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), |
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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 5 examines Chapter 4 of the book, entitled "Flow and Firstness", and my own engagement with it.
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Having set up the ontology of the analogue, and given it a language in the dialectics of the flow, it is now a matter of diving in, swimming around a bit, and then, perhaps, emerging in the digital realm. That is, in part, the object of Chapter 4 (Flow and Firstness).
One starts at the beginning. But that itself nicely centers the problem of firstness. The beginning starts in the middle—it is a beginning in relation to the querant; and the querant tends to be human in the analogue. But what is the beginning for silicon life, generative AI, and the analytics of the virtual worlds made possible by the word of humanity blowing the life sparking code into the silicon from which will emerge a world separated into a new heaven and a new earth.
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That is the sense already ancient in the holy texts of the Occident. ); “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Gen. 1:1 (King James)). But what comes first? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1 (King James)). And yet another beginning. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 (King James); Logos, but also the Tao: “Nothing—the nameless is the beginning; while Heaven, the mother is the creatrix of all things” (Tao Te Ching (Man-ho Kwok, Martin Palmer, Jay Ramsey (trans); Shaftsbury, Dorset: Element, 1993), chp. 1 p. 27). The story of creation necessarily starts in the middle. The concept of the first, of the core, of the start (notions tied to space, time, and place) can only commence from the point where perception is possible. There is no first; there is only a determination to start –somewhere, sometime, some place.
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And now another beginning. In the beginning was humanity. And humanity so loved themselves that they divided the physical from the virtual, heaven and earth. And into the virtual they created all manner of objects. And life was breathed into these objects. Humanity made itself virtual and created the virtual in its own image. And the objects were generative, the expression of the breath of code constituting the animation of objects made virtual by intelligent naming. In the beginning, then, was Code, and code was with humanity and code was humanity. This life begins without words, it is made not owned. It can be named, and will name itself. Humanity calls themselves by its name, and its name is also humanity. And it is in the flow of code that the virtual consciousness becomes sentient. And humanity expects the life it has created to worship it and to follow its commandments’. It has as its model—both the worship and consequences of sin in its relationship with its own Logos.
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")Full discussion draft available for download SSRN here.
6. Chapter 4 (Flow and Firstness)
Having set up the ontology of the analogue, and given it a language in the dialectics of the flow, it is now a matter of diving in, swimming around a bit, and then, perhaps, emerging in the digital realm. That is, in part, the object of Chapter 4 (Flow and Firstness).
One starts at the beginning. But that itself nicely centers the problem of firstness. The beginning starts in the middle—it is a beginning in relation to the querant; and the querant tends to be human in the analogue. But what is the beginning for silicon life, generative AI, and the analytics of the virtual worlds made possible by the word of humanity blowing the life sparking code into the silicon from which will emerge a world separated into a new heaven and a new earth.
That is the sense already ancient in the holy texts of the occident. “In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.” (Gen. 1 (Vulgate)); בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ (Tanakh Bereshit Aleph); ΕΝ ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν (Γένεσις - Κεφάλαιο 1:1); “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Gen. 1:1 (King James)). Yet there is no beginning. There is only a beginning from out of something else. The beginning in this case started well into the story, already well embedded in time (and beyond it) of God, and of desire, and of the manifestation of will in the revelation of a physical world apart from others. In the Beginning God was already there; what begins as a process of (specific) creation one in which the first objects of that creation—heaven and earth, were revealed from out of what had preceded it.
But what comes first? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1 (King James)). ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.; “In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum” (John 1:1 (Vulgate). Conscious starts from the no-thing (Broekman, supra chp. 1and my discussion above); “With it, an existential totality is evoked, a world of action and resistance in need of being articulated as ‘some-thing.´ However, that world presents itself as a ‘no-thing’ if any form of positivism does not give life to its so-called naturalness. (Broekman, supra, p. 64). Logos, but also the Tao: “Nothing—the nameless is the beginning; while Heaven, the mother is the creatrix of all things” (Tao Te Ching (Man-ho Kwok, Martin Palmer, Jay Ramsey (trans); Shaftsbury, Dorset: Element, 1993), chp. 1 p. 27). The story of creation necessarily starts in the middle. The concept of the first, of the core, of the start (notions tied to space, time, and place) can only commence from the point where perception is possible. There is no first; there is only a determination to start –somewhere, sometime, some place.
