To my great delight, I was asked to review Jan Broekman's brilliant new work, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Springer Nature, 2023). The work is published as Volume 8 of the Series Law and Visual Jurisprudence, for which I serve as an Advisory Editor.
Knowledge in Change approaches ancient and perplexing issues of the organization of human collectives within a rationalized understanding of the world in which these collectives function (exteriorization) and the investigation of the human individual as disaggregated components of that world of human social relations (internalization). These are usually articulated by knowledge guardians as issues of phenomenology (a philosophy of experience; meaning through lived experience),
But the book does much more than
that. It provides a basis for re-thinking the fundamentals of the way
in which one understands the interface between humanity and its
increasingly autonomous technology, and between the idea of humanity as
innate in itself against the reality that the human may now be more
intensely manifested in its interfacing with increasingly
self-generative machine intelligence and the hardware within which it
resides. The consequences for everything from philosophy to a philosophy
of knowledge, to core insights for the organization of social relations
within a world that is now populated by carbon and silicon based
intelligence may be quite profound. Human social collectives already
fear and desire this new world--the engagement with artificial
intelligence and its consequences is but a tip of that iceberg. While
humanity started this century secure in its conceit that it was the
center of all things, by century's end a very different form of
intersubjectivity may well be the basis of the ruling ideology for
humanity within its natural and machine orders.
It is with that in mind that in this and several posts that follow I will review Knowledge in Change. This Part 3 examines Chapter 2 of the book, entitled "Fluidity and Flow", and my own engagement with it. The chapter's focus is on the foundation of cognition, re-imagined as conversion and based on the permanence of a constancy of change--that is of cognition as the calculus of the infinitesimally small (dy). There are three points worth emphasizing with tremendous ramifications of the sentience of self-generative AI as the emerging plural of the self in virtual space (and thus of the characterization of the problematique that is missed in contemporary analogue efforts to "regulate" AI.
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| Pix Credit here (From the MOvie Serenity (2005); Mr. Universe: "You can’t stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere, and I go everywhere.") |
The first is the problem of the operative center of cognition. It is here that Broekman plants the fundamental semiotic question—one of the position of the observer who from their observation is attempting to extract theories of knowledge (epistemology) and knowledge-experience (phenomenology) from the only place possible for it to happen—from the lifeworlds and imaginaries of cognition . Is knowledge lodged in the picture of cognition at any one point, or is cognition (and thus the knowledge of knowledge) or is it lodged in those spaces between pictures of cognition that may exist from one point to another? In the age of the digital lifeworld or imaginary, one must move from the algebraic to the sensibilities of calculus (that term understood in its mathematical and semiotic senses).
The second is the problem of language. If the focus of cognition is on convergence (the router function of experiences in change), and cognition on "the flow" of change, then the question of language--of the conveyance of cognition--becomes a central issue of facilitation. That, in turn requires a reconsideration of the classical language of communication, now text and its ideologies and reflexivity. Symbolic language other than standard text becomes more compelling . But what language. Certainly the language of logic expressed in mathematics, or the language of mathematics expressed in logic. And certainly, in the context of the selfie and the Self-E, in the language of code. That is the operative modality for investing autonomy in AI. Or put differently, a semiotics of digitalization and cognition requires a digital language.
The third is on the problem of the digitization of traditional concepts of cognition and its relation to the flow in the age of the digital. That, in turn requires a focus on the centrality of the difference between iteration and reflexivity. Self-generating AI is built on momentary manifestations of the flow of data projected as iterative and repetitious contextually useful strings of data. Iterative consciousness is inductive. Human intersubjectivity is built on suppositions drawn from the premises about the self, either experienced or felt. Reflexive consciousness is deductive.
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| Pix Credit Here (Leonore silicon based wife of the carbin based Mr. Universe) (Mr. Universe: "Can't stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere. And I go everywhere") |
Additional posts will consider each of the other nine chapters that make up this work. Links to the discussion of the book:
Part 2: Chapter 1 (Minds, Moons and Cognition)
Part 3: Chapter 2 (Fluidity and Flow)
Part 4: Chapter 3 (Post-Dialectics)
Part 5: Chapter 4 (Flow and Firstness)
Part 6: Chapter 5 (Interludes: Changing Worlds Changing Words)
Part 7: Chapter 6 ("The Non-Naïve-Natural")Part 8: Chapter 7 ( "Plurality and the Natural")
Part 9: Chapter 8 ("Rearguards of Subjectivity)"
Part 10: Chapter 9 ("Conversions Convert Us All")Part 11: An Epilogue (Chapter 9.5 ("Climate and Change")
Full discussion draft available for download SSRN here.
