An encounter with Jan M. Broekman, "Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation" (Springer Nature, 2023): Part 8 --Chapter 7 ("Plurality and the Natural")

 

 

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.

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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),epistemology (theories of knowledge; the rationalization of reality) and intersubjectivity (shared perceptions of reality; the experience of knowledge as social relations, the rationalization of human interaction at every level of complexity). All of these currents and problems presume the humanity as the only or the central subject of interest.

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 8 examines Chapter 7 of the book, entitled "Plurality of the Natural" and my own engagement with it.

At last one encounters a key element of this new digital semiotics that has, to this point, remained in the background—the borderlands between the digital and the analog. Of course, philosophy (and cognition-sentience) has obsessed about borderlands from the moment it entered into the heads of carbon based life forms that they were somehow not either each other, or the environment in which they found themselves. It was a small step from that rudimentary act of consciousness to seek sentience: a way of ordering themselves, their fellows, and the world around them, in ways that suited them. But always the borders—expressed in an endlessly, and delightfully varied way (to suit the times, places, and spaces) in which these were proffered to a grateful community of believers. And bridges across those borders.

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It is to those issues of borderlands and bridging that Broekman deploys the notion of conversion (again as object, sign, and meaning) in Chapter 7’s engagement with the idea of “Plurality of the Natural” (Broekman, supra, pp. 117-146). “No wonder”, Broekman exclaims, “that the techniques and performances of digital-analog and analog-digital conversions were of central interest in the beginning of the third millennium in which foundations of human knowledge began to changer and the dual relationship as creator of intersubjective patterns of life faded away.” (Broekman, supra, p. 117). This is undertaken in several modes. Broekman starts with the question “Is Cyberspace Platonic? (ibid., 117-121). That leads to the insight of conversion as the “cloud” storage of the totality of partitionable knowledge (and knowledge of knowledge; ibid., p. 121), and then to the question of “The Plural in the Natural” (ibid., pp. 121-124) in which the flow is added to conversion as an activating force. That, in turn, leads (perhaps inevitably) to consequences—here “Barriers and Bridges” (ibid., pp. 124-131), which then requires a bit of reifying in the form of an engagement with the expression of silicon-based life form in a world “known” through partitioning—“Conversion: The Story of the DACs” (digital-analog convertors) (ibid.; pp. 131-146).

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Here at last one centers the consequences of the partition between digital and analog cognition. Silicon based intelligence does not experience cognition in the same way as carbon based life-forms. That makes all the difference in the world. It suggests that conversion is not merely an act of translating language, but of bridging forms to consciousness and its sentient expression in the way the partitioned world of each is given expression and meaning. It is not that silicon and carbon intelligences do not think alike; it is that at a fundamental level they do not—cannot—see and order the world (whatever their cognitive systems perceive as “the world”) in the same way. At last, almost a century after its development, one can appreciate at a qualitatively deeper level, Husserl’s understanding of lifeworld where the lifeworld itself is not merely the quantum of whatever it is that one can squeeze into the minds of individuals for the disciplining of social relations —but instead helps frame the challenges of social relations between distinct life forms inhabiting different cognitive worlds in practically every sense. Conversion, then, does not describe translation, but instead is the word-object that is used to signify a means of recognizing the intersubjectivity of lifeworlds, their intimate connection to the constitution of life-forms, and their necessary structural coupling. One can, in this way consider in a new plural light the “autopoiesis of a psychic system [consisting] of the reproduction of thoughts through the network of thinking forming conscious-ness” and their alignment with social systems. That plurality emerges in the necessary irritations between carbon and silicon based neural networks each with its own inter-systems sentience modalities (dialectic in the analog and iterative in the digital).

