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I take this opportunity to post for comment a discussion draft recently completed. The essay, Describe, Predict, Intervene!—On Objective Subjectivities and the Simulacra of Semiotics in the New Era; Simulated Signification and of Mechanical Meaning Making in Managing Post-COVID Human Society, grew out of remarks delivered at a conference in honor of
Jan M. Broekman’s 90th Birthday (International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law --IRSL 2021; The Rearguard of Subjectivity) which was hosted by Leuven University Faculty of Law on 17-18 June 2021 (Online) (more on that event HERE).
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| Pix Credit; Rafael fresco--Joseph Interpreting Pharaoh's Dream (1519) |
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The paper is organized as follows:
Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Mathematical Intuition for the Masses
2.1 From Model to Subject. . . . And Back Again
2.2 The Reality of the Model and the Model of Reality—Modeling COVID in the US.
2.2.1. Constituting the COVID-19 Golem
2.2.2 The Building Blocks of Imitation
2.2.3 The Simulation as the Modeled Collective
2.2.4 Simulation as Politics and the Battle of the Models in the United States
3. In Search of Semiotic ‘Trantors’: The Modeling of Predictive Universes
3.1 The Construction and Operation of Contemporary Trantors—The New Semiotics of Regulations and Social Relations Trantor
3.2 Reading the Runes: The Semiotics of Modelling and the Modelling of Semiotics
4. Conclusion: Interpreting Pharoah’s Dream in Trantor
The Abstract and Introduction follow. The paper may be accessed and downloaded through SSRN HERE. As always engagement appreciated.
International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law --IRSL 2021
The Rearguard of Subjectivity
In Honor of Jan M. Broekman’s 90th Birthday
Hosted by Leuven University Faculty of Law
17-18 June 2021 (Online)
Describe, Predict, Intervene!—On Objective Subjectivities and the Simulacra of Semiotics in the New Era; Simulated Signification and of Mechanical Meaning Making in Managing Post-COVID Human Society.
Larry Catá Backer
W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar Professor of Law and International Affairs
Pennsylvania State University | 239 Lewis Katz Building, University Park, PA 16802 1.814.863.3640 (direct) || lcb11@psu.edu
ABSTRACT: This contribution considers the challenges for semiotics, for the understanding of the conditions of meaning in relation to the human that is posed by a global obsession with the control of reality and its instrumentalization through the mechanics of simulation. Simulation describes, predicts and intervene to manage a situation, context, or process it is imitates. While simulation is meant to imitate an environment, through a process of replication made possible by reducing the imitated environment to its essence, semiotics suggests that simulation has a more profound effect. The decisive move toward the objectification of reality and its meaning through its simulation (present) and its modelling (future)--that is the quantification, and digitalization of humanity--has brought humanity to a great transformative moment. If a situation, context, or process is now comprehended as and by its own simulation, then the modalities of objectification, of signification, and ultimately of the encounters with meaning and its making, has now (again) removed itself from an immanent to a transcendent condition. That is, that human activity becomes centered in and manifested through its simulation rather than in the world itself. This, in turn, processes asset of challenges for human institutions and their utilization—law, governance, politics, culture are now more real in simulation than in the reality they were meant to imitate. The essay starts with an examination of the problem. To make the discussion more concrete, the analysis is undertaken in the framework of the challenges for simulating humanity (and thus of saving it from its predicted barbaric fate) created on Isaac Asimov’s “Prelude to Foundation” and the more ancient insights taught in the interpretation of dreams. Asimov’s recounting of the effort to use a planet to simulate the human universe, and of Joseph’s modeling of Pharoah’s dream nicely frame the central problems of simulation today. The essay then applies these insights to its manifestation in the use of simulations in the early efforts to describe, predict and intervene in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. It considers the way that Jan Broekman has pointed a way forward for semiotics, or at least that branch of its study that points to an understanding of the objectification of subjectivity and the instrumentalization of the “Human, All-Too-Human” essence of the reductionist model. The essay ends with a look to some of the areas of human self-governance in which modeling is now displacing the situations it was meant to imitate and considers what semiotics may bring to this emerging reconstruction of reality and the challenges that it may pose for traditional approaches to understanding the making of meaning.