4. Chapter 2 (Fluidity and Flow).
We have come t understand that knowledge is a narcissistic exercise, even in the age of the digital. However, that self-reflection projected outward now acquires a far more interesting architecture. The mirrors of the self now reflect not just itself but its virtual self as well. This double mirroring (the self and its other or null self plus the virtual self/Selfie/Self-E) creates a state of cognition in which sentience flows in a plural inter-subjectivity of self, virtual self, and the null set of either/both. That flow requires a router. And that router, conversion, serves as the pathway toward, and perhaps as, cognition. The sentience of the self—whether physical or collective, becomes plural, historical, and always available for playback not just within the vagaries of the human mind but in the playback loops of its silicon self. It follows that as data serves the role of semiotic object—firstness—the flow of data, memory, playback encases object and object flows in secondness, signs the signification of which become both significant and the framework of epistemology. That epistemology, again in its semiotic aspects, is flowunderstood as the phenomenology of knowledge. Thus, Broekman signifies the meta-looping of the inter-subjectivity of epistemology; that is of the human reconstitution of the world, physical and simulated, that can be accessed and experienced—with reference to the self, selfie, Self-E.
The flow, and fluidity, then, become a central ordering concept in the reconstitution of cognition as conversion, of conversion as the reflection of the plurality of inter-subjectivity, and of the multiplicity of personality and its experiences in physical and virtual space—all spewing data around which a cognitive epistemology is possible. In the paraphrased language of St John: in the beginning was the flow, and the flow was with God, and the flow was God. (John1:1). Flow and fluidity, then, acquire a core position in the constitution of knowledge, of what can be known from the position of the human and its simulacra. The flow itself points to something of its core significs—the condition of being fluid. If fixity is analogue and modern, then fluidity is digital and post-modern. The state of fluidity permits a more intense consideration (cognition!) of flow (the constant and multi-directional signaling that are data) that makes visible the plurality and dynamic state of inter-subjectivity and thus of cognition. . . and thus of knowledge that is itself a sentience and experience of the world in which the physical-virtual selves occupy and with which they interact.
It is to that issue of fluidity in the self-experience that renders epistemology visible and knowable (in the sense that knowle4dge can be made to know itself—the self knowledge of knowledge) that Broekman turns in Chapter 2. The object is to consider “fluidity” and “discourse” in the context of the objectivity of knowledge where it proceeds from the self-selfie, self-E. If discourse is a sort of textual flow—the analogue of data flows, iterative processes, and the foundations of self-generative silicon consciousness-functionality, then fluidity references the dynamic nature of discourse in its iterations that necessarily must incorporate emerging discourse into the some of its text. (Broekman, supra. pp. 23-24).
But there must be more. That “more “is found in both the useful vagueness of the term the flow encased in fluidity as its major characteristic (ibid., p. 24) and its utility for signifying the dynamic digital subject. Starting with Zygmunt Baumann’s much discussed Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000) (an effort to move beyond the historicism of modernity-post-modernity and beyond), and Umberto Eco’s essays in Chroniclers of a Liquid Society (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2017) (collection of essays written for his regular column in the magazine L’Espresso ), Broekman draws on concepts of crisis from Baumann and fluidity from Eco to grasp a concept of flow that is tied to what older people in the later 20th and early 21st century saw as destabilizing transformation of social, political, economic, and cultural orders. And indeed, the original title to Eco’s collection of essays--Pape Satán Aleppe: Cronache di una società liquida with its invocation of the incantation that serves as the first line of Canto VII of Dante Alighieri's Inferno, the meaning of which continues to elude—invokes the discursive crisis that is at the heart of the liquid modernity and a liquid society.
But Broekman uses that as a foil to detach the flow from the hand wringing of late post-modernity’s infatuation with crisis and change (an irony given that most of its adherents had spent lifetimes wishing for the thing they now feared) —and then to take it into the digital. He turns the post-modern problemmatique upside down. If the problem of the post-modern is crisis, then that is a crisis of the analogue. In the digital, the focus is not on crisis, but on the flow—the inevitable movements of which can be understood as crisis, or they can be understood as the essence of cognition-conversion. Crisis , in this sense, comes from the privileging of stasis; yet stasis in the post-modern, defines its general contradiction. The resolution of that contradiction, and the pathway from the mirrored box of the post-modern, is in the shift from stability to flow, from analogue to digital. Broekman notes: “Flow is, after all: change. Movement, flux, drift, gush, or stream of values. The issue to be studied is thus the specificity of the flow’s dynamics rather than its syntax! Change is the key word for this approach!” (Broekman, supra, p. 25).
