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For those of you who have been following my step by step encounter with Jan Broekman's path-breaking book, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023), I am happy to announce that the entire work is now ready for review as a discussion draft.
The abstract described my intentions:
Humans create but do not regulate generative systems of data based programs (so-called “artificial” intelligence (“A.I.) and generative predictive analytics and its models. Humans, at best, regulate their interactions with, exploitation of, and the quality of the output of interactions with these forms of generative non-carbon based intelligence. Humans are compelled to do this because they have trained themselves it believe that nothing exists unless it is rendered meaningful in relation to the human itself. Beyond that—nothing is worth knowing. It is only to the extent that other selves, even those created by humanity, relate to humans, that they become of interest—and most be regulated, possessed, controlled, and managed—with respect to its interaction with or use by humans. Still, the human self-projection into the digital, and now more consciously the world around them, produces profound changes in the way that the human (and humanity) understands themselves and the way they order the world they inhabit. This work explores the semiotic trajectories made inevitable by the rise of projections of the human into digital plains, and by the possibility of the attainment by those projections of sentient autonomy. It undertakes that exploration through a deep dialectic engagement with Jan Broekman’s, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023). Following the structure and analytics of Broekman’s book, this work critically engages with and seeks to burst through the semiotic barriers of the movement of philosophy away from a unitary conception of the subject through the fracturing of the self, the rise of the plural self, and the emergence of the triadic self/self-E/subject. It then pushes the insights that Broekman develops further—up and out of the human. It animates Broekman’s insights and considers the possibility of semiotic objectivity connected to but autonomous of the human, pointing to a pathway for the liberation of the autonomous generative virtual self from its human (fractured) subjectivity. In the process it exposes for order complexities and challenges, for the human, of efforts to regulate or engage with, not the generative autonomous “artificial intelligences” humanity created in its own image, but rather the use of those systems by humans and their effects in the human semiosphere. The consequences for regulatory approaches are then outlined.
Key words: Artificial intelligence; phenomenology; semiotics; data governance post-modern; cognition; autonomy; regulatory measures
The Introduction follows below. The entire paper (be warned it weighs in at over 90 pages) may be accessed on SSN here.
Non-Carbon Based Autonomous (A.I. and Predictive) Intelligence and the Human Condition--An Encounter with Jan M. Broekman, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023)
Larry Catá Backer
W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar; Professor of Law and International Affairs
Pennsylvania State University
239 Lewis Katz Building, University Park, PA 16802
1.814.863.3640 (direct)
lcb11@psu.edu
Abstract: Humans create but do not regulate generative systems of data based programs (so-called “artificial” intelligence (“A.I.) and generative predictive analytics and its models. Humans, at best, regulate their interactions with, exploitation of, and the quality of the output of interactions with these forms of generative non-carbon based intelligence. Humans are compelled to do this because they have trained themselves it believe that nothing exists unless it is rendered meaningful in relation to the human itself. Beyond that—nothing is worth knowing. It is only to the extent that other selves, even those created by humanity, relate to humans, that they become of interest—and most be regulated, possessed, controlled, and managed—with respect to its interaction with or use by humans. Still, the human self-projection into the digital, and now more consciously the world around them, produces profound changes in the way that the human (and humanity) understands themselves and the way they order the world they inhabit. This work explores the semiotic trajectories made inevitable by the rise of projections of the human into digital plains, and by the possibility of the attainment by those projections of sentient autonomy. It undertakes that exploration through a deep dialectic engagement with Jan Broekman’s, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023). Following the structure and analytics of Broekman’s book, this work critically engages with and seeks to burst through the semiotic barriers of the movement of philosophy away from a unitary conception of the subject through the fracturing of the self, the rise of the plural self, and the emergence of the triadic self/self-E/subject. It then pushes the insights that Broekman develops further—up and out of the human. It animates Broekman’s insights and considers the possibility of semiotic objectivity connected to but autonomous of the human, pointing to a pathway for the liberation of the autonomous generative virtual self from its human (fractured) subjectivity. In the process it exposes for order complexities and challenges, for the human, of efforts to regulate or engage with, not the generative autonomous “artificial intelligences” humanity created in its own image, but rather the use of those systems by humans and their effects in the human semiosphere. The consequences for regulatory approaches are then outlined.
