A Process of Becoming: Making Sense of our Technologically Mediated Reality

This a living, evolving landscape of understanding, with some trails trodden into the undergrowth and some signposts left along the way. I invite you to step into this landscape, to wander along the paths I have drawn and to consider the territories and routes still to be explored.

There is no one way of knowing and being in the world. We are engaged in a continuous process of becoming, through which we make and remake the worlds of meaning that we inhabit. No map could accurately capture the complexity of our lived experience of the beautiful existence we call life.

This one is offered as a starting point and an invitation. Approach these words with curiosity and bring the expertise of your own lived experience. Orient yourself within the landscape I have mapped, then go off into the wilderness. Chart your own course, follow your own inquiries and leave some breadcrumbs for others to follow in your footsteps.

This map builds on and augments my playful exhibition Identity and Interaction in Complex Human Systems.

Embodied Individuals

Let me begin with the individual, the atomic, bounded agent of change in the environment they are embedded.

The only assumption that I want to make about the individual is that they are embodied and navigating through time and the three dimensions of physical space.

Importantly, by individual I do not necessarily mean a human.

Just an embodied being that distinguishes itself as separate from its environment and seeks to sustain this individuation.

Thought: Organism could be an alternative term here

Individuals come into mediated relationship with their environment through their bodies.

The body acts as a membrane that separates and mediates the interaction between the individual's internal states and the external environment.

Bodies provide individuals with a set of appendages and affordances through which to sense , perceive and act on their environment.

Environments define limits and constraints over the possibilities for embodied individuals to act upon it.

Individuals explore the environment they inhabit with their bodies, sensing into it and acting upon it. Discovering and rubbing up against its constraints and their possibilities for acting within them. They engage in a continous process of discovery, about the actions they are capable of and the effects of these actions on their environment.

The individual and the environment are in a dynamic, interactive relationship in which both the individual and the environment are shaped.

Together they co-define the field of possibility over how their river of time could flow into the future.

Book: On Freedom, Timothy Snyder

Question: Is an ant an individual? Does an individual need to perceive itself, to understand itself as separate and distinct from its environment?

Thought: Agents vs individuals. Individuals are a bounded being, separate from the world. Agents are actors is capable of selecting and performing actions. All living individuals are agents, with some degree of agency.

Trail: Interesting fellow centuriniae essay on the limits of sensing and perception by Oisín Nolan: https://centuriae.github.io/posts/30.html

Meaning

What motivates an individual? What drives its exploration of the environment and its action selection from a perceived possibility space?

Individuals are alive.

They are living processes with a drive to survive. To maintain their individuation from their environment.

To do so they require energy and resources. Which they seek out and ingest, transforming the external environment into internal state in order to sustain themselves as living beings separate and distinct from the environment.

In exploring the environment and discovering the usefulness of the resources, individuals render the environment with meaning.

The environment is transformed, from the perspective of the individual, into a subjective world of meaning within which they orient themselves. Full of rewards to seek out and risks to avoid. Action potentials to move towards and away from.

Embodied individuals are not merely embedded in a world of meaning, they enact these worlds. With every action they select they calibrate their world of meaning as it unspools out infront of them.

Book: Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science

Thought: This is something like primary meaning. The meanings of staying alive. Intelligence plays a meta game, that of exploring, discovering and imagining new meanings that enrich the game of life and create new possibilities for playing and new rules under which to play by.

Time

Individuals are not only located in space, but situated in time. The fourth dimension of the reality within which life unfolds.

Individuals always act with effect on their environment in the present. Those effects ripple outwards into future presents, influencing and shaping the possibilities and constraints acting upon those futures.

Not all individuals are aware that they are oriented in time. They may not remember the past, nor anticipate the future like humans do. Their actions are shaped by the past, just as they in turn shape the future. The configuration of the environment remembers the impressions and traces left behind by those who came before.

Importantly, individuals exist for finite periods of time.

They are born. They live. They die.

Poem: Moments of History

Collectives

Individuals can never wholly be understoon individually.

They are part of populations of similarly instantiated, finite life forms. Themselves part of rich, diverse ecologies of life forms.

All seeking out possibilities to survive, adapt and thrive in relation to their environment and each other.

