Jakob von Uexküll lectures

Semiotics Department warmly invites you on Wednesday, 27 November, at 16:15 to Professor Kobus Marais's guest lecture, "Co-constructing the Vredefort dome? New materialism, biosemiotics, and epistemic translation". Professor Marais is from the Department of Linguistics and Language Practice at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. This lecture is part of the Jakob von Uexküll lecture series

The Lecture

If the creation of knowledge is itself a translation process, translation studies scholars need to be able to account for this process and for the translationality (Blumczynski, 2023; Robinson, 2017) that the process entails. In Kant and the platypus, Umberto Eco (1997) provides a fascinating description of the process through which the knowledge about the platypus was constructed by the first groups of Europeans to sail to Australia. Equally, Bruno Latour (1992) has written fascinating texts on the social work performed by mundane artefacts like doors. From a biosemiotic-philosophical perspective, John Deely (2009; 2014) suggests that knowledge is created through an entanglement between reality and organism, and Jakob von Uexküll (1926; 2010) argues for a functional circle through which an organism engages with its environment. The entanglement theme is taken up by new materialists like Karen Barad (2007) to argue for the irreducibility of reality, observation and observer in the knowledge creation process. In translation studies, Robinson (2017) considers the role of the socio-neurology of the brain in the creation of knowledge, and Bennett (2007; 2023) has done foundational work in setting out the parameters of ‘knowledge translation’ or epistemic translation.

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In order to delve further into this issue, I start with a description of the history of knowledge creation about the Vredefort Dome, a meteorite impact site in South Africa, using a variety of sources from the field of geology (e.g., Reimold & Gibson, 2005). I then analyse this history from the perspective of knowledge translation, bringing the scholars mentioned above into a dialogue with one another. I pay particular attention to the implications of recent work in ‘new materialism’ with the aim of synthesising the views into something like a ‘constructive realism’ or, as John Deely calls it, a ‘semiotic realism’. This synthesis allows me to consider the role that material reality (including the brain) as well as ideation play in constraining the translation process through which knowledge is created.

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Donald Favareau: “Biosemiotic General Intelligence”

After a brief period in which the early “machine learning” dream of eventually developing a human-like and even super-human-like, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) was more or less put to rest, and subsumed by the development of more targeted and less ambitious computational and robotic technologies, with the global release of Generative Pre-Trained Transformer based software such as Chat GPT and DALL-E to the public “in 2023, everything changed” in the both the professional and in the public discourses surrounding Artificial Intelligence in general, and AGI in particular, as Audi Viidalepp reveals so cogently in her recent doctoral dissertation, The Expected AI as a Sociocultural Construct and its Impact on the Discourse on Technology (2023).

As Viidalepp shows, such discourse “is saturated with reified metaphors [of anthropomorphism and technological determinism] which drive connotations and delimit understandings of technology in society” (2023: 13). Too, along with reviving ancient fears, hopes and debates on the role of “technology” in the lives of human beings, the current discourse surrounding these technologies once again makes salient the foundational biosemiotic question of “How are we to understand the nature of an ‘intelligent’ system per se?” Is it the result of algorithmic computation and stochastic probability functioning? The “imprinting of meaning” via the creation of embodied and enacted “functional circles” in an otherwise unlabeled world? Or the navigation of co-ordinates within a cultural (or even natural) matrix of possibility, actuality and lawfulness, as described by Peircean triadic sign logic?

Such questions have always been, and remain, at the heart of the biosemiotic research agenda, and in this talk, I will take the opportunity to reflect a bit on the implications that a serious consideration of the biosemiotic perspective on organismic intelligence might bring to the current discourse surrounding the possibilities and perils of AI and AGI, as they are currently conceived.

References:

Favareau, Donald and Kull, Kalevi (in press). Conceptualizing the Role of Signs and Meanings in the Biosphere: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Pathways to the Origin and Evolution of Meanings in the Universe. Sharov. A., Gordon, R., Mikhailovsky, G. and Seckbach, J. (Eds). Austin: Scrivner.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. (1857-1914[1931-1935; 1958]). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volumes 1-8. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Uexküll, Jakob von. (1926 [1928]). Theoretical Biology. D.L. Mackinnon (trans). Kegan Paul, London.

Viidalepp, Auli. (2023). The Expected AI as a Sociocultural Construct and its Impact on the Discourse on Technology. Tartu: Tartu University Press.