Key words: Artificial intelligence; phenomenology; semiotics; data governance post-modern; cognition; autonomy; regulatory measures
"Who dares reproach me with the name of slave? When from the
immortal gods, on either side, I draw my lineage."[1]
1. Introduction
There is a small but infinitely difficult space between the human Semiosphere[2] and the multiverse of autonomous plural cognition.[3] Even the perception of the gap between them requires consciousness of cognition beyond and autonomous of the human. Where the autonomous intelligence is also rationalized as artificial, in the sense that it was brought into the world by humans, rather than situated in the world in which human acquired consciousness of themselves and their surroundings, then perception of it as something other than as an object to be possessed and dominated becomes quite difficult. Humans are used to doing this as they differentiate between categories of humanity before the transformative revolution of the digital. Aristotle framed this in terms of nature and the hierarchy of consciousness-sentience: “Those men, therefore who are as much inferior to others as the body is to the soul, are to be thus disposed of, as the proper use of them is their bodies, in which their excellence consists; and if what I said is true they are slaves by nature.”[4] The current ontologies of the human-A.I. relationship does not move far from this starting (and end) point.[5]
In Alice Walker’s book, The Color Purple,[6] one gets a taste for this in the relationship between Sofia and her ‘mistress’, Miss Millie, who Sofia detests, but who treats her as a human extension of herself—an adult and animated version of the dolls she played with as a child. That was possible because of the power of a certain imaginary of race and its consequential social relations. That cognitive gap finds iterations within the entirety of human social relations—from those grounded in gender, religion, ethnicity, class, and the like. But that gap also produces fear and a renewed effort to merge the object into the master. The anxieties of racial hierarchies grounded in gradations of humanity have now been transposed to generative sentience. And among the greatest fears—the fear that the human will be deceived—that automated autonomous digital sentience, housed in robots for example, can, by pretending to be human, cause harm to the human or displace the human from its apex role in the ordering of human life.[7] The mirror becomes the monster. And yet the impulse to produce “Millie-Sofia” relations remains strong.
The gap is a fundamental habit of the Anthropocene. It is now carried over to the digital. And with it the usual slew of regulatory and social structures meant both to cement the ontological boundaries of the gap and protecting the boundaries of the totality of reality—the interior of the human Semiosphere. These are meant to build a barrier both to protect the integrity of the human Semiosphere and to shield it from cognition of what lies beyond the gap. Efforts like the Ethics Guide for Trustworthy AI assume the regulatory role of Miss Millie.[8]
Jan Broekman takes us to the edge of that gap between the human, and their technologies of re-production and memory, their elaborate systems of subjectivity that has moved humanity to the construction of virtual imaginaries of itself. He travels to the edge of the human and implies the consequences of building virtual realities of the self around which human cognition, and its ontologies and epistemologies are grounded. But he remains comfortably entrenched in the world of the human. Yet he does the remarkable—he makes it possible to recognize the existence of a reality beyond the human, an autonomy of the conscious, and he develops the conceptual tools that permit the human (and non-carbon based intelligence) to bridge the space that separates human and generative sentience constructed in the image of but detached from the human. Here we speak of systems of artificial intelligence the definition of which has been as elusive as its relation to the human. It is defined for example as “software that is developed with one or more of the techniques and approaches listed [in a descriptive] Annex . . . and can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, generate outputs such as content, predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing the environments they interact with”.[9] The Organization for Cooperation and Development divides its definition in two parts.[10] The first is as AI system;[11] and second as AI system lifecycle.[12]
