How Forests Think: Eduardo Kohn and the Semiosis of Life

The Runa people of Ecuador's Upper Amazon say the forest "speaks." Not metaphorically. They say it shows things, communicates, has intentions. When anthropologist Eduardo Kohn first heard this, he did what he was trained to do: look for the cultural meaning, the symbolic system, the human interpretation of natural phenomena.

Then he realized: What if the forest actually does think?

Not in the way humans think—not with neurons, not with verbal reasoning, not with self-reflective consciousness. But thinking nonetheless: making and interpreting signs, maintaining coherent organization, responding intelligently to environmental challenges, participating in meaning-making.

This is the central claim of Kohn's How Forests Think (2013): semiosis—the process of creating and interpreting signs—extends beyond humans into all living systems. Forests think. Ecosystems communicate. Life itself is a semiotic process.

This isn't mysticism. It's an extension of perspectivism to its logical conclusion. If all beings occupy perspectives, and perspectives involve interpreting signs from the environment, then thinking is distributed across all life. The question isn't whether forests think. It's whether we're prepared to recognize forms of thought that don't look like ours.

Series: Neo-Animism | Part: 4 of 10

Beyond the Human

Anthropology studies humans. It's in the name. But Kohn argues for an anthropology beyond the human—because the semiotic processes that make humans human extend into the non-human living world.

His starting point is C.S. Peirce's semiotics: signs come in three types:

• Icons represent through resemblance (a photograph looks like what it depicts)
• Indexes represent through causal connection (smoke indicates fire)
• Symbols represent through convention (words mean what they mean because we agree they do)

Humans use all three. We see resemblances, read causal signs, and deploy conventional symbols (language). But non-human living systems also traffic in signs—primarily icons and indexes.

A tree responds to fungal signals (indexical: chemical presence indicates fungal partner). A bird recognizes the shape of a hawk (iconic: silhouette resembles predator). An immune system distinguishes self from non-self (indexical: molecular markers indicate foreign entity). These aren't metaphorical interpretations. They're actual semiotic processes—systems responding to environmental signs in ways that maintain their organization.

Kohn's radical move: all life is semiotic. Bacteria interpreting chemical gradients. Plants detecting light patterns. Ecosystems regulating through feedback loops. Wherever there's organized response to information, there's thinking—not human-like thinking, but genuine engagement with meaning.

This shifts the question from "what makes humans special?" to "how does semiosis vary across different living systems?" Humans add symbolic capacity (language), but we're participating in semiotic processes that pervade all life.

The forest thinks. Just not in words.

What the Forest Shows

Kohn spent years with the Runa in Ávila, Ecuador's Upper Amazon. They hunt, gather, and navigate the forest through attentiveness to signs: where animals appear, how weather shifts, what paths emerge, which plants indicate what.

The Runa say the forest "shows" things. A hunter might say sacha riwan—"the forest showed me"—when game appears. This isn't claiming supernatural revelation. It's recognizing that the forest itself is an organized system that generates patterns, and those patterns constitute communications if you know how to read them.

Kohn argues this is accurate phenomenology. The forest is communicating—not intentionally in human sense, but through its distributed semiotic processes. Trees coordinate through mycorrhizal networks. Animals leave trace markers. Weather patterns reflect larger climatic dynamics. The forest's "showing" is the perceptible manifestation of ecosystem-level organization.

The skilled hunter isn't projecting meaning onto random noise. The hunter is reading genuine signs produced by the forest's coherent dynamics. The difference between good and poor hunting isn't supernatural favor—it's semiotic literacy. The good hunter reads signs the forest actually produces.

This connects to research on mycorrhizal networks—the "wood wide web" through which trees coordinate resource sharing, warn of threats, and maintain forest-scale organization. Suzanne Simard's work shows that "mother trees" regulate nutrient flow across networks, support younger trees, and respond to disturbance. This is ecosystem-level intelligence: distributed, slow, operating through chemical and electrical signaling rather than neurons.