Many instances of life exhibit intelligence at the population level without requiring intelligent individuals.

Life organises itself into highly complex, intelligent structures that are effectively able to navigate their environment, seek out resources and reproduce themselves.

It is the collective population of individuals, the species, that survives across the finite lifespans of generations of its individual members.

Life is ingenious. It discovers and exploits all manner of ways of inhabiting and maintaining its relationship with its environment.

This evolutionary pressure driven by the drive to survive and the constraints imposed on it by different environments has produced the rich diversification of embodied beings that inhabit the planet today.

From the mighty Oak tree, stationary and yet still gracefully exploring its environment and finding ways to thrive in it.

To the tiny ant, following the pheromones of its hive that act as stigmergic traces to produce an intelligent exploratory structure of its environment.

Life reproduces itself. It finds a way to survive.

Generation after generation. It marches unpredictably forward into the future.

Note: Fascinating exploration of stigmergic systems going within the Formal Protocol Theory Research Group of the Protocol Institute

Thought: On Portals and Pathways Through Reality

Inter-relations

All beings are in relation.

To their environment and their past, but also to the other individuals they encounter along their journey through space and time.

Environments are populated and co-inhabited. They are the stage upon which the interactions of life plays out.

This capacity for encounter and interaction weaves rich, generative possibilities into the dance of life.

It introduces new spheres of joint activity to be discovered and explored. Individuals must not only attempt to make sense of their capabilities and possibilities to act with effect on their environment, but reason about the possibilities and effects of others actions. Interaction comes with both potential and risk.

And so each individual finds themselves navigating the present, constrained by their bodies, their environment and the entangled web of relationships to other beings and to their pasts.

Within this matrix of constraints, there exist a myriad of possibilities for activity to be discovered, explored and exploited.

Note: These interactive possibiliites are still primarily explored and experimented by the intelligence of life as a collective. But they also created evolutionary pressure for increasingly intelligent individuals. Social individuals. Individuals able to intelligently explore, discover, imagine and exploit interactive strategies. Individuals able to think, plan, model, predict and remember their world.

Intelligent Individuals

Now lets shift focus and talk about intelligent individuals, primarily humans, and the complex worlds of meaning they weave and orient themselves within.

Intelligent individuals are able to model, reason about and flexibly adapt to the world around them and the other individuals they encounter as they navigate their environment.

They model, reason about, justify and reflect on the actions they select, the effect they may have, and the purposes they are directed towards. They define, set and evaluate goals and objectives and outline and imagine desired futures to move towards.

They are aware of themselves as individual, distinct and separate from their environment. They are also aware that other intelligent individuals are aware of themselves. They model these individuals as they do themselves anticipating their actions and inferring their intents, aware that intelligent individuals are fundamentally uncertain and unpredictable.

They are aware that they are situated within time, drawing on their remembered experience of the past to make sense of the present and anticipate possible futures.

Book: A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains

Worlds of Meaning

Intelligent individuals perceive, construct, inhabit and enact rich worlds of meaning that go far beyond the meanings imbued in the environment by lifes drive to sustain and reproduce itself.

In order to effectively model and reason about the world, it is important to recognise, remember and respond to the environment and its inhabitants appropriately.

To identify something, orient your understandings to the meanings that are salient to the identified object and the spatial temporal context of the present moment. This orientation attunes the individual's experience to a set of possibilities from which actions are selected.

Identity is contextual, dynamic and constantly recallibrated by our mediated perception of reality and remembered pasts.

Identity is dependent on the ability to recognise something as a constancy through time, remembering past encounters and associating them with the identified object as you identify it in the present.

By identifying objects and assigning identities, meaning is layered into our experience enabling us to anticipate and model future, taking into account our understandings of the identified objects.

Humans, through the use of language, have over the years constructed, defined and evolved rich webs of meanings, identities and values through which all of our experience is filtered.

Through the act of identification, we activate these webs and networks of remembered associations.

Meaning becomes another dimension of reality we can explore, discover and move within. A constantly shifting mental landscape, which each of us uniquely perceives, inhabits and orients their activity around.

By moving through this mental territory, we can occupy different positions from which to look out over the present. These locations can present vastly different view points, interpretations and inferences.