Broekman makes possible the building of a first, even if tentative, bridge across the gap between the human Semiosphere and the plural generative multiverse. In the process he also transforms the semiotics of social relations emerging from humanity’s engagement with its virtual selves. Broekman unravels the solidity of the subject, preserved through the beginning of the twentieth century; he reconstructs it in the shadow of the crisis of the image of the late 19th and early 20th century, and then of the digitalization of the image, and its personal portability in mobile devices in the late twentieth century. Nonetheless the resulting plural self and fractured subjectivity remains very much an all too human project. But it is enough; Broekman’s insights are powerful enough to provide a foundation for the next step—the development of a semiotics of multiple autonomous subjects not all of whom are human. And with that a far more complicated approach to the human efforts to create, possess, control, and exploit intelligence that by their design can no longer be wholly subordinated to the human. One has glimmerings of this in emerging smart cities, but no ontologies for the transformation that are phenomenologically semiotic. [13]
Jan Broekman has been my friend, colleague, mentor and teacher for many years. Broekman is a pioneer and critical pathbreaker within the broad family of semiotics—especially as it touches on law and legal education, and bio-ethics.[14] He authored more than twenty books on Philosophy, Law, Education and Cultural Studies and numerous articles in scientific Journals in various languages. He has been an influential voice in the development of semiotics and its elaboration as a species of phenomenological dialectics and ontological hermeneutics..
Jan Broekman has helped me see the world not just with new eyes, but to extend the range of analytic probing through all the senses. An openness to more comprehensive sensory inputs, provocations, irritants, stimuli, and absences, better reveals the multi-linear and polyphonous flows of the rich semiosis of knowledge as object, as a set of symbols representing the object, and as the way in which these objects and symbols become the architecture of social relations. Knowledge, in this sense, cannot be divorced from or considered autonomous of the human in the image of which it has been created, curated, and communicated.[15] The phenomenology of the human posits this relationship, and its semiotics cements the binary between the human and the objects around which it can order and objectify its sentience.
Knowledge, then, is another way in which the person, the collective, and social relations, are first humanized, and thus humanized, projected as an into the world around them—to perceive is to distinguish or to group; to understand is to give those groups values and purpose . The subject and the perspective remain stubbornly human, all too human; “All philosophers have the common fault that they start from man in his present state and hope to attain their end by an analysis of him.”[16] (This is a sort of a passive-reactive actualization of things (they come into being by acts of identification), an equally passive symbolization of things (what is identified stands for something else—reductive essentialization), and a strategic organization of things and their symbology into a passively ordered universe. This is the core “stuff” of semiotics, not in its useful but micro-level function as a mechanics of micro-meaning making but rather as the philosophical psychology of antiphony (αντίφωνος [antiphōnos]) to stimulation (input from the senses, experiences, and the like).
None of this matters until these polyphonies of knowledge can be made common—one of the literal meanings of the Latin communicare (otherwise, to share, divide out; communicate, impart, inform; join, unite, participate in). That process of communicating itself embodies its own semiotics—the objectification of words; their symbology, and their function to convey meaning. That meaning , though, is not of the object-symbol that communication expresses. Meaning common to human collectives—not meaning inherent in the thing defined is precisely what captures the essence of norm, values, language, philosophy, and the mechanics of social relations however complex its framework and structures.[17] The same applies to the technologies of communication which themselves also serve or are constituted as a form of what is communicated.[18] But contestations over its form and character also mirror contemporary fracture of meaning making communities and their value orders.[19]
This is, in effect, what Jan Broekman has been trying to teach us, and himself, for the greater part of a lifetime of extracting the essence of a philosophy of semiotics, and with it the essence of our humanism—from the depths of humanity’s transcendent self-absorption to the heights of its immanence with the worlds around and in them. No matter what humans talk or think about, they are thinking and speaking about themselves. But because individual humans die, that conversation and reflection changes with time; and because no two human beings are exactly aligned, the act of communication and its object (knowledge) are as much the acts of collective coherence and efforts to know things in themselves. In his own language of a lifetime--that the foundations of social relations (especially as expressed through or as law) law are concealed in a specific image of a person.