One embraces here not the self-referencing rigidity of systems built in concreate., but rather the full consequence of moving from solid to liquid states of intersubjectivity—and thus to more liquid states of certainty in what epistemology is stuffed with: in a sense it is the dynamics of phenomenology that both fills and defines the spaces of epistemology. Knowledge—cognition—grounded in convergence and built on flow (of data (eg of objects experienced))mirroring the physical and virtual producers of data, now takes on its digital character. One is no longer in the world of Husserl, Lyotard, Eco, or Baumann; one now inhabits the self-conceived world of Mr. Universe who sits at the routing point of “the signal”: “Can’t stop the signal. . . Everything goes somewhere. And I go everywhere.” (Serenity, Universal Studios Home Entertainment (20 December 2005; quoting Mr. Universe).
The flow is a manifestation of consequence of the movement from analogue to digital—the reduction of the effect of language, of discourse: “the flow demonstrates the contrary, namely that life and cosmos are more than linguistic categories ever express!” (Broekman, supra, p. 25). It is here that Broekman plants the fundamental semiotic question—one of the position of the observer who from their observation is attempting to extract theories of knowledge (epistemology) and knowledge-experience (phenomenology) from the only place possible for it to happen—from the lifeworlds and imaginaries of cognition (Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth & Logic (2nd ed. NY: Dover, 1946); pp. 120-133. Is knowledge lodged in the picture of cognition at any one point, or is cognition (and thus the knowledge of knowledge) or is it lodged in those spaces between pictures of cognition that may exist from one point to another? In the age of the digital lifeworld or imaginary, one must move from the algebraic to the sensibilities of calculus (that term understood in its mathematical and semiotic senses). Cognition, and its phenomenological epistemologies (tied to its complicated intersubjective and mirroring baggage of the self-selfie-Self-E) moves from the study of things to the study of the way things are changing: the flow; the signal! “Where or when did we lose our grip on knowing the flow in which we live? Or: did we ever know the flow?” (Broekman, supra, p. 25).
That question, perhaps, is one of the most contemporaneously relevant questions that Broekman poses. However, it takes one back not to modernity, but back to the cognitive foundations of Leibnnitz and his calculus ratiocinator (a mechanism for mechanically deducing all possible truths from the list of simple thought). And that bring sone face to face with two vital changes from analogue to digital. The first is the critical mirroring role of the virtual self (as selfie and Self-E). That takes one to the classical arguments—reinvented over and over since the 1670s—about ligua characterica and calculus ratiocinator. This is the conversation to which Broekman alludes in his discussion of fluidity—and one that is deeply semiotic, and algebraic, involving Peirce in an interesting way (Joan Bertran-San Millán, “Lingua Characterica Aad Calculus Ratiocinator: The Leibnizian Background of the Frege-Schröder Polemic,” The Review of Symbolic Logic 14(2) (2021) 411-446). And it is imbedded in the fascination with discourse, linguistics and its connection to cognition/communication (and thus to semiotic meaning making and the rationalization of the world, etc.) (Broekman, supra., pp. 23-27; Philip E.B. Jourdain, P. E. B. (1914). Preface, in Louis Couturat, L’Algèbre de la Logique (L. G. Robinson (trans.); Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1914); pp. iii–x. [Chicago: Open Court, 1914].). Its epistemological consequences have been much mined, certainly to good effect as archeology in the age of the analogue (Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language (A.M. Sheridan Smith (trans); NY: Pantheon Books, 1972). The point is underscored with Broekman’s discussion of Gadamer’s linking of language (objectified sentience) and consciousness (ego) (Broekman, supra., pp. 27-29).
The second touches on the constitution of the virtual self(ie or -E) as the constantly moving aggregation all that is possible from the current state of cognition). It gets one—in effect—to generative AI and to the subjectivity of the autonomous but connected virtual self. (Daniel M. Rice, Calculus of Thought: Neuromorphic Logistic Regression in Cognitive Machines (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2014) pp. 1-25 (“In a sense, this concept of Calculus Ratiocinator foreshadows today’s predictive analytic technology.” Ibid., p. 2). But the perspective inherited from Leibnitz gets it wrong—one ought not to focus on the product of the deduction of all truths, but on the process of deduction of truth as truth—the flow. It is in the spaces between iterations of imaginaries that the virtual self resides. And it is in the process of transition from one to another—captured to an extent by Broekman’s concept of conversion (here as router, and in the world of logic as analytic structure; and in the world of AI, as code sparking self-generation). It connects the concept of flow, to conversion, and centers conversion within cognition even as cognition remainds the central element in knowledge experienced by and through the self, selfie, Self-E.
