XENO-PATTERNING

Abstract

If the image of the future has already been colonized by the inevitability of a planetary automation or by the Singularity, is it at all possible to re-introduce alienness in machine thinking beyond a master pattern that knows it all? As contemporary forms of artificial intelligence such as neural nets experiment with predictive learning generating counter-factual models for what has not yet been thought, they have also become productive of machine percepts and concepts. These are not of an optical nature, but are exclusively algorithmic. However, as opposed to the master pattern of the Singularity aiming to debunk logic from thinking, this article argues that the growth of the automated network is never given: the indeterminacy of fallibility in the trial-and-error efforts to predict what has not yet been programmed – known – constantly defies the master pattern from within the system. This article draws on Octavia E. Butler’s farsighted story of Mary in Mind of My Mind as an example of the alien formation of an intuitive patterning, and of alien image-models ready to take over the transcendental schema of the Patternist.

Keywords:

• pattern
• logic
• thinking
• alien
• artificial intelligence

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Butler 186.

2 Butler.

3 The so-called technological Singularity refers to the sudden intelligence explosion of artificial systems that would continuously self-improve without any need to be programmed or understood by humans or by human methods of knowing. Kurzweil; Bostrom.

4 Sellars, Science and Metaphysics 5.

5 Ibid. 4.

6 Sellars, “Role of the Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Experience” 31.

7 Parisi.

8 From the standpoint of logical thinking, the counter-factual in general describes a conditional based upon an if-clause, which is contrary to a fact, or what has actually happened. While discussions about the counter-factual include aftermath reflections about what could have happened as an alternative to what happened, in this article’s discussion about predictive patterning this concept is rather used to refer to the computational processing of co-existing possibilities that are held in the patterning dimensions to activate non-linear modalities of decision making. In short, here counter-factuality is invested in the futurity of causality, whereby the fallibility of decision making is preserved within the formation of a hypothesis-led logic stirred by a condition of trial and error and not by the mandate of fitting proofs into truths. In particular, this view is partially inspired by David Lewis’s counter-factual theory of causation and especially his early writings and reflections on possible worlds’ semantics referring to non-actual possible worlds as real concrete entities. This article, however, does not intend to focus on the historical and philosophical theorizations of counter-factual causation. Here, the term is used largely to describe how contemporary modes of artificial intelligence such as machine learning algorithms in neural nets are adding dimensions of possible worlds that are not immediately actualized, and, I suggest, have the potential to change from within the dominant image of the network. See Lewis.

9 Kant.

10 Ibid. A101–A109; 229–34.

11 Sellars, Science and Metaphysics 3.

12 Ibid. 4.

13 Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race 59–67.

14 Dowek 44–48.

15 Ibid. 49–50.

16 One way of understanding meta-abduction is as a method that hypothesizes about unknown relations in an incomplete network and thus works to infer missing rules, unknown facts, and opaque causes. Inoue, Doncescu, and Nabeshima 241.

17 Magnani.

18 Kohs.

19 Goldin, Smolka, and Wegner.

20 Wynter, “Human Being as Noun?” 68.

21 Sabour, Frosst, and Hinton.

22 Ibid. 9.

23 Ibid. 2.

24 Ibid. 2–3, 6.

25 Whitehead 294.

26 Goldin, Smolka, and Wegner.