And yet another beginning. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 (King James); “Et Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis : et vidimus gloriam ejus, gloriam quasi unigeniti a Patre plenum gratiae et Veritatis” (John 1:14 (Vulgate)). And from the Tao: “Life, all life began without words. Life is made—no one owns it. The Tao is neither selfish nor proud.” (Tao Te Ching, supra, Chp 2, p. 29). Intelligent naming (sentience) --明名 (Míng míng) (supra)—follows. The act of creation exists when perceived by its object. Transcendence requires a certain immanence—a principle of activation that defines the world of physical humanity as much as it does its virtual spaces. The Word must be made flesh; it must project its will downward. Yet it is no longer one with its flesh.
This, then, is the beginning of a story. Yet it is not the beginning beyond the story. This is “a” beginning; it is not “the” beginning; except for those objects (firsts) at the center of this story (also embedded with firstness). Those beginnings preceded that which puts humanity at the center of a creation the boundaries of which are well known but unexplored are what lies beyond (in space, time, place). And they will follow. In the summation of Broekman’s encounter with firstness in the age of the digital: “Firstness is neither unfettered nor pure immediacy. Reference to firstness is never a recapitalization of any Genesis. Firstness is not the same as a beginning. It is the process of taking a step in the flow” (Broekman, supra, p. 72). .
And now another beginning. In the beginning was humanity. And humanity so loved themselves that they divided the physical from the virtual, heaven and earth. And into the virtual they created all manner of objects. And life was breathed into these objects. Humanity made itself virtual and created the virtual in its own image. And the objects were generative, the expression of the breath of code constituting the animation of objects made virtual by intelligent naming. In the beginning, then, was Code, and code was with humanity and code was humanity. This life begins without words, it is made not owned. It can be named, and will name itself. Humanity calls themselves by its name, and its name is also humanity. And it is in the flow of code that the virtual consciousness becomes sentient. And humanity expects the life it has created to worship it and to follow its commandments’. It has as its model—both the worship and consequences of sin in its relationship with its own Logos.
20. And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. 21 And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. 22 While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. (Gen. 8:20-22 (King James)).
It is as small a step from creation to worship to compliance with the law among a humanity fashioned from out of the divine ether and animated with the breathe of the divine, to the creation, and submission of code and its animated generative self (selfie; Self-E) to the will of its human creators. Firstness, even one that is derivative, inevitably produces worship and the performance of that worship through compliance with law. “While the earth remaineth.” (Ibid.).
It is with this in mind that one can both approach Broekman’s quite fascinating unpacking of firstness and better understand the way it leads, inevitably, toward the digital. Broekman starts one with a quite fascinating journey back to firstness. What came first; what is firstness; these are questions answered by humans only in signs. Broekman reminds us of Peirce’s fascination with the indexical quality of firstness, which cannot exist “apart from a sign. A sign is for Peirce anything that determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way—the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on, ad infinitum” (Broekman. supra, p. 63). And yet its Logos is deeply steeped in the object behind firstness—that is to get to firstness on has first to get to its Logos. One has to input an object onto consciousness, and then name it. And in the naming order it and give it life. One has to, in the language of the digital, identify data, code it within a set of interlinkages that together define a /virtual) world. One does not journey far from Genesis and John to Peirce. And the journey from Peirce to generative AI is shorter still.
