Our bodies are the products of semiosis

Symbolic thought run wild can create minds radically separate from the indexical grounding their bodies might otherwise provide. Our bodies, like all of life, are the products of semiosis. Our sensory experiences, even our most basic cellular and metabolic processes, are mediated by representational – though not necessarily symbolic – relations. But symbolic thought run wild can make us experience "ourselves" as set apart from everything: our social contexts, the environments in which we live, and ultimately even our desires and dreams. We become displaced to such an extent that we come to question the indexical ties that would otherwise ground this special kind of symbolic thinking in "our" bodies, bodies that are themselves indexically grounded in the worlds beyond them: I think therefore I doubt that I am.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) p. 49