_________
Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Mathematical Intuition for the Masses
2.1 From Model to Subject. . . . And Back Again
2.2 The Reality of the Model and the Model of Reality—Modeling COVID in the US.
2.2.1. Constituting the COVID-19 Golem
2.2.2 The Building Blocks of Imitation
2.2.3 The Simulation as the Modeled Collective
2.2.4 Simulation as Politics and the Battle of the Models in the United States
3. In Search of Semiotic ‘Trantors’: The Modeling of Predictive Universes
3.1 The Construction and Operation of Contemporary Trantors—The New Semiotics of Regulations and Social Relations Trantor
3.2 Reading the Runes: The Semiotics of Modelling and the Modelling of Semiotics
4. Conclusion: Interpreting Pharoah’s Dream in Trantor
* * *
1. Introduction
In his after-the-fact prequel to his famous Foundation series, Prelude to Foundation,[1] Isaac Asimov attempted a novelistic construction of a taxonomy of collective meaning making, and to give it life apart from the objects from out of which it was formed.[2] In the process, Asimov considered the problematique[3] at the heart of the post-1945 drive toward the systemization of the meaning of the world, its ordering, and the individual’s role in it—to remake the world in its own image.[4] That problematique centered on the reduction of the qualitative element of signification to its essence, and then the reconstitution of that essence as the reality of its own representation. Asimov starts with the problem of simplification in the face of dynamic complexity; that is of the perversities of modelling as a Platonic exercise,[5] what Azimov has his hero Hari Seldon call ‘psychohistory’—the rationalized quantification of intuition.[6]
Through this science, Asimov toys with the idea of rationalizing intuition—and thus of democratizing it, of detaching a rarified talent for intuiting future paths into an everyday tool that anyone can use.[7] That required a change in the language of prediction from intuitive and qualitative to rationalized and quantitative: As Asimov had the none too bright Emperor Cleon intuit: “A mathematician, however, who would back his prophesy with mathematical formulas and terminology, might be understood by no one and yet believed by everyone.”[8] That rationalization of intuition, and its quantification, were built on two core premises. The first was that the data set was both robust and large enough; the second those (people and collectives) from whom data is extracted remain unaware.[9] The first speaks to the integrity of modelling; the later to the prevention of strategic behavior.
Yet initially there is a rejection of the idea that one can model reality, much less reliably predict the suture states of its component parts, as well as the while. Using the human voice of his hero, Asimov suggests the inherent fallibility of models that are mere incomplete reflections of the objects they are designed to reduce to a true essence, a fallibility that inherently defeats the objective of simulation.[10] It is one mindful of Wittgenstein’s early critique that “to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical to itself is to say nothing at all.”[11] At the same time it is a process that requires overcoming the error of oversimplification, even of the problemmatique itself.[12] In effect—to answer to the question: ‘is it possible to predict the future?’ it is only necessary to thoroughly understand the past and present as expressed in multi-generational interactions under conditions of change. But to do that, one would have to acquire data about everything. That is, in order to predict the future one would have to recreate the world as it exists in time. The model, in effect, is itself.[13]
But then he is challenged by a robot--the ultimate simulation of the fundamental complexity at the heart of meaning for humanity, a robot, we learn later, has been guiding humanity toward its perfection (or at least away form disaster) for eons. The ultimate simulacra of humanity asks the human about the possibility of simulating simulation to avoid the fatal trap of reductionism--that reduction is inherently impossible because it was inconceivable that such an effort was possible without fracturing the whole of the object simulated.[14] That is, the project takes as its starting point the possibility of detaching selfness and identity from its object[15]—of making it portable and practical. Hidden within this exercise is its ultimate power—not to see into the future but to mold it; to instrumentalize time by transforming the possibilities of prediction into a science of molding the future to achieve the objectives of the present.