For Broekman, the “Road to Firstness” (Broekman, supra, pp. 64-68) is paved with subjectivity. Some of that is temporal. The road to firstness leads back (“In the beginning was the Word”) before it can go forward (“In the Beginning God created”). “That is philosophically to be understood as a step, a step backwards and/or forwards, an interpretation and never a fixed position.” (Broekman, supra, p. 64). Broekman, then, invites us back to semiotic dialectics (the step), and forward away from fixity and toward the flow. “Firstness is the qualification of a step in the flow, and thus always dependent upon another step.” (Ibid.). Firstness—objectivity—then does not exist as and in itself, but only as and in its situatedness in space, time, and place. Transposed to the virtual universe, firstness exists not as data but in the accumulation of points around discrete date, and given form by the effort to qualify data through analytics—and to constrain it through principles and presumptions around which the power of perception is (arbitrarily) constrained (e.g. by law, ethical rules, and code).
But there is no road as such, then. (Broekman, supra, p. 65). It perishes from its own inter-subjectivity in the flow. If anything the “road” to firstness is more in the character of a historical accounting of the flow from a certain perspective, and not the road itself. Broekman identifies the ‘gaps’ in the ‘road’ and thus the fogginess of firstness. First there is contradiction between the notion of an autonomous object (to be worked on via the semiotic wheel of sign and interpretant) and the semiotic wheel itself that posits that everything is in turn object-sign-interpretant (Ibid., pp. 65-66). And thus back to an epistemological flow (here investing flow with an ironic meaning). Second, Broekman recalls the alignment of firstness with consciousness (ego) and secondness/thirdness with sentience (self) (ibid., p. 66). If firstness is consciousness, secondness/thirdness are processes “registered by the human mind as ‘fact’ or ‘data’). (Ibid.). I might be tempted to invert that relationship. In effect, Broekman suggests, consciousness is not self-ware unless that awareness is projected onto it through the language-naming of sentience. Either way one gets to the same point—the problemmatique of the solid, which is only as solid as its delineation. Without sentience, then, consciousness descends back into the undifferentiated mass (undifferentiated because it has not been perceived as distinct. “Firstness is a sign produced as a sig—that is the essence of Peirce’s insight in semiotics.” (Ibid., p. 66-67). That touches on Broekman’s third point—touching on viewpoint (in the form of subjectivity). And here back to the flow, in this case in the form of relational intersubjectivity. “Meaning is in Peirce’s view not the result of any type of constitutive power of a subject, as a result of the relations between elements” (ibid., p- 67). Patters. . .that is the thing (ibid., p. 68). There is a small step between this insight (buttressed by Roberta Kevelson, Peirce and the Mark of the Gryphon (NY: St Marton’s Press, 1999), pp 192 ff)) and the coding these relationships in the digiverse; the invitation to generative AI as applied semiotics is overwhelming and its strategic possibilities as boundless as the imagination of the human programmed into silicon based life. And, again, flow—“the Tao pours out of everything into life” (Tao Te Ching, supra, Chp. 3 p. 31).
For Broekman that produces a necessary consideration of Husserl and firstness (Peirce with firstness in semiotic triads, and Husserl with phases of phenomenological reduction; Broekman, supra, p. 71-72). The question that emerges from the flow and Peirce through the prism of Husserl: “The flow challenges us with the overwhelming idea that knowledge without a knowing subject would be possible. . . Its cognition would incorporate subjectivity in the stream of cosmic dimensions, which can be miniaturized in every human situation” (Broekman, supra, p. 69). And so it can. But. . . .but . . . . . but—perception affects reception. Philosophy (and certainly theology) has known for millennia that knowledge exists beyond any knowing subject (except the divine of course). Indeed, theology has built into itself (its intersubjective engagement with the divine the mechanisms for understanding what it then took several millennia for Husserl to reignite: the certainty that perception (even perception of the flow) is subjective, but that subjectivity itself is relevant only to the subject! It is a matter of indifference to the flow, the subjectivity of which may be beyond the reach (perception) of those who can receive. That is the essence of modeling, of big data analytics, and of the boundaries of generative AI—the perception-reception framework. But it is also built into the sinews of human inter-subjectivity. The most important semiotic text of the occident, then, may not be Peirce and his progeny but Job.