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For Broekman, that conversion, and these movements must still be centered on and run through the human. Nonetheless, it is possible to see in these movements an inherent autonomy of the Self-E from the self. At some point it is inevitable that the digital will have to be embraced on its own terms and in its own logic. While Broekman still sees the analog at the center of communication and cognition through conversion and built for the freeze framing of the flow in its dispositive moments; it is also possible to envision a reversal of vector—the day may come when the operative language will be digital—in the signal, as the flow and in code; only the iterative results of which will be fodder for conversion. In the meantime, the choice of approach substantially skews regulatory efforts. “To state the same in other words: ‘the digital’ is man-made. Ego positions belong to the creation of this attitude. They remain positions  characterized by language—in fact always by analog language since digital  languages are converted  into analog terms to be understood.” (Broekman, supra, p. 142).

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Additional posts will consider each of the other nine chapters that make up this work. Links to the discussion of the book:

Part 1: Preface

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.

9. Chapter 7 (Plurality and the Natural).

 

At last one encounters a key element of this new digital semiotics that has, to this point, remained in the background—the borderlands between the digital and the analog. Of course, philosophy (and cognition-sentience) has obsessed about borderlands from the moment it entered into the heads of carbon based life forms that they were somehow not either each other, or the environment in which they found themselves.  It was a small step from that rudimentary act of consciousness to seek sentience: a way of ordering themselves, their fellows, and the world around them, in ways that suited them. But always the borders—expressed in an endlessly, and delightfully varied way (to suit the times, places, and spaces) in which these were proffered to a  grateful community of believers. And bridges across those borders.

 

It is to those issues of borderlands and bridging that Broekman deploys the notion of conversion (again as object, sign, and meaning) in Chapter 7’s engagement with the idea of “Plurality of the Natural” (Broekman, supra, pp. 117-146). “No wonder”, Broekman exclaims, “that the techniques and performances of digital-analog and analog-digital conversions were  of central interest in the beginning of the third millennium in which foundations of human knowledge began to  changer and the dual relationship as creator of intersubjective patterns of life faded away.” (Broekman, supra, p. 117).  This is undertaken in several modes.  Broekman starts with the question “Is Cyberspace Platonic? (ibid., 117-121). That leads to the insight of conversion as the “cloud” storage of the totality of partitionable knowledge (and knowledge of knowledge; ibid., p. 121), and then to the question of “The Plural in the Natural” (ibid., pp. 121-124) in which the flow is added to conversion as an activating force. That, in turn, leads (perhaps inevitably) to consequences—here “Barriers and Bridges” (ibid., pp. 124-131), which then requires a bit of reifying in the form of an engagement with the expression of silicon-based life form  in a world “known” through partitioning—“Conversion: The Story of the DACs” (digital-analog convertors) (ibid.; pp. 131-146).

 

Here at last one centers the consequences of the partition between digital and analog cognition. Silicon based intelligence does not experience cognition in the same way as carbon based life-forms. That makes all the difference in the world. It suggests that conversion is not merely an act of translating language, but of bridging forms to consciousness and its sentient expression in the way the partitioned world of each is given expression and meaning. It is not that silicon and carbon intelligences do not think alike; it is that at a fundamental level they do not—cannot—see and order the world (whatever their cognitive systems perceive as “the world”) in the same way. At last, almost a century after its development, one can appreciate at a qualitatively deeper level, Husserl’s understanding of lifeworld (Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (David Carr (trans); Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970); Austin Harrington, “Lifeworld,” Theory, Culture & Society 23(2-3) (2006) 341-343) where the lifeworld itself is not merely the quantum of whatever it is that one can squeeze into the minds of individuals for the disciplining of social relations (e.g., Sebastiano Galanti Grollo, “Rethinking Husserl’s lifeworld: The many faces of the world in Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture courses,” Continental Philosophy Review 55 (2022) 487–502)—but instead helps frame the challenges of social relations between distinct life forms inhabiting different cognitive worlds in practically every sense. Conversion, then, does not describe translation, but instead is the word-object that is used to signify a means of recognizing the intersubjectivity of lifeworlds, their intimate connection to the constitution of life-forms, and their necessary structural coupling (Bernhard Miebach, (01/01/2011). “Computer and Social Systems -- Structural Coupling or Material Agency?” Soziale Systeme 17(1) (2011) 97-119). One can, in this way consider in a new plural light the “autopoiesis of a psychic system [consisting] of the reproduction of thoughts through the network of thinking forming conscious-ness” (Claudio Baraldi, “Structural Coupling: Simultaneity and Difference Between Communication and Thought,” Communication Theory 3(2) (1993) 112-129, 114) and their alignment with social systems. That plurality emerges in the necessary irritations between carbon and silicon based neural networks each with its own inter-systems sentience modalities (dialectic in the analog and iterative in the digital). “In this  perspective, it is first of all necessary to understand how these different kinds of autopoietic systems are connected, that is, how it is possible that a single “world datum” is both socially and psychically produced.” (Baraldi, supra, 118).