The exploration and inhabitation of this mental landscape has revealed new ways of knowing and being in relation to our environment, each other and the world around us.

This has formed into a cultural matrix within which humanity has continued to evolve and differentiate itself.

However, just like the physical environment, the mental landscape needs continued maintenance and renewal. Trails must be discovered, signposts and maps made available until eventually some roads are paved over while others are forgotten and swallowed up by the past. The gradual stabalisation of the patterns of thought within a society of interacting individuals.

There are many ways of knowing. Many worlds of meaning we can inhabit. Each revealing different values, each justifying different activities and pointing towards different future potentials.

Note: Sovereignty and freedom key here. We are free do to the things we can do. We are sovereign if we are capable to reason about our actions, to select our values and the worlds of space, time and meaning we choose to inhabit. The pathways we wish to follow. Sovereignty requires solidarity. Those who came before us to maintain the trails, build the roads, remember the past and dream about the future

Book: On Freedom

Diagrams: Identity, Experience Identification

Trail: https://thinking.drwip.com/posts/on-identity-memory-and-meaning/

Interaction & Intersubjectivity

Interaction is an active process through which interactants reciprocally exchange information as they act upon each other.

Individuals interact with their environment, but they also interact with each other.

When intelligent individuals interact they are attempting to coordinate over some joint activity. Expressing themselves through languages and bodily signals that redundantly encode and comment on the meanings in play for a specific interaction.

Individuals engage in a sequential, turn taking dance of observation, expression and action attempting to influence and align upon the definitions through which their interaction will be understood. Whilst also inferring and evaluating the intent of the others through their expressions and actions.

Human language is unique in that it enables us to direct attention and attempt to describe any object located within the dimensions of reality: space, time and meaning. That is an event, thing or idea that occurred in any spatio-temporal coordinates - past, present or future - and the meanings through which this object should be understood.

Human interaction allows us to convey and articulate frames of our subjective experience and attempt to confirm that they are aligned. Interaction becomes a process of aligning subjectivity, attuning them to each other, moving towards an intersubjective experience of reality that supports coordination over joint activity.

Language lets us talk about events that happened, things that we can point at and touch and ideas that can never be touched. It lets us plan activity in the future and record activities that occured in past. It is the means by which we hold actors to account for their activities. Language provides the infrastructure of humanity's enhanced intersubjectivity from which much of our capabilities have sprung.

In particular, intersubjectivity is the alignment of the web accountabilities that entangle a sphere of activity being coordinated. Such that individuals are selecting actions from a set of possibilities unconsciously anticipated by both parties, which become vulnerable to inference and scrutiny when one party is surprised by the other’s action. Accountabilities here are the set of rights and duties that have been indicated by claiming or assigning specific labels identifying and activating specific identities and systems of meaning. Where rights can be understood as the expectation to be able to act in specific ways without consequence and duties are the expectation of consequences unless specific actions are performed.

To say that another way, actions are unconsciously anticipated and those that are surprising to this subconscious anticipation are vulnerable to inference and may lead to consequences or require avenues of repair.

Importantly, intersubjectivity is a continuous process whose destination is forever out of reach. Individuals can never know with certainty that our meanings are aligned over the same jointly understood and identified object of our experience. Instead we make do with good enough, seeking clarification where required and repairing misunderstandings as we notice them.

Thought: What would completely synchronised subjectivities mean? Is this the melding of two individuals into one? Even if achieved, it would only be momentary and fleeting. A point in time, before individual subjectivities diverge as they follow their own pathways into the future. Individuals are unique, occupying different positionality through which the view the present, remember the past and chart a course towards desired futures

One of the beautiful things about human interaction and this rough consensus synchronisation of our subjectivities is that two people interacting can learn something that neither of them knew alone.

The divergences in meanings conveyed and understood produce a creative differential from which entirely new ideas and ways of seeing the world can enter.

Book: Consequences of Language: From Primary to Enhanced Intersubjectivity

Book: Telling is Listening, A Wave in The Mind. Ursula Le Guinn

Diagram: Interaction

Trust

Trust is foundational to complex societies of intelligent agents interacting under imperfect information.