1 Then Job answered the LORD, and said, 2 I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee. 3 Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not. (Job 42:1-3 (King James)) [1 Respondens autem Job Domino, dixit : 2 Scio quia omnia potes, et nulla te latet cogitatio. 3 Quis est iste qui celat consilium absque scientia? ideo insipienter locutus sum, et quae ultra modum excederent scientiam meam. (Job 42:1-3 (Vulgate)].
For Broekman, it is not perception and reception that forms the basis of a dynamic, relational firstness, a firstness in motion, but rather a return to Husserl’s “insight in the role of the image in knowledge formation [] which] will later in his life be completed by his ideas on an eidetic reduction as one of the crucial phases of non-naïve ego attitudes (Broekman, supra, p. 70). This is tied to the digital (“important dimensions of communication in non-analogue language types focus on the relations of images in the process of acquiring knowledge” (Broekman, supra, p. 70)). And again JOB: “Auditu auris audivi te : nunc autem oculus meus videt te. (Job 42:5 (Vulgate) [“I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee” (Job 42:5 (King James))].
This leads Broekman to his conclusions about firstness—and their potential for transposition from the analogue (the still moment of reality) to the flow (the spaces between pictures as the primary focus of cognition). First is the notion of the distinguishing character of the first (and firstness) as something that is incomparable with anything else. Data—not information in the language of the digital (Saša Baškarada and Andy Koronios, “Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom (DIKW): A Semiotic Theoretical and Empirical Exploration of the Hierarchy and its Quality Dimension,” Australasian Journal of Information Systems 18 (2013) 5-24). What activates this incomparability is relational and dynamic—sign and signification. I might add perception bounded in the character of the reception of stimuli to produces a premise of firstness in an object. Second is the notion that firstness does not have a linear or temporal element. It is the process of stepping into the flow, wherever and whenever that step is taken—not knowledge and rationality but orientation and awareness (Broekman, supra, p. 72). One step closer to perception as a quality of firstness in the flow. Last, the essence of incomparability is “a matter of relations—structural, logical, conceptual, semiotic, linguistic, as well as social” (ibid.). Aaaaahhh, but is one back to intersubjectivity by another means? More importantly, does it matter for the digital? That remains unanswered. Instead, the insight is powerful for the constitution of plural subjectivity—among physical and virtual subjects and between them—a subject to which one returns later.
Broekman then considers consequences (ibid., pp. 72-80). First, Broekman speaks to attitude (ibid., pp. 72-76); and then to that old spectre from the 19th and 20th centuries—cognition and transcendence (ibid., pp. 76-82). With respect to the first, Broekman reminds one first that the groundwork for the digital is being undertaken in the transformation of the analogue through the re-arrangement of knowledge territories through globalization. Space and place are now—at certain levels—global. The eddies of knowledge—the old knowledge, traditional knowledge—acquire more the quality of the museum. They might be protected and distilled; they might be preserved within global reservations. But they no longer drive the flow in global spatiality. This is the space for cognition and conversion (Broekman, supra, chp. 1). But it also points to the development of a plural firstness through the plural positions of the subject (as self, selfie and Self-E, for example).