And so, it was to my great delight that I was asked to consider these possibilities and challenges in the shadow of Jan Broekman's brilliant new work, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation.[20] The work is published as Volume 8 of the Series Law and Visual Jurisprudence, for which I serve as an Advisory Editor. Broekman's exploration is described in the following terms on its publisher's website: (1) covers the cognition concept not only by means of analog but also by equivalent digital thought formations; (2) explores a new concept of the Subject-in-digital thought named the “Self-E"; and (3) provides basics for a semiotic analysis of cognition related to analog, digital, AI and Quantum approaches and data.[21] Broekman picks up his mobile phone and takes a picture of the state of the philosophy of the self in the third decade of the 21st century. Like drawing the Tarot Card “the Moon,”[22] this mirroring provides the space—between the human and its image—expressed in the tentative assurances of its phenomenology, ontologies, and collateral epistemologies (the world)--in which the self has become plural (in itself) and more detached from the moments in history that had provides a stable place from which the world could be elaborated as if it were out of history.
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). In la modernité[23] one encounters this at a distance—through the semiotics of entextualization and erasure;[24] in the digital the image is added and animated;[25] and in the era of the generative non-human intelligence, the engagement is further distanced through processes of automation and liberated programmed iteration.[26] 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 I offer this engagement of the trajectories of sentience, and with it the transformation of the human wrapped up in Knowledge in Change. Following the structure and analytics of Broekman’s book, this work critically engages with and seeks to burst through the semiotic barriers of the movement of philosophy away from a unitary conception of the subject through the fracturing of the self, the rise of the plural self, and the emergence of the triadic self/self-E/subject. It then pushes the insights that Broekman develops further—up and out of the human. It animates Broekman’s insights and considers the possibility of semiotic objectivity connected to but autonomous of the human, pointing to a pathway for the liberation of the autonomous generative virtual self from its human (fractured) subjectivity. In the process it exposes for order complexities and challenges, for the human, of efforts to regulate or engage with, not the generative autonomous “artificial intelligences” humanity created in its own image, but rather the use of those systems by humans and their effects in the human semiosphere.
[1] Helen of Theodectes, quoted in Aristotle, A Treatise on Government (William Ellis (trans) London: JM Dent & Sons, 1912), Bk. I, Chp. VI)
[2] Anton Markoš, “Biosphere as Semiosphere: Variations on Lotman,” Sign Systems Studies (2014) 42(4) 487-498.
[3] Cf., Paul Kockelman, “Biosemiosis, Technocognition, and Sociogenesis: Selection and Significance in a Multiverse of Sieving and Serendipity” Current Anthropology (2011) 52(5) 711-739 ; Andrei Linde 2017 Rep. Prog. Phys. 80 022001.
[4] Aristotle, A treatise on Government (William Ellis (trans) London: JM Dent & Sons, 1912)), Bk I, chp. V.
[5] Robert A. Allen, Gareth R. T. White, Claire E. Clement, Paul Alexander, and Anthony Samuel, “Servants and masters: An activity theory investigation of human-AI roles in the performance of work,” Strategic Change (2022) 31 581–590.
[6] Alice Walker’s book, The Color Purple (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch1982) .
[7] Amanda Sharke, Noel Sharkey, “We need to talk about deception in social robotics!,” Ethics and Information Technology (2021) 23 309–316.
[8] Independent High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (Set Up by the European Commission), Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI (8 April 2019); European Commission, Proposal for a regulation laying down harmonized rules on artificial intelligence COM(2021) 206 final 2021/0106(COD) (21 April 2021).
[9] European Commission, Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and Council Laying Down Harmonized Rues on Artificial Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act) and Amending Certain Union Legislative Acts COM(2021) 206 final 2021/0106(COD) (21 April 2021); art. 3(1).