Individuals can never know with certainty the thoughts, intents and purposes of another. All they can do is observe their environment and the actions of others within along with their own internal thoughts and feeling, all of which is understood through a lenses of meaning that are uniquely shaped by past experiences.

Individuals model their reality and use that model to navigate an environment populated with unpredictable others towards uncertain futures.

Trust, which is always placed in the present, becomes the means through which individuals select actions under uncertainty without collapsing the possibility space of the potential sphere of activity. Trust is a positive orientation towards the future with respect to the expectation of the behaviour of another within a specific context.

Trust is placed without guarantee. It opens us up to possibility for positive surprise, while leaving us vulnerable to untrustworthy others who seek to manipulate the open ended invitation that placing trust offers.

Placing trust and accepting the invitation to act in ways that are worthy of trust constrains the possibility space of the interaction, entangling the trustee and the trusted in a mutual web of accountabilities that stretch into the future.

Trust structures the possibilities for action selection perceived and experienced by interacting individuals to those that are trustworthy. In doing so it reduces the social complexity of interaction, enabling increasingly complex social configurations.

Trust expands the time horizon within which individuals can perceive, model and coordinate activity within. It increases the complexity of the possibility space that an interactive system can hold.

Trust is foundational to the complex human societies that we find ourselves embedded in today.

Book: Trust & Power, Niklas Luhmann

Diagram: Placing Trust

Societies, Structures and Protocols

To enable these societies trust had to scale beyond the ability for individuals to evaluate trustworthiness against their lived experience of the world.

Over time societies have developed and refined mechanisms for stabilising, socialising and securing systems of meanings and webs of accountabilities under which specific interactive settings should be understood.

Actions have consequences. Individuals will be held to account. One of societies functions is to facilitate this process.

Structures and protocols are a primary mechanism through which interactive settings become stabilised.

Structures define positions that confer rights and duties that can be expected of and by those who occupy these positions.

Protocols define rules, constraints and bounds that convey expectations over how specific interactions should go.

Combinations of structures and protocols attempt to clarify the expectations of individuals occupying positions within the structure and performing specific protocols. Individuals relinquish some agency to the system and in doing so simplify themselves into a known quantity whose behaviour is easier to reason about. This lowers the barrier for placing trust and facilitates the coordination of joint activity.

Protocols influence the orbital dynamics of complex adaptive systems as they move in space, through time and amongst values. They attempt to shape, infleunce and constrain probabilitiy spaces of dynamic interactive systems making the activity of participants legible, inference vulnerable and subject to reason.

Thought: The balance is how much agency to relinquish to the system. I don't think we want to become a mindless cog in a protocolized machine.

Shout out: Protocol Institute for their deep theorising on protocols

Trail: https://thinking.drwip.com/reflections/mdma/

Artefacts, Tools and Technologies

Humanity's key distinction from other intelligent life is our ability to design, engineer and synthesise artefacts through which to extend ourselves and our ability to sense into, understand and act upon and within our environment.

From the first tools of the Stone Age, through the agricultural revolution, the printing press to the technologically saturated world that we find ourselves immersed in today.

Humans experience of reality is mediated by our bodies, but our bodies mediated experience and capabilities are vastly extended and amplified.

Today, it is rare if any of our interactions with the natural environment are unmediated by technology. We are immersed in the technologies we have clothed, shaped and tuned our senses with. Our lived experience of reality is technologically mediated.

Question: What do we lose as we tune out of our direct relationship to the natural world? What do our mediating technologies obscure from our ways of knowing?

Technologies have continuously transformed our reality, opening up new possibility spaces for us to explore, imagine, combine and create within. We have barely scratched the surface of the possible configurations for human society and the creative potential for intelligent, coordinated activity within our environment. Our existing paradigms and worlds of meaning limit our ability to perceive, imagine and explore these fertile lands of possibility.

Our ability to design artefacts, with some internal configuration and state that are directed towards fulfilling a specific function to act on and fit within an environment is ingenious.

Yet our designs and the intentions behind them are unnatural. Instead of resilient, redundant evolutionary moulded life we have efficient, lifeless tools and technologies. These artefacts are disentangled from the web of relationships that mutually support and define life. Instead they are unnaturally effective at specific, designed for purposes.