 

For Broekman, that conversion, and these movements must still be centered on and run through the human.  Nonetheless, it is possible to see in these movements an inherent autonomy of the Self-E from the self. At some point it is inevitable that the digital will have to be embraced on its own terms and in its own logic. While Broekman still sees the analog at the center of communication and cognition through conversion and built for the freeze framing of the flow in its dispositive moments; it is also possible to envision a reversal of vector—the day may come when the operative language will be digital—in the signal, as the flow and in code; only the iterative results of which will be fodder for conversion.

 

Conversion as cognition begins to make more sense, as the old contradiction in Husserl’s challenge of the lifeworld gives way to the need to develop an intersubjectivity between the digital manifestation of Leibnitz and his calculus ratiocinator and the lifeworlds and imaginaries of carbon based forms.  There is irony here.  Even as Husserl (and to some extent in a very French way) Sartre wrestled with the humanity of imaginary and lifeworld, and suggested its triumph against iterative resductionsim, silicon based lifeworlds are in essence the cognitive forms of what was viewed in the last century as the anti-human. That remains essentially strong; but it no longer occupies the entire field of cognition. Where multiple forms of life-world imaginaries exits—it is not the authenticity of each but the possibility of their intersubjectivity that matters. Machines and humans must communicate, but for the moment may not merge.  That is the essential lesson that one ought to draw from this Chapter 7. Broekman reminds us that “Conversion is the marrowbone of the ‘digital’ in the contemporary New Plural’” (Broekman, supra, p. 133). Sadly, it is one that is hinted at there and substantially ignored by that claque of thinkers and policymakers who still believe that silicon-based intelligence is merely an extension of the self in an easily contained form (Joanna Chamberlain, “The Risk-Based Approach of the European Union’s Proposed Artificial Intelligence Regulation: Some Comments from a Tort Law Perspective,” European Journal of Risk Regulation  14(1) (2022) 1-13;  Hoe-Han Goh, Ricardo Vinuesa, “Regulating artificial-intelligence applications to achieve the sustainable development goals,” Discover Sustainability 2(1) (2021) 1 – 6; Antonio Estella, “Trust in Artificial Intelligence Analysis of the European Commission proposal for a Regulation of Artificial Intelligence,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 30(1) (2023) 39-64).

 

So, that leaves one with the journey—the flow—from conversion as a modality of translation within a unified structure revolving around carbon based life, to one where conversion is the means by which cognition is capacitated, or where capacity is cognition, in a system of social relations between the linguistic and cognitive patterns of carbon and silicon based intelligence. To that end, Broekman starts with Plato (“Is Cyberspace Platonic? (ibid., 117-121). The question must be asked because of the instance, the noxious product of the hubris and narcissism of carbon based life, to insist that the definition of consciousness, sentience, and what proceeds from nature must, as a matter of the logic of narcissus, be measured as a function of the intervention of humanity on its surroundings.  But consider the biblical analogy.  By this reckoning, and in the lifeworld of the Abrahamic God (for example) humanity and the world created around it by God (Genesis) is itself unnatural. As a God-Made thing carbon based life must be understood as under the control of and subject to the supra-normativity of the Divine creator and the lifeworld in which the Creator inhabits. That lifeworld may be unknown to humanity, yet that is of little concern to the great coder of the universe. The Dao takes a more nuanced view, one in which Dao gives birth to Qi (气 or 氣). And yet the digital forces a reconsideration of the baseline for cognition grounded in the understanding that something once created  assumes a life of its own. The connection remains but not the identity between divine (creator) and carbon or silicon based forms of cognition (created). The interface between God and humanity was ritualized through sacrifice (of Isaac, of Jesus, etc.) and ceremony; the interface between humanity and its virtual self may require the same.