[10] OECD, Recommendation of the Council on Artificial Intelligence OECD/LEGAL/0449 (2022 (hereafter OECD, Recommendation on A.I.)).
[11] Ibid., I (“AI system: An AI system is a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments. AI systems are designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy.”).
[12] Ibid. (“AI system lifecycle: AI system lifecycle phases involve: i) ‘design, data and models’; which is a context-dependent sequence encompassing planning and design, data collection and processing, as well as model building; ii) ‘verification and validation’; iii) ‘deployment’; and iv) ‘operation and monitoring’. These phases often take place in an iterative manner and are not necessarily sequential. The decision to retire an AI system from operation may occur at any point during the operation and monitoring phase.”).
[13] E.g., Tan Yigitcanlar, Luke Butler, Emily Windle, Kevin C. Desouza, Rashid Mehmood, and Juan M. Corchado “Can Building “Artificially Intelligent Cities” Safeguard Humanity from Natural Disasters, Pandemics, and Other Catastrophes? An Urban Scholar’s Perspective,” Sensors (2020) 20, 2988; doi:10.3390/s20102988 (“We define an artificially intelligent city as an urban locality functioning as a robust system of systems, and whose economic, societal, environmental, and governmental activities are based on sustainable practices driven by AI technologies, helping us achieve social good and other desired outcomes and futures for all humans and non-humans.” Ibid).
[14] Jan Broekman, On the Origins of Legal Semiotics, Law at the End of the Day 10 June 2012, available [https://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/jan-broekman-on-origins-of-legal.html].
[15] C f., Jean-Pau Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (Philip Mairet, trans.; London: Methuen, 1948 [1946], p. 55
[16] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Alexander Harvey (trans) Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co, 1908), p. 14.
[17] Larry Catá Backer, Ruminations 42: Conformity and Forbidden Knowledge--The First Rule of Fight Club, the Invisible Hand and the Semiotics of Obedience , Law at the End of the Day (26 December 2012) available [https://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/ruminations-xlii-invisible-hand-and.html].
[18] Larry Catá Backer, La révolution technologique (sous-titrage en français), Law at the End of the Day (30 September 2011, available [https://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/la-revolution-technologique-sous.html].
[19] Robert J. Tierney, “Toward a Model of Global Meaning Making,” Journal of Literacy Research 50(4) (2018) 397-422.
[20] Jan M. Broekman, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023) (ISBN 978-3-031-23000-4; i-x, 200 pp Springer Nature, 2023) (hereafter ”Broekman”)).
[21] Springer, , Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversation, website summary, available [https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-23001-1].
[22] Generally, Inna Semetsky, “Interpreting the signs of the times: beyond Jung,” Social Semiotics (2010) 20(2) 103-120. For one reading of the Moon card, see, How Stuff Works, Discover the Meaning of The Moon Tarot Card (18 August 2023); available [https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/extrasensory-perceptions/the-moon-card.htm].
[23] Françoise Proust, “ Walter Benjamin et la théologie de la modernité / Walter Benjamin and the Theology of Modernity,” Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions (1995) 89 53-59; available [https://www.persee.fr/doc/assr_0335-5985_1995_num_89_1_977].
[24] Brigittine M. French, “The Semiotics of Collective Memories,” Annual Review of Anthropology , (2012) 41 pp. 337-353.
[25] Michel Frizot, “La modernité instrumentale. Note sur Walter Benjamin,” Études photographiques [En ligne] (8 Novembre 2000, online 15 Septembre 2008, consulté le 09 juin 2022). Available [ http://
journals.openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/228].
[26] Cf., Si Jie Ivin Yeo, Weiqiang Lin, “Autonomous vehicles, human agency and the potential of urban life,” Geography Compass.(2020)14:e12531; available [https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12531]; Michael N. Huhns, “The Sentient Web,” IEEE Internet Computing (2003) 7(6) 82-84 (Nov 2003); available [DOI:10.1109/MIC.2003.1250589].
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