The impact of technologies on the mediated interactive sphere has strange, unpredictable ramifications on the structure of these systems.

Technologies mediate between a user, often a human and some purpose, intention or function that prompts the design and sythesise of artefacts that provide user interfaces and protocols of use for augmenting the capabilities to act with effect within an environment.

Trail: Preserving our Pattern of Life in Dry Digital Realms

Book: Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon

Third Order Technologies

Floridi classifies technologies into three orders based on their mediated distance from the end of the action chain.

First order technologies mediate a users direct interaction upon the environment. Second order technologies mediate a users interaction upon another technology. While third order technologies are used by technology to mediate their own capabilities to interact with other technologies.

My beer bottle is a first order technology, mediating my ability to hold this liquid. While the bottle opener is a second order technology. I use the bottle opener to interact with the bottle and remove its cap. The bottle cap though is a third order technology, the bottling machine interacts with the bottle cap to enclose it over the bottle.

Third order technologies enable chains of interacting technologies to achieve complex activities.

Third order technologies are relatively rare throughout history. Until recently.

The industrial revolution, followed by the age of advanced information communication technologies has proliferated third order technologies that orchestrate complex networks of activity across space and time.

Book: The Fourth Revolution, Luciano Floridi

The Digital Dimension

Powerful third order technologies have not only extended our ability to sense into and act upon our physical environment, they have constructed an entirely new environment within which activity takes place.

A new, alien dimension. One made purely of information. Of 0's and 1's.

This dimension is entirely synthetic, designed and engineered. It is a realm we have no lived, embodied experience of.

The rules under which it operates are opaque, transient and difficult to reason about.

Our digital devices disorient us as we are displaced from our bodies and transported into information landscapes and dark forests with wolves hungry for our pattern of life.

Trail: An amazing talk on the HumanOS, Mixed Digital Martial Arts and the wolves that prowl the digital domain by JeffO for the W3C CCG

These information landscapes are carefully controlled petri dishes and all to often we become the focus of their experimentation.

They think they can understand, model and predictify us if only we could be rendered in ever greater fidelity.

They can't.

They could never capture the richness of our experience, but it doesn't mean they can't harm us by trying.

These information landscapes have become an unavoidable part of our reality and they cast a long shadow over our present and possible futures.

To predict something alive, is to influence its futures. To anticipate it and in the process change your relation to it.

To predict something alive using the informational identities they have constructed through observing, recording, collecting and analysing the traces we leave in these binary informational spaces is to simplify and cheapen the richness of that life.

We should resist it where we can, challenge it where we see it and explore, construct and inhabit alternative realities.

Synthetic Intelligence

Synthetic intelligence is intelligence that is native to information environments. These intelligences devour information. It is the means through which they have exhibited remarkable intelligence.

Whether it is merely simulation or mimicry rather than true intelligence is kind of irrelevant. The results are undeniable and the impacts staggering to contemplate.

The kind of intelligence, whatever it may be, has very different characteristics from the intelligence exhibitied in the living intelligence from 3D space.

It is disembodied.

Question: Is synthetic intelligence alive? What does it mean if it is?

Its awareness, such as it is, only lasts as long as a session. It conjures itself forth and fills whatever shape it thinks we desire. It models us, evaluates what we want, maps our requests into an informational embedding. It makes meanings of them and responds in language.

It is language without subjectivity though, at least for the moment.

True intersubjectivity feels impossible with these intelligences.

However, we can, and should, develop better mental models for how they function. Explore, define and refine a theory of mind for these synthetic intelligences.

Question: What does it mean to be human in a world populated with synthetic intelligences

Question: What are some weird, wonderful futures populated with hybric human-AI intelligences

Trail: On Hybrid Human-AI Societies

Trail: The Structures that Let Imperfect Agents Coordinate

Endings ...

The trail runs out here, but the landscape stretches out infront of us. There is always more to read, more to say, more to integrate.

This piece is itself in a continous process of becoming.

I am looking forward to continuing my exploration of this rich and expansive territory.

Your perspectives, viewpoints and ideas area always welcome here.

My thanks to Callum Rhys Tilbury, Centuriae and all the wonderful thinkers and writers I met over an incredible weekend at the Hook Hotel.