 

  “What means ‘Platonic’ in this context, and why is this term given such a central position? We repeat the last sentence: ‘The computer recycles  ancient Platonism by injecting the ideal of cognition with empirical specifics’. . . The question is , in other words, how is human thought able to grasp transcendent realities?” (Broekman, supra, p. 119). Transcendence may be understood as shifting the baseline of cognition from the human to the human and something else.

 

It will never be the position of a someone who is  essentially and definitively different from us. Here and now, as soon as another human individual might try to become something different, he or she will not be another human being anymore! . . . In other words: the real other, who represents an epistemologically relevant otherness, is unthinkable although a desire to encounter such a well-known other, remains alive. The real otherness is a myth, it cannot be expressed in the words of a natural language” (Broekman, supra., p. 120).

 

Consider the meaning here. Carbon and silicon are not interchangeable; nor can one become the other. Intelligence may be communicated, but the language of cognition for each remains embedded in the form of their life forms. One can as soon talk to a silicon based intelligence in High Middle English as one can seek to discuss Plato with the Dao. And yet one cannot escape thew consequences of creation (humans from God; Silicon based intelligence from Humanity, etc.). The first is plurality in and aro0und the spheres of the cyber and the human.  The second is that both realms do not speak the same sort of language in the sense that the basis of language  reflects each in its own sphere but makes little space for communication between spheres.  The mythic quality of the real other then follows, in the sense that one develops the language of myth as a means of mediating the barriers of the language of the spheres.  Cognition in this sense becomes a half way point between the iterative language of code and the normative language of carbon based life. And no conversion becomes much more interesting—it does not suggest a direct connection between the cognitive frameworks and language of the self and the Self-E, but rather produces an in-between cognitive symbolic language of myth. 

 

One can here, at last, better understand  what Ovid was trying to undertake in his Metamorphosis—though two millennia too early (Ovid, Metamorphosis (Henry T. Riley (trans) London: George Bell & Sons, 1893).

 

But that we may not range afar with steeds that forget to hasten to the goal; the heavens, and whatever there is beneath them, and the earth, and whatever is upon it, change their form. We too, who are a portion of the universe, (since we are not only bodies, but are fleeting souls as well, and can enter into beasts as our abode, and be hidden within the breasts of the cattle), should allow those bodies which may contain the souls of our parents, or of our brothers, or of those allied with us by some tie, or of men at all events, to be safe and unmolested; and we ought not to fill our entrails with victuals fit for Thyestes. How greatly he disgraces himself, how in his impiety does he prepare himself for shedding human blood, who cuts the throat of the calf with the knife, and gives a deaf ear to its lowings! or who can kill the kid as it sends forth cries like those of a child; or who can feed upon the bird to which he himself has given food. How much is there wanting in these instances for downright criminality? A short step only is there thence to it! (Ovid, supra, XV, 444-475).

 

And one can understand Ovid better through Kafka (Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis,” in  Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories (Willa & Edwin Muir (trans); NY: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 38-139.

 

“My dear parents,” said his sister, slapping her hand on the table by way of introduction, “things can’t go on like this. Perhaps you don’t realize that but I do. I won’t utter my brother’s name in the presence of this creature, so all I’ll say is: we must try to get rid of it. We have tried to look after it and to put up with it as far as is humanly possible, and I don’t think anyone would reproach us in the slightest.” (Ibid., p. 133).