Asimov then has his hero reconsider. A reduction of a reduction was not merely possible but could also appear to distill its signification in ways that mattered to those signifying.[16] In this case a planet that reflected and contained within it a significant quantum of the variant in the universe could itself serve as the basis for the simulation of the simulation of the galaxy [17] Yet, the model has escaped its 19th and 20th century semiotic confines as icon;[18] as predictive or manipulative instruments it has become the thing it represents, it has become its own object the interpretation of which is written into the success of its predictions and intervention (control). This is not just science fiction. This is the foundation of the post-1945 international order and the reconstitution of the United States as the simulation of the world, the modelling of which could be tested and refined, and thus refined, exported and generalized as a global order. The United States as the simulation of the world assumed a much great power when it moved from the traditional semiotics of word and meaning to its quantification and reduction to objectifiable subjectivities. It is a model that now finds its analogue in the reconstitution of socialist society through the simulacra that in the aggregate constitutes the Chinese social credit system.[19]
The simulated object, corporeal or virtual, becomes less objective than its avatar. It is decentered. The operative element of social semiotics moves from the thing itself to its simulation, fed by the data that simulation may stimulate. Yet what occurs in the reality space inhabited by the avatar is felt with greater force by the object. The semiotic object (the thing simulated) exists only as a projection of simulated reality outward. Modelling is signification, and its manipulation becomes the form of meaning making for a new era of human development--one in which the driving force is no longer humanity but humanity’s detritus, and one in which the operative force is not natural but artificial persons representing the simulated perfectibility of the human object. This is Pharoah’s Dream[20] as much as it is the Galactic Empire that serves as the novelistic simulation in Asimov’s Foundation series. Both provide significant clues about the reshaping of semiotics and its expression in governance and politics.
Trantor—the planet-- is both real (a planet full of people) and a simulation of a larger reality the operations of which it simulates (humanity as a whole spread across the galactic empire). Pharoah’s dream of the seven lean cattle consuming the seven fattened ones, and of the seven withered ears consuming the seven full[21] is both real (Pharoah) and a simulation (Egypt). Psychohistory--the modelling--is descriptive, and predictive; It objectifies ideology in the habits and behaviors of collectives.[22] So is dreaming where God is the Shepard of the simulation the description of the future shape f which is communicated through dreams.[23] The greatest force of both is in their reality making—the power to project description and prediction into the future permits altering that future in simulated space—and then transposing that outward to the simulated world.
Here one moves from the semiosis of text and individuals to the semiosis of the collective expressed in the interrelation of description, prediction, and intervention (control). The descriptive model-simulation observes; it is how the semiotic construction of Trantor (as the simulation of humanity) is undertaken; it is the signification of Egypt as cattle and corn in a fertile Nile Valley. The descriptive model serves as the signification of the essentialized reduction of a constantly changing present. The predictive model-simulation projects observation forward; it is passive—in the sense that it teases out the future from the present. It is also reactive—it provides a means of mitigating and remedying what cannot be prevented. Joseph’s plans for the storage of grain during the years of plenty; Asimov’s construction of the 1st Foundation and the preservation of knowledge. Both make the most powerful vision of the simulation-model operative—where the simulation becomes the space where description and prediction is deployed to prevent, change and control what is observed in the future by changing the pathways of the present. The object here is to manage the simulation by changing the variables that produce description and lead to prediction. Here one does not change meaning—one reframes the basis on which meaning is made. In Asimov’s world one changes societal variables enough to reduce the age of barbarity from 30 to a single millennium. In Pharoah’s world that is undertaken by building the Aswan Dam, or by inducing God to change Divine intention. The lifeworld of semiotic meaning moves from the objects modeled to the model and from the present, to a set of multiple possibilities in the future, the possibilities of which are a function of the power to direct the present—at least to the extent it can be grasped, and mapped.[24]
This contribution considers the challenges for semiotics, for the understanding of the conditions of meaning in relation to the human that is posed by a global obsession with the control of reality and its instrumentalization through the mechanics of simulation. Simulation describes, predicts and intervenes in (controls) a situation, context, or process it is imitates. While simulation is meant to imitate an environment, through a process of replication made possible by reducing the imitated environment to its essence, semiotics suggests that simulation has a more profound effect. The decisive move toward the objectification of reality and its meaning through its simulation (present) and its modelling (future)--that is the quantification, and digitalization of humanity--has brought humanity to a great transformative moment. This, in turn, processes asset of challenges for human institutions and their utilization—law, governance, politics, culture are now more real in simulation than in the reality they were meant to imitate. After this introduction to the problem, the essay employs the imagery and insights of Asimov’s “Prelude to Foundation” and of Joseph’s modeling of Pharoah’s dream to frame the central problems of simulation today. The essay applies these insights to its manifestation in the use of simulations in the early efforts to describe, predict and intervene (control) the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. It considers the way that Jan Broekman has pointed a way forward for semiotics, or at least that branch of its study that points to an understanding of the objectification of subjectivity and the instrumentalization of the “Human, All-Too-Human”[25] essence of the essential Ing model. The essay ends with a look to some of the areas of human self-governance in which modeling is now displacing the situations it was meant to imitate and considers what semiotics may bring to this emerging reconstruction of reality and the challenges that it may pose for traditional approaches to understanding the making of meaning.