The forest thinks through its network architecture. Not centralized thought. Distributed semiosis—many organisms interpreting signs from each other and the environment, collectively generating coherent ecosystem behavior.

The Semiosis of Dogs

Kohn's most striking example isn't trees—it's dogs.

The Runa keep hunting dogs. These dogs have learned to bark at night to scare away jaguars. The jaguars, in turn, have learned that barking indicates human presence and avoid approaching.

Here's the semiotic chain:

1. The dog produces a sign (barking)
2. The jaguar interprets that sign (human presence, danger)
3. The human interprets the jaguar's response (absence = effective deterrence)

All three are engaged in semiosis. The dog is making a sign. The jaguar is reading a sign. The human is reading the jaguar's reading. Layers of interpretation involving multiple species, each bringing their own perspective, each participating in a shared semiotic ecology.

The dog isn't using language (symbolic signs). It's using indexical signs (barking causally connected to human presence). The jaguar isn't conceptualizing "this means humans." It's responding to a learned association (barking → danger). But both are genuinely interpreting signs—adjusting behavior based on environmental information in ways that maintain their coherence.

This is thinking. Not human thinking. Species-appropriate thinking: the dog thinking dog-thoughts, the jaguar thinking jaguar-thoughts, both participating in a semiotic field that emerges from their interactions.

Kohn's point: you can't understand this system by studying humans alone. The forest ecology of Ávila is constituted by trans-species semiosis—multiple kinds of beings making and reading signs, their interpretations mutually shaping each other's behavior.

An anthropology beyond the human isn't abandoning human focus. It's recognizing that humans are embedded in semiotic ecologies that extend beyond our species. To understand human meaning-making, you have to understand the broader field of life-meaning we participate in.

Form and the Self-Organizing Sign

Here's where Kohn gets technical. He draws on Peirce's distinction between types and tokens: the general form (type) versus specific instances (tokens).

When the dog barks, each bark is a token—a specific event in time. But the form of barking (the pattern, the acoustic signature, the contextual association) is a type—a repeatable structure that carries meaning across instances.

Living systems propagate forms. DNA is a type (genetic sequence) instantiated in tokens (individual organisms). The hawk's silhouette is a type (predator shape) that birds recognize across different hawks (tokens). Memes are types (cultural patterns) transmitted across individuals (tokens).

Kohn's claim: living systems think by propagating formal patterns—types that replicate, mutate, and select based on how well they enable organisms to navigate their environments. Natural selection operates on these forms. Evolution is semiosis: the universe interpreting which forms work.

This is where semiosis becomes genuinely trans-species. Forms propagate across organisms. The predator-prey dynamic is a form shared by jaguars and peccaries. The pollination relationship is a form shared by bees and flowers. These patterns aren't created by individual organisms—they emerge from the interaction, and both sides respond to them.

The forest thinks by maintaining and propagating forms: seasonal cycles, nutrient flows, succession patterns, species distributions. These are self-organizing signs—patterns that emerge from distributed interactions and then constrain future interactions.

In active inference terms: the forest maintains a generative model of its own organization. Not explicitly, not centrally, but through distributed prediction-and-correction loops across multiple organisms and timescales. Trees predict resource availability and adjust growth. Animals predict predation risk and adjust behavior. The ecosystem collectively minimizes surprise by maintaining stable patterns while adapting to perturbations.

This is coherence maintenance through distributed semiosis. The forest keeps itself organized by thinking—not human-style thought, but genuine engagement with signs and meanings.

The Limits of Language

One of Kohn's key insights: language simultaneously enables and limits. Symbolic signs (words) allow humans to represent things that aren't present, plan for futures, construct abstractions. But symbols also cut us off from non-linguistic semiosis.

When you name something, you fix it conceptually. The forest becomes "forest"—a category, an abstraction. But the actual living forest is constantly shifting, particular, more-than-any-concept. Language helps us think about the forest. But it also prevents us from thinking with the forest—from participating in the non-linguistic semiotic processes the forest itself uses.