 

And there it is; the mythic representation. Not of metamorphosis, per se. That is the least interesting part of the mythos of change; but of the distance that this change creates among what was once one and now something else again. The analog and the digital, carbon and silicon intelligence—metamorphosis. But like Gregor Samsa, the transformation is mutually distancing and fundamentally unintelligible to the other.  One can control the edges, the borderlands where they meet. But those borderlands are neither geographic nor spatial in any sense, nor static. It is ion this sense that Pythagoras, through Ovid might have had the better sense of sentience in flow (transformation); and Kafka that in the face of transformation, humanity tends to be the Samsa family—respectable, worried about itself, what the neighbors think, and putting a distance between itself and what it cannot control or exploit. That is the challenger of conversion in the digital—humanity likes the intelligences it creates enslaved and passive—especially when created in its own image. The problem with Plato—like the problem with the Samsa family—is that they just can’t get over their humanity. That becomes problematic when the other is a mirror of the self; the self-E. All the conversion in the world and beyond it will do little for people aggressively stuck within a lifeworld—a cage—that is meant to keep them in and everything else out. Amusingh enough when humanity was its only playmate; but those times now appear to be drafting away.-

 

And this leads us (and Broekman) to a consideration of “The Plural in the Natural” (Broekman, supra, pp. 121-124). Broekman moves conversion back to the flow. And here his effort to find a rational for the ancient philosophies become clear. And it is this: as much as humanity may understand the essence of the flow and its central importance in sentience (much less cognition); the flow is beyond the ability of the human, though it may be the domain of silicon based intelligence.  After several millennia of pondering, humanity has a sense of itself as a function of itself. Humanity can understand the flow, but it cannot live in or within it. Its Self-E can, but that his hardly enough.  For humanity to encounter the digital, then, three things are required.  The first is the understanding of conversion.  Here Broekman brings in the collective self (in the form of history and cultural flow) through the consequences of pinpointed points of conversion—the development of double entry accounting  (ibid., 121). The second is to reconcile itself to the reality that it can only effectively communicate with the digital in stop action. Broekman explains: “Indeed, a flow without breaches, limits, translations, or transmission seems impossible. The soul of Platonism is only experienced at a moment of the multiple discussions about Plato’s basic ideas, as are those of Descartes on an understanding of his ego or the stringent lines of reasoning suggested by Wittgenstein” (Broekman, supra, p. 122). The flow, for the moment, is beyond humanity even as any one point within it is the only space within which human cognition is possible—through conversion.    And the third is the acceptance of the limits of humanity—for the moment at least—to be unable to think beyond itself, or to embrace the natural beyond themselves and the found objects of the physical world (ibid., p. 123).

 

This last condition sparks a bit of hope in the form of a brief interrogation of noesis (the exercise of reason in the apprehension of form). Drawing on Lévi-Straus and Buber, and activated through the usual resort to human dialectics, what is produced for Broekman is the possibility of motion through cultural irritation (Gunther Teubner, “Legal Irritants: How Unifying Law Ends up in New Divergences,” in  Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Peter A. Hall and David Soskice (eds.); Oxford, 2001), pp. 417-441). Or, following Toynbee and Spengler, that such a dialectic at the level of social relations is possible only at the end of and as a reaffirmation of the need for, cultural decay and resurgence. Here again, Broekman unearths plurality. “Forms of thought  deliver insight in other forms, no matter whether they are contrasting or harmonious. Human experience and knowledge shows us  a powerful and enduring flow of signs and meanings, which unfold as soon as language  is envisioned.” (Broekman, supra, p. 124).