[1] Isaac Asimov, Prelude to Foundation (NY: Doubleday, 1988).
[2] This effort was, in turn, embedded within a lifelong construction of a chronology of a human-centered universe the complexities of which have produced some interesting studies touching on chaos and fractal theory. See, e.g., Donald Palumbo, ` Psychohistory and Chaos Theory: The "Foundation Trilogy" and the Fractal Structure of Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation Metaseries, (1996) 7(1) Journal of the Fantastic Arts 23-50. 27-34.
[3] See John N. Warfield and George H. Perino, ‘The Problematique: Evolution of an Idea,’ (1999) 16(3) Systems Research 221-226.
[4] This remaking of the world was meant to mimic another remaking of the totality of a thing in its own image—as something complete but apart; as something that simulated that from which it was made but in a derivative sense . “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.” Gen.1:27 (KJV). This was a remaking that provided a way for experimenting without affecting the creator directly. That, at any rate, is the essence of the proposition at the heart of Job: with which it was possible to experiment.
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. . . And the Lord said unto Satan, ‘Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and upright man’. . . Then Satan answered the Lord and said, ‘Doth Job fear God for nought? . . . But put forth thy hand now, and touch all that he hath and he will curse thee to thy face.’ And the Lord said unto Satan, ‘Behold, all that he hath is in thy power.’ Job1:6-12 (KJV).
[5] David Weissman, ‘Are We Trapped in Plato’s Cave?, (2021) 52(5) Metaphilosophy 650-654. He note (ibid., 651):
“Plato argued in the Cratylus that signifiers embody the natures of their referents. .. The word signifying goats embodies in some way the nature of goat. . . Yet the Cratylus is thought to be earlier Plato; the allegory of the cave is middle Plato and a different account of linguistic meaning. There, in its opening stage, words are used projectively by prisoners who make shadows intelligible by telling stories about them. The fictive “objects” evoked by their stories have no other reality.
[6] Psychohistory was defined by Asimov as a language of mathematics, a “branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli.” Isaac Asimov, Foundation. In Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy (Doubleday & Co., 1951), p. 14. See, also, Asimov, Prelude to Foundation, supra, Asimov, himself, in a later interview suggested the tensions meant to be modeled through psychohistory: “It seemed to me that if we did have a galactic empire, there would be so many human beings-quintillions of them-that perhaps you might be able to predict very accurately how societies would behave, even though you couldn't predict how individuals composing those societies would behave.” Earl G. Ingersoll, Isaac Asimov, Gregory Fitz Gerald, Jack Wolf, Joshua Duberman and Robert Philmus, ‘A Conversation with Isaac Asimov,’ (1987) 14(1) Science Fiction Studies 68-77, 70. The fiction here has not obscured to science. See, e.g., Danny Cullenwood and Anat Sudarshan, ‘ Psychohistory revisited: fundamental issues in forecasting climate futures’ (2011) 104 Climate Change 457-472.
[7] “’With the proper mathematics, anyone would be able to assess the probabilities. It wouldn’t take the rare human being who is successful because of a remarkable intuitive sense.’” Asimov, Prelude to Foundation, supra, p. 10-11. u
[8] Ibid., p. 5.
[9] Asimov, Foundation, supra, p. 14.