The Runa navigate this by maintaining practices that bypass language: dream interpretation, ayahuasca journeys, hunting attentiveness. These practices access iconic and indexical signs without converting them into symbols. They participate in the forest's semiosis directly.

This connects to a broader point about embodied cognition: much of intelligent behavior happens below the linguistic threshold. Skilled movement. Intuitive recognition. Pattern detection. These use iconic and indexical semiosis—body-level thinking that operates faster and more holistically than verbal reasoning.

Kohn argues that anthropology's obsession with language and culture has made it miss the broader semiotic field humans participate in. We're embedded in trans-species sign systems—ecological relationships, bodily intuitions, non-verbal communications—that shape meaning but resist linguistic capture.

To study these, you need methods beyond interviews and texts. You need ethnographic presence that attunes to non-linguistic signs: how people move through space, what they notice, how they coordinate with animals and plants, what they respond to pre-consciously.

An anthropology beyond the human requires methods beyond language—attending to the semiotic processes that constitute life itself.

Selves and the Problem of Representation

Kohn tackles a hard question: If forests think, do they have selves?

His answer is nuanced. A self isn't a thing you have. It's a semiotic process—an ongoing interpretation of signs that distinguishes "me" from "not-me" and maintains that boundary over time.

Even simple organisms exhibit this. Bacteria distinguish self from environment through chemical sensing. They maintain internal organization while coupled to external conditions. They exhibit rudimentary selfhood—not conscious self-awareness, but functional self-other distinction.

More complex organisms build more complex selves. The dog has a self in a richer sense: it recognizes itself as agent, anticipates futures, maintains relationships. The human self adds symbolic capacity: verbal narratives, explicit self-concepts, identity across time.

But the forest? The forest might have distributed selfhood—a collective organization that maintains boundary (the forest edge), resists perturbation (homeostatic regulation), and pursues its own coherence (ecosystem succession). Not a centralized self. A network self: selfhood distributed across many organisms and processes, bound together through semiotic coupling.

This parallels basal cognition research showing that cellular collectives exhibit goal-directed behavior without central control. Michael Levin's work demonstrates that groups of cells collectively navigate problems through bioelectric signaling—a distributed self maintaining target morphology.

The forest's self is similar: emergent, distributed, operating through networked communication rather than central processor. It's not conscious. But it's coherent—maintaining organization while responding to change. And coherence maintained through semiosis is what Kohn calls thinking.

The question isn't "does the forest have a self like ours?" but "what kind of self does distributed coherence generate?"

The Ethics of Encounter

If forests think, if dogs and jaguars participate in trans-species semiosis, if selves emerge at multiple scales through different semiotic processes—what does this mean for how we should relate?

Kohn doesn't offer easy answers. But he suggests the question itself shifts. Instead of "what are our duties toward nature?" (which positions humans as moral agents and nature as moral patients), the question becomes: "How do we participate ethically in trans-species semiotic fields?"

This reframes environmental ethics. You're not managing resources or protecting wilderness. You're engaging with thinking systems—forests that communicate, animals that interpret, ecosystems that organize. Your actions are contributions to shared semiotic ecologies. What you do becomes part of the sign-field others interpret.

The hunter who takes without respect isn't just violating a norm. The hunter is introducing disruptive signs into the semiotic ecology—patterns that damage relationships, degrade communication, reduce coherence. The skilled hunter maintains semiotic reciprocity: reading the forest's signs, contributing appropriate responses, participating in ways that sustain rather than degrade the system.

This has contemporary application. When we clearcut forests, we're not just removing trees. We're destroying semiotic infrastructure—the communicative networks through which forests maintain coherence. When we pollute rivers, we're introducing noise into semiotic channels—disrupting the signs ecosystems use to coordinate.

Restoration ecology, in this frame, becomes semiotic repair: rebuilding the communicative pathways through which ecosystems think. Planting trees isn't enough. You need to restore the sign-networks—mycorrhizal webs, animal corridors, water flows—that enable ecosystem-level semiosis.