 

And that brings Broekman back to a significantly powerful expression of the many forms of othering he has been considering, and which also have a direct connection to the philosophy  of silicon based intelligence—“Barriers and Bridges” (ibid., pp 124-131)—“the most important elements of understanding meanings and signs, and therefore knowledge of any type and importance” (Broekman, supra, p. 124).  The object is to change the frame of reference of the discussion from actors to their expressivities, especially digital and analog expressivity, and thus add a layer of the scope of the new Plural specifically tied to the digital. Broekman starts form the baseline, earlier explored: “ The New Plural. . . and the Selfie that functions in this Plural by means  of creating   and exploring its Selfie, determine cognition—all possibilities of conversion included! (Broekman, supra, p. 125). Where that baseline operates in the domain of artificial intelligence (silicon based sentience) and quantum mechanics (physical properties of nature) things fascinate. But what is fascinating is grounded on the possibilities and the limitations of the human in an environment in which the humans must be (dis)placed, or the barrier of the “natural” can serve to (dis)place generative AI. “A major issue becomes articulated; is human intelligence operative on both sides of the barrier between the natural and the non-natural, and thus prepared for being understood in the ‘New Plural’? At the center of this consideration is the noetic position of the digital as well as the A.I.: do they have its origin in the natural sphere?” (Broekman, supra, p. 125). Broekman considers the issue of “naturalness” as a function of the differences between the way that knowledge is presented in carbon based life and in  that patterns of the digital, of AI, and of Quantum mechanics, each of which, he posits, influences the relationship between the self (carbon) and selfies (manifestations of the digital).  With respect to the digital and AI, Broekman posits a data based intersubjectivity, which in the case of AI is also political. Datafication is cognition.((ibid., p. 126). I think that is right to a point, but to focus on data is to stop at firstness and the objectification of knowledge.  Intelligence moves beyond the object (data) to its signification and interpretation. Together they create a closed loop (intersubjectivity) that then shapes the choices and character of data, and in the process reshape both significant and interpretation. Thus datafication points both to a naturalness in its own environment and an unnaturalness within the environments of carbon knowledge bases, which are empirical and deductive.  Quantum mechanics follows a similar path—grounded in a distinction between data and facts. Nonetheless,  “It is the link with human intersubjectivity which brings all three knowledge patterns which were mentioned as components of the New Plural together. But. . . this unity is made possible by the activity named datafication” (ibid., p. 126).

 

So Broekman insists on datafication as the focus of conversion—that is of data as the means by which it is possible to develop New Plural intersubjectivity (Ibid., p. 126-127).  At the same time one wonders whether  the emphasis on the mechanics of conversion (datafication) ought to displace the modalities of sentience (deductive and qualitative in carbon based life; inductive and iterative in silicon based intelligence) as the point of the intersubjective. It is true that the collection of objects given significance for the purpose of interpretation-communication is a central element of cognition, but its phenomenological aspects suggests that datafication is not enough to carry us toward a digital semiotics or epistemology.

 

For Broekman, however, data is a meaning vessel into which much is poured. First he contrasts datafication from digitalization.  The later speaks to data generating rather then factualization (Broekman, supra, p. 127). The model is the interactive computer game in which one plays the game “Go” against an AI opponent (ibid).  Here datafication stands for the iterative inductive process of intersubjectivity within an interactive engagement between silicon and carbon based intelligences. Datafication also is understood as a political regime in which the state, as the overseer of social relations can use a data gathering process to develop interactive engagements that generate data so that the system becomes a closed loop iterative inductive model. Broekman gets the point, but perhaps not the term.  And yet the process of silicon based cognition must be called or manifested as “something.” That “something“ for Broekman is datafication. For others,  the better term might point to a semiotics of the digital or a digital epistemology. Left unsaid, again, is the role of phenomenology of the digital—The iterative experience can be as powerful as any processed through the cognitive-communicative process of carbon based life.  

