anthroposemiotic and biosemiotic models described in the previous sections. One of the most powerful and recent outcomes of this important interaction of research methods and concepts is seen in the move away from focusing imaging analysis within *regions of interest* to understanding the networks and *functional connectivity* in operation during not only task-based fMRI but resting state fMRI. The first network that was identified is known as the default mode network (DMN) [57, 59, 60]. Current research demonstrates that there are multiple such interactive networks and the details of these networks are clearest in studying intrinsic functional connectivity in individuals, not groups [72]. The recognition of neural functional connectivity and networks is in keeping with the autopoietic approach given by Maturana and Varela, where they foresee such an outcome:

The fact that we can divide physical autopoietic machines into parts does not reveal the nature of the domain of interactions that they define as concrete entities operating in a physical universe (1992, p. 82).

As fMRI imaging methods shift to include individual and group data analysis and protocols expand from task-based to include resting state, there will be more evidence contributing to our understanding of the default network as "the apex transmodal association network" [72].

<sup>9</sup> C.H. van Schooneveld [71] draws important connections between autopoiesis and his definition of *semantic dominants* in human languages. For an in-depth discussion of Uexküll's *Umwelt*, functional circle, and Lotman's semiosphere, see Andrews [10].

<sup>10</sup> The four major outcomes of autopoietic organization according to Maturana and Varela (including their definition of "autopoietic machines," which include living systems ([66], p. 76)) are autonomy, individuality, unities, and no inputs or outputs (only perturbations that lead to internal structural changes) ([66], pp. 80–81).

#### *Cognitive and Intermedial Semiotics*

The interaction of semiotics and the cognitive neurosciences has not been generally noted at the level of discrete analyses or individual experiments but becomes more obvious and prescient when the philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of the two disciplines are made explicit. That is one of the goals of the present analysis. The other is to draw attention to the importance of multidisciplinarity and the obligatory re-evaluation of disciplinary boundaries that has emerged within semiotics and the cognitive neurosciences. The major frames that support both of these efforts are found in the importance of ecological validity in research, recognition of connectivity modeling and multimodal perspectives, the re-evaluation of arbitrariness and the relative nature of non-arbitrariness, and the inalienable role of context both in neurological networks and signification systems.