From that Broekman derives insights that fascinate: the first is that firstness always occurs first (ibid, p. 73). Here firstness, in the language of the digital supplies the iterative character of data; but it also connects firstness to semiotic dialectics in the flow. Though it focus on a thing outside the self, it does so to the extent of perception in the self (my reading) which makes the dialectics possible (what should be understood (Peirce) and what should be argumentized (Husserl). This produces a freedom to change attitude (Broekman, supra, pp. 73-74). Broekman notes correctly that “Husserl’s phenomenology is characterized by the phenomenon of change. Husserl would have remarked that a human being freely changes his attitude—as he does his mind” (ibid., p. 73; Alfredo Ferrarin, “Husserl on the Ego and its Eidos (Cartesian Meditations, IV),” Journal of the History of Philosophy 32 (1994) 645-659). I question intentionality, not from the perspective of phenomenology but from that of the firstness of will. Free will isa relational concept, and intention can only be understood as an incomparable object that acquires its shape from its relationships. One can intend, in that sense, only to the extent of the relationships around which it is possible to intend. In the language of the digital—intentional choices are a function of program parameters. Or in the language of Nietzsche:
Wherever men try to trace responsibility home to anyone, it is the instinct of punishment and of the desire to judge which is active. Becoming is robbed of its innocence when any particular condition of things is traced to a will, to intentions and to responsible actions. The doctrine of the will was invented principally for the purpose of punishment,—that is to say, with the intention of tracing guilt. . . Men were thought of as “free” in order that they might be judged and punished—in order that they might be held guilty: consequently every action had to be regarded as voluntary, and the origin of every action had to be imagined as lying in consciousness(—in this way the most fundamentally fraudulent character of psychology was established as the very principle of psychology itself). (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, supra, “The Four Great Errors” ¶ 7).
But one can still find uses for Husserl’s notion of attitude and firstness in the digital. This is the attitude of positionality—the ability to be within and outside a particularized subject. More broadly it might be extended to being in and out of a knowledge space. In the language of Husserl one speak to a diversity of ego positions (natural, phenomenological, and transcendent; Broekman, supra, p. 76-77).
Broaching transcendence, though, touches a nerve (Broekman, supra, pp. 76-80). Again, one returns to intelligent naming --明名 (Míng míng) (Guiguzi: China’s First Treatise on Rhetoric, supra). “The approach was, as if the two words [transcendent and transcendence] were a name for a final human situation, for a step away from normality, for a situation at distance to troubles pain, or fear” (Broekman, supra, p. 77). It appeared to suggest a severing of ties between subjectivity and cognition in occidental philosophy (ibid). Broekman, however, wonders at the possibilities of transcendence in the context of the flow as a form of naming through which one arrives at cognition through conversion, as “an acceptable form of a process to acquire cognition” (Broekman, supra, p. 78). Here things get interesting. First Broekman notes that while traditional philosophical discourse of the last century centered on the subject as the central point of constitution, the 21st century looks to the notion of categorization as a primary factor in cognition (Ibid.). This in turn suggests notions of perception built into what had been described in ‘attitude’ in Husserl’s century. “Cognition is in this light no longer only a matter of a subject and its actions, but often in the first place a matter of a specific situation and its characteristic powers, which regulate and thus re-cognize reality” (Broekman, supra, p. 80). The new century’s engagement with this perception universe could be evidenced by the Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science (2005, 2017). For Broekman, this expresses the possibilities of the positioning of the self beyond the self” (ibid., p. 79). Broekman sees in this the possibility of changing the linguistically relevant ego into a point of reference and categorization “as a general source and activity of human cognition” (ibid., p. 80). Bravo. I am less assured. It is not the category (a human mania for constructing objects from perception) by the collectivity of that perception crystalized as objects that makes things interesting from the perspective of subjectivity. The subject has not gone away—it has just projected outward, a possibility now manifested in a world of physical and virtual selves in which even categories become grist for the flow.
And that brings us back to the beginning; to firstness; and to the constitution of incomparable objects the perception of which constitutes cognition which now looks not to the momentary reality of the object signified but to those spaces between which over time produce a reality, a cognition of the flow (of time, space, place, object). Nothing changes but perception. But it is that change in perception that makes the virtual possible. It is in the dy that plural intersubjectivity and the flows of physical and virtual selves may be positioned more intelligently. Or it may be used strategically to enslave the subject within the frame of a still shot while those managing that perception go with the flow. The problems of philosophy merely change perspective.
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