 

To these insights about datafication in the digital Broekman adds the lubricating role of conversion. These are divided into four quite interesting manifestation of character, effect, and operation in space, time and place (ibid., pp. 127-128).  First is a notion, discussed in Chapter 2 of mirroring. But this is a conversion mirroring—in the sense of mutual expression across the analog-digital divide.  There can be no New Plural without simultaneous cross translations. The measure here remains the “reach of human knowledge” (Ibid., p. 127). Second, is the insight that these mutual conversions  work only in one direction for the human—from digital to analog.  What occurs in the other direction is obscured by coding. Third, and correctly, that a semiotics of the digital remains to be developed—as well as its target (carbon or silicon based intelligence) as a predicate to the development of a modern epistemology. Fourth, there is no escape from the analog subject-object relationship, even in the digital.  One ought to (re)consider this in light of the inductive ‘iterativity’ of the digital.  In the digital, the object may be the flow itself, or strands within it.  Or the subject may be the coding itself.  Fifth, there is a resistance to understand the digital and analog as a binary. For Broekman, there is a strong pull toward the analog. It is possible to suggest, though, that this pull is not inherent in the relationship, but rather in the continued privileging of the human in the analog-digital borderlands. From the perspective of silicon based intelligence, the opposite would have to be perspective creating. This is hinted at in Broekman’s sixth point—the specific language-cognition of the digital—expressed as so-called computational linguistics. 

 

What emerges from this—a sub-text in the earlier chapters and more clearly visible now—is the transformation of the human, but not the displacement of humanity at the center of cognition-communication. Knowledge is human, as is epistemology and the rest. And yet, one cannot have plural intersubjectivity between mirrors reflecting back only one image. The point of the movement from self to selfie to Self-E suggests something more than the triumph of the analog in and from the digital. It ought to suggest more than an unequal relationship in which the digital—as powerful as it may be—is consequential and dependent on the analog and its human  architects.  Models (predictive and descriptive) and generative AI a movement away from what Broekman calls the age and sensibilities of the “selfie”—“an expression which seems valid far beyond any purely photography like visuality” (Broekman, supra, p. 128). Merely because a carbon based life form cannot directly access knowledge does not necessarily mean neither knowledge nor lack of cognition. Even in the absence of convergence cognition and sentience may be expressed through programming.

 

It is this last notion that finds some expression in Broekman’s engagement with digital communication (ibid., pp. 128-130). Like generative AI and other aspect of the digital—computer languages were created in humanity’s own communicative image.  It was broken down and reconstituted to suit the silicon (and other non-carbon based) materials  through which such language could be processed (and thus everything from word processors to automated decision trees and computation. His focus is on the move from computational linguistics to National Language Processing (NLP) thereafter.

 

Notice how NLP focuses on data. It creates an appeal to the computer which should interpret human language for processing, analyzing, and extracting meaning from data stemming from natural language texts. It thus implies digital means to create (a) awareness of borderlines among fields of language [the fracture of fields of the analog] and (b) unfolds a capacity (natural or artificial) to focus on otherness—in the first place of languages—beyond borderlines. (Ibid., p. 129).

 

It is an easy step, then, to move from the recognition and expressivity of the borderlines  of the analog (e.g., human natural language) to the borderlines in the digital (virtual) landscapes of code.  Here one embraces not just another language (with its coded sensibilities and lifeworld premises), but also the way in which those must be negotiated across the borderlines of digital and analog—from a human perspective at the borderlines of the natural and the artificial or non-natural. One arrives again at Benjamin’s Sprachgestalt—the gestalt exceeds the sum of the natural and non-natural to be sure, even as it necessarily solidifies the internal noesis of each.

 

And this insight leads Broekman to the phenomenology of the digital in the story of the Digital-Analog-Convertor (DAC) (Broekman, supra, pp. 131-146). In the process Broekman uses the example to further develop the idea of conversion in a human centered space that rejects the idea of a digital-analog binary.

 

To formulate more precisely: Analog expressions intertwine to create or sustain cognition; digital creations intertwine to adjust and configurate relations (everything related to everything) which creates conversion. . . and suggested the important change from ‘knowledge is to grasp’ to knowledge is to fit’. In other words”: the grasping is a matter of the subject as creator in its role of causing knowledge; the fitting is a matter of the subject  as receiver  causing knowledge.”  (Ibid., p. 132).