[10] Asimov, Prelude to Foundation, supra. Speaking through the voice of Hari Seldon, the “inventor” of “psychohistory”, Asimov argues:
“Well--” He retired into himself to choose a method of presentation. Then he said, “If you want to understand some aspect of the universe, it helps if you simplify it as much as possible and include only those properties and characteristics that are essential to understanding . . . The simplification you can call a model or simulation. . . Such simplified simulations make it far easier to grasp a phenomenon than it would be if we had to study the phenomenon itself. . . Now, as you wish to know more and more about any phenomenon, or as a phenomenon becomes more complex, you need more and more elaborate equations, and more and more detailed programming, and you will end with a computerized simulation that is harder and harder to grasp.” “Can’t you form a simulation of a simulation?” asked Hummin. (Ibid., pp. 146-147).
[11] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logicus-philosophicus, in Workausgabe Vol. 1 (Frankfurt, 1984); ¶5.5303.
[12] Régis Meissonier, ‘De la problématique â la problématisation,’ (2021) Revue française du gestion No. 297 73-80 (“Ainsi, notre société, habituée à résoudre les problèmes en les décomposant et en les simplifiant comme cela est enseigné dans les écoles, comprend de moins en moins le monde dont elle fait pourtant partie.”).
[13] Ibid., p. 11.This is a problem that bedevils modern predictive science. In the context of climate change models , see, Cullenwood and Sudarshan, ‘ Psychohistory revisited: fundamental issues in forecasting climate futures’ supra, 458-459.
[14] Asimov, Preclude to Foundation, supra. Here Asimov speaks through the voice of his ancient robot hero R. Daneel Olivaw, who has disguised himself in a way that both plays with and reveals his simulated (hyper)humanity--Chetter Hummin, who asks: “’Can’t you form a simulation of a simulation?’ asked Hummin. ‘You would go down another degree.’? (Ibid., p.147).
[15] Consider the problemmatique in Peter Wagner, ‘Identity and Selfhood as Problemmatique,’ in Heidrun Friese (ed) Identities: Time, Difference and Boundaries (NY: Berghahn Books, 2002), p. 32-55) and the issue of the identity-selfhood complex in interaction between the collective and individual self.
[16] Björn Kralemann & Claas Lattmann, ‘Models as icons: modeling models in the semiotic framework of Peirce’s theory of signs,’ (2013) 190 Synthese 3397–3420 (mapping models in semiotic spaces; “that which makes something a model is not to be found within the model itself, but that this rather belongs to the specific outer context into which something is placed by a pragmatic act of a subject in order to use this object as a model: the ontological question of what a model is thus becomes “a question about reasoning of a judgement on model-being”” ibid., 3399).
[17] Asimov, Prelude to Foundation, supra, p. 413. (the planet “was itself a system complex enough to make [simulation] meaningful and yet it was simple enugh, compared to the Empire as a whole, to make [simulation] perhaps practical.”].
[18] Kralemann & Lattmann, supra, p. 3404-3410.
[19] Larry Catá Backer, ‘Next Generation Law
[20] Gen Chapter 42 (KJV).
[21] Gen 42:17-24.
[22] Jeremy Campbell, The Improbable Machine (New York, 1989) (noting the incomprehensibility of the completely open mind in a collective the ordering of which is grounded on complex systems of biases; ibid., 35, 151, 158); Abraham P. DeLeon, ‘Are We Simulating the Status Quo? Ideology and Social Studies Simulations,’ (2008) 36(3) Theory & Research in Social Education 256-277.
[23] Gen 42:28 (?”What God is about to do he showeth unto Pharoah”).
[24] See Anne Buttimer, ‘Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld,’ (1976) 66(2) Annals of the Association of American Geographers 277-292 (on the need to bring intellectual knowledge closer to lived experience presaged the sensibilities of dynamic simulation).
[25] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (Alexander Harvey (trans), Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co. 1908 ; Project Gutenberg November 26, 2011 [EBook #38145]); available < https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38145/38145-h/38145-h.htm> (“In the dream, mankind, in epochs of crude primitive civilization, thought they were introduced to a second, substantial world: here we have the source of all metaphysic. Without the dream, men would never have been incited to an analysis of the[25] world.” Ibid., Of First and Lat Things ¶5).
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