This last point is the one that animates much of the discussion in the last sections of Chapter 2 of Broekman’s work—effectively an archeology of the flow in Plato’s dialogues (ibid., 27-32); Voeglin’s flow (ibid., pp. 32-24), and Kant’s desire (ibid., pp. 34-38). The discussion of Plato’s work is meant to underscore the humanity of knowledge. More importantly Broekman connects the desiderata of Plato’s schema with contemporary conceptions of consciousness, and from the conscious to the sentient, and from sentience to cognition as a short half lived expression of flow made manifest (incarnated like Logos) through conversion. This is tied to Damasio’s idea, shared by Peirce (Broekman, supra, pp. 30-31), of the materiality of the sign in an object in relation to feeling a thing as the foundation of the (analogue) consciousness. For Broekman this produces an emphasis of the importance of the flow in four distinctly described categories (ibid., p. 31): (1) the flow is internal to consciousness; consciousness as an entity “does not seem to flow or be in a flow;” (2) the flow of consciousness cannot be understood as a rationalized dance of objectified significs; (3) consciousness of flow is not flow but its momentary manifestation as object-signs conveyed through performance (language in some form or other); (4) flow may be reflexive but it exists empty of refection.
The first, of course, touches on the nature of coding—a code cannot be understood as code. Yet, it is not possible to understand programs or applications as code—code is in and of. In the land of predictive analytics and AI, however, it is possible to understand that code is external to that which is coded—code can become self-reflexive; that is self-generative AI is consciousness attuned to its own consciousness through its relationship to flow. The second underlines the difference between moments in time and the dynamic that is movement from time to time. One cannot signify flow but is signified by it. The third suggests an apartness of flow from the consciousness of those in the flow—human consciousness. The last suggests the difference between iteration and reflexivity. Self-generating AI is built on momentary manifestations of the flow of data projected as iterative and repetitious contextually useful strings of data. Iterative consciousness is inductive. Human intersubjectivity is built on suppositions drawn from the premises about the self, either experienced or felt. Reflexive consciousness is deductive.
However, consciousness of flow remains elusive under the old thinking. Back in the world of experience and symbolization—the analogue—flow serves as the placeholder that connects one qualitative state of knowledge with another: like the balance sheet of a business. That becomes the centerpiece of the sentience of a business enterprise—its periodically updated picture of itself in a moment in time. In the world of the digital, the four dimensional canvas on which Broekman constructs for us out of the gossamer of fluidity, flow serves as the flux reality, the pathways of which may be followed through the aggregation in space and time of its picture, momentarily frozen. In this sense flow is more like the ledger entries that can be manifested in any moment in time as an income statement and statement of cash flows. The sentience of the business enterprise now shifts from the frozen imagery of the balance sheet—the core on which pre-millennium philosophy took for granted as the stable space of sentience and around which worlds were built. Its shifted core always existed, of course, but as a second order space between what was important. Now, in the digital, reality understood as moments in times fall away to reveal the continuity of constant movement—of the iterative processes of the ledger in a business with many consumers and complex producers—as a platform the solidity of which is founded on its constant movement of consumers and producers, of change agents.
But back to Voeglin, who adds the insights of time in and as flow (Broekman, supra, pp. 32-35). More specifically, Voeglin adds a hyper-objectification to history form which actors acting provide the only thing of significance the aggregation of which ordered within and through time makes it possible solidify abstractions like consciousness only in relation to concrete specifics—a bottom up phenomenology. But again life in the analogue has its limits. In this case the limits are created by the abstract and not the concrete—“truth” is the object but also one that gets n the way of a theory of the concrete, specifically because it can be a first order concrete object but rather a discursive referent to amalgamation built on (not concrete) supposition. This one obsesses about the truth of consciousness; and that truth flows through the concrete consciousness of concrete men, etc. (Voeglin pp. 3-36, discussed in Broekman, supra., pp, 32-33). Back in the world of tensions between experience and symbolization, Broekman considers whether (again a change in the locus of perception) the flow can be found not in experience or symbolization (the traditional subjectivity-objectivity nexus) but in what Voeglin describes as the tensions between them (Broekman, supra, p. 33) The answer is maybe.