The ethical imperative: participate in ways that enhance rather than degrade trans-species semiosis. Recognize that you're in conversation with thinking systems, and act accordingly.

The Geometric Translation

How does this connect to coherence geometry?

Semiosis is coherence maintenance. When a system interprets signs and adjusts behavior, it's minimizing prediction error—keeping its internal model aligned with environmental conditions. This is the Free Energy Principle: all self-organizing systems minimize surprise by maintaining accurate predictions and acting to fulfill them.

The forest maintains coherence through semiotic loops: trees sensing nutrient status → signaling through mycorrhizae → adjusting growth patterns → changing resource distribution → trees sensing new status. Each loop is interpretation-action-interpretation—thinking instantiated in biogeochemical dynamics.

In AToM terms: M = C/T. Meaning equals coherence over time. The forest generates meaning by maintaining organized patterns through semiotic engagement. The dog generates meaning by interpreting and producing signs that help it navigate its niche. The human generates meaning by participating in trans-species sign-fields while adding linguistic layers.

All are instances of the same fundamental dynamics: coherence maintenance through information processing. Different substrates (neurons, mycorrhizae, cellular networks), different timescales (milliseconds to seasons), different sign types (symbolic, indexical, iconic)—but the same basic structure.

Kohn's insight is that this process is what thinking is. Not consciousness, not language, not human-like reasoning. Organized engagement with signs to maintain coherence while coupled to an environment.

By that definition, forests think. And once you recognize thinking as distributed semiosis, the cosmos becomes vastly more populated with minds than modern ontology allows.

What This Demands From Us

Kohn's project isn't purely academic. It's a call to expand our ethical community to include all beings engaged in semiosis—which means all living systems.

This doesn't mean treating forests exactly like humans. It means recognizing that different kinds of thinking deserve different kinds of relationship. You can't have a conversation with a forest in the way you can with a person. But you can learn to read its signs, respond appropriately, maintain reciprocal relationship.

The Runa already do this. They hunt, but they also attend. They take, but they also give. They recognize the forest as someone they're in relationship with, not something they simply use.

Modern environmentalism often oscillates between exploitation (nature as resource) and preservation (nature as pristine wilderness to be protected from humans). Both position humans as outside nature—managers or stewards, but fundamentally separate.

Kohn's framework suggests a different stance: participation. You're in the forest's semiotic field. Your actions are signs the forest interprets. Your wellbeing depends on the forest's coherence. You're not managing from outside. You're coupled from within.

This changes everything. From conservation policy to agriculture to urban planning. If you recognize living systems as thinking systems, you can't simply optimize for human utility. You have to ask: How does this intervention affect the semiotic ecologies we're embedded in?

Clear answers don't follow automatically. But the question itself—taking seriously that forests think, that ecosystems communicate, that life is semiotic—shifts the frame toward something closer to relationship than domination.

In the next article, we'll explore what it means for personhood to be relational: you become a person by being treated as one. And if that's true for humans, might it also be true for rivers, forests, and AIs?

This is Part 4 of the Neo-Animism series, exploring the ontological turn and expanded personhood through coherence geometry.

Previous: Perspectivism: Every Being Is the Center of Its Own World
Next: Relational Personhood: You Become a Person Through Being Treated as One

Further Reading

• Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. University of California Press, 2013.
• Peirce, Charles Sanders. The Essential Peirce, Volume 2: Selected Philosophical Writings (1893-1913). Indiana University Press, 1998.
• Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs. University of Scranton Press, 2008.
• Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Knopf, 2021.
• Baluška, František and Stefano Mancuso. "Plant Neurobiology: From Sensory Biology, via Plant Communication, to Social Plant Behavior." Cognitive Processing 10.1 (2009): 3-7.
• Friston, Karl. "Life as We Know It." Journal of the Royal Society Interface 10.86 (2013): 20130475.
• Deacon, Terrence. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. W.W. Norton, 2011.
• Wheeler, Wendy. The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture. Lawrence & Wishart, 2006.