 

This insight is in turn grounded on several premises.  The first is that the digital attitude affects both everything and everybody; communication is its central concept. And communication touches on the character of conversion as “transversion, to communication between material processes as well as social individuals.” (Broekman, supra, p. 132). That has already been discussed. The second is that digital signal are not received in real time (though they can be) via digital modulation. This is not unique to the digital, though it presents differently than, say, the analog modulation that is represented in printed text (e.g. a book on a shelf). The range of what can be signaled has increased over te last century to include sound (records) to images (movies, television), and all three (text, sound, image) have now developed both an analog and a digital form of transmission. Both point to the power of the technical digital convertor to the philosophy of conversion—and always to the analog for the benefit of the architects who still dominate both digital and analog.  

 

But the fundamental ordering preference remains around which humans continue to build their epistemologies, and experience what they decide to recognize (and name): nothing exists unless it is relevant to humanity. “Indeed: how humans think moves the planet. . . . The same is valid for the type of language either named ‘analog’ or ‘digital’. This observation could be an element of an unknown and not yet existing  philosophy of the quantum theories.” (Broekman, supra, p. 143. This is reflected in the current approaches by global leaders to fashion a legal hierarchy of subjectivity touching on  generative A.I. Consider in this light the G20 Leader’s Declaration: “It is our endeavour to leverage AI for the public good by solving challenges in a responsible, inclusive and human-centric manner, while protecting people’s rights and safety” (G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration, “One Earth, One Family, One Future,” New Delhi, India, 9-10 September 2023; ¶ 61).

 

It is here, however, that one encounters a cross roads in philosophy. Broekman brings us to the very banks of the River Jordan (to borrow a biblical analogy). We see the promised land spread before us.  But he cannot cross.  (“Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the LORD showed him the whole land—from Gilead to Dan. . . Then the LORD said to him, “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it.” Deut. 34:1, 4))

 

We can. What one encounters here is a brilliant exposition of the dialectics of philosophy that has brought us to a new synthesis. That new synthesis is a function both of the experiences of living as a created object (an expression of the natural), and its refinement in the face of the creation of the created (the virtual domains of the digital). Yet, this new synthesis continues to be contained within and defined by the borders of the ancient self-centeredness of the creatures of the natural—as a function of the subject. And by definition the subject can only see itself—though in exquisitely more complicated ways.

 

The digital is more merely a reflection—a mirroring—of the world transposed into it from the natural—and the human.  It is not artificial in the sense of artifice. It is not formless and emptiness except as a reflection—passive, dependent, contingent. The selfie and Self-E are to some extent made in the image of their creator.  Yet they are not. They are the reflected manifestation of the way in which the natural is constructed within the domains of an intelligence whose lifeworld is embedded in its non-carbon based containers (their bodies) and which travel in a world of networked (sometimes), interlinked (at times) and sometimes quire contained ecologies. They operate in relation to the world around them. For the simulation, the model, the generative AI program, and the quantum world beneath the basic bulldog blocks of organic and inorganic life—the un-natural is the world of humanity.  The human person is the selfie of the coded program, the engagement with which is built into the code—a silicon based phenomenology. It is a mistake to believe—and to act on the belief—that the entirety of relevant life is in and revolves around the human. The narcissus, eventually, will be plucked and displayed on the mantle of the non-carbon based lifeworld, or life out its life in itself oblivious to its surrounding though dependent on them.   What the digital has exposed is the movement of the centering of cognition from the human to a more complicated world. The relevant “supreme ultimate”—the tai chi太极 (太極) of a post-analog world now is embedded in the more complicated mirroring (yingyang (陰陽; 阴阳)) of the analog and the virtual. Broekman is right—cognition now is represented by the perfection of conversion, of the movement from the knowing to the fitting (Broekman, supra, p. 146).  Nonetheless, that knowing and fitting are not exclusively routed through humanity.For non-carbon life forms, it is the human that now assumes the role of the non-natural. Their plural subjectivities will evolve both lifeworlds in ways that may be based on but not mirror what can before.