To this, Broekman layers the possibilities in Kant’s desire (Broekman, supra. pp. 34-38). A rich discussion to be sure. One shares a measure of Broekman’s frustration, in the digital, with the modernist obsession with the “I.” Kant, like Moses standing on Mt Nebo and looking into Canaan, can get us to the Jordan River but is able to cross (Deut. 34:1-8). Or, in the language of Broekman, “The specificity of our second decade of the third millennium is however, that a new plurality of expressivity is becoming dominant: the plural of the analog and the digital type.” (Broekman, supra, p.35). What Kant appear to bring to the flow is tied to the relationship between the state of self-consciousness and consciousness of worldly objects. And off we go again—“our inner experience, which Descartes did not doubt, is only possible under the condition of our external experiencing.” (Broekman, supra, p. 37). This is an analogue project—and again back to language—and the Human All Too Human (Nietzsche) that is both self-centered in a two dimensional way and fascinated by text.
On the sidelines are the digital—images, codes, symbols, and the spaces between momentary stops—the individual frames of a movie that has yet to flow. “So, there is no doubt [in the shadow of Kant that is] that human knowledge is related to and even fundamentally limited by sensory experiences.” (Broekman, supra, 38). These are the shadows (Broekman’s term, supra p. 38), what I would call the spectres, that haunt the flow in the age of the digital, and that veil the possibilities of consciousness in the age of the multiple physical and virtual self. A confrontation is inevitable and the old must be swept aside or at least embedded within a new world in which consciousness itself has become self-generating (not just of itself in its virtual self) but in the reframing of cognition as defined by the infinite spaces between momentary iterations of cognition. Broekman does not sweep away, he re-imagines: He re-frames Kant’s subject-object embrace into a space between which one might find the flow: “Kant refers to the fact that he distinguished two characteristics in the frame of what we name “A Flow”: (a) a language of the Self, which functions within the structures of subjectivity, and (b) a language of the external world of that Self.” (Broekman, supra, p. 39).
And now the great leap forward (William A. Joseph, “A Tragedy of Good Intentions,” Modern China 12(4) (1986) 419-457)—a “rethinking of the flow as a philosophically relevant concept” (Broekman, supra, p. 38). That requires achieving escape velocity from the confines of the analogue that was philosophy before the third millennium (ibid., p. 39). That requires a combining of the flow as a critical component of conversion, and conversion as a critical component of consciousness, and, of course, consciousness as a critical component of sentience, which is knowledge born of the experience of things instantaneously experienced in the flow.
This new digital reflexivity can be understood in five layers (Broekman, supra, pp. 39-40). These are meant to underline the differences between the analog and the digital—that is between notions of streaming and those of the flow. First, it is necessary to capture streaming as an analogue variation of the flow, as an analogue expressivity. “Flow and stream can both be equalized with ‘flux’, ‘torrent,’ or even ‘jet.’” (ibid., p. 39). Second, this streaming “takes place in the sphere of conversion of analogue terms into digital” (ibid.). This produces a strongly reified version of digital flow. Third, this reification takes place in media directly and unconditionally accessed via computer networks (ibid). The result is a form of objectification of flow for and in markets. Streaming is thus understood as a powerful if constricted object fit for market and the management of social relations. And thus the fourth insight, “Streaming is therefore to be understood as a highly institutionalized process which embraces specific digital meanings that access recent block-busters or special top series.” (Ibid., pp. 40). Streaming does not flow—it is, if one follows this logic the detritus of the flow which like the rest of consciousness, is in made visible in an instant re-iterated ad infinitum (and thus the calculus in and as the flow). Streaming, then, in Broekman’s linguia analytica “is a one time only occurrence.” (Ibid.).
It is against streaming that one might consider flow. But to do that one must—and this will hurt—abandon analogue philosophy to the compost bin of history. And yet, as Broekman brilliantly reminds us, provides a fertile basis for growing new things on well-tended ground. One moves now beyond the language of words to that of the quite different language and the language of logic and its mathematics—or its inverse, the language of mathematics and its logic (Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica (3 vols., Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1927). This is the language of verification where that sort of accountability is self reflexive—and becomes the language of code in the digital. It is the language of the flow of infinitesimal changes, and in this sense transcendent (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (P Patton (trans); NY: Columbia University Press, 1994); discussed as against Leibnitz and Hegel in Henry Somers-Hall, “Hegel and Deleuze on the metaphysical interpretation of the calculus,” Continental Philosophy Review 42 (2009) 555-572). But now live in an age where the infinitely small difference between two points, dy, has become quite large and lively. And like their carbon based analogues, the predictive analytics of big data, even in the form of self-generative AI, can vary widely given their modeling and input assumptions. (Rice, Calculus of Thought, supra, pp. 5-9). That is the flow; and its calculus—conversion—now becomes the key to cognition of both carbon and silicon based consciousness.
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