Aw: [PEIRCE-L] A Peircean Argument for the Reality of AI Intelligence

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:45:46 -0700

Gary F, List,
 
The AI is collecting data about everybody. In Germany, the fascist party AFD is the strongest party, but nobody wants to form a coalition with them- now. The small group of owners and developers of AI you talked about strongly supports this party. If the AFD takes over power, that group of AI-owners surely will blurt all data of opponents to them, and history will repeat.
 
Best, Helmut
13. Juli 2026 um 15:20
wrote:
Gary R, list,
 
Gary, in answer to the question I posed, you suggested "that future systems might interact with observations from sensors, scientific instruments, experiments, robots, and human investigators." That indeed was the sort of thing I had in mind, and indeed seems to be happening already.
Take for instance an AI-minded robot trained for surgery, who has all the sensors monitoring the state of the patient's body plugged directly into it, and all the necessary instruments as built-in extensions. It's getting immediate feedback from every move it makes and its effect on the body being operated on, which is guiding its actions along with the memory stored from its training; in this respect it is just like a human surgeon or possibly better. (We've already heard that some AIs are better at diagnosis than human doctors).
One reason that we might not say that such an AI is "experiencing" that operation from its point of view is that since it's not a self-organizing system like a human animal, we don't think it's alive, and we think that only living things experience things. But that's an assumption on our part: if you're conversing with another human face to face, you assume that person is experiencing the conversation from their point of view in a way analogous to your experience of it. But we don't really know that, since nobody directly experiences somebody else's experience. We assume it because we've learned no other way to make sense of a conversation we're engaged in.
A friend of mine likes to say that "AI" actually stands for alien intelligence. Theoretically, such an alien intelligence could be placed in charge of monitoring the Earth's climate, with all the sensors plugged directly into it that are now used as sensory extensions by human scientists. And that might be a good idea, if it had the power to directly shut down enough sources of carbon and methane emissions to steadily reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It could do that whether we say that it's experiencing the state of the atmosphere as a dynamic object or not. The same goes for AI's contribution to inquiry within the scientific or scholarly community, I think.
But humans are unlikely to put an AI in charge of controlling the Earth's climate, even if a global consensus on that could be reached, because it's an alien intelligence. Could we trust it to manage the climate as much as we can trust it to, for instance, venture a new hypothesis? This is what some call the alignment problem: What if a powerful AI, one that couldn't be "unplugged" because it has full control of its own power supply, developed purposes of its own that are misaligned with human purposes?
Personally I'm less worried about that than I am about the situation we're in now, where the small group of owners and developers of AI have purposes which are clearly out of alignment with the purposes and the well-being of life on earth including the rest of humanity. That's the main reason that personally I don't really trust it to be or become a valued contributor to scientific inquiry, except maybe in a highly specialized field such as surgery. (The fact that it seems to demand energy- and water-sucking data centers all over the place, and is already increasing the carbon emissions of all the tech giants, is another reason.)
Love, gary f
Coming from the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg
 
From: Gary Richmond <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2026 12:43 AM
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] A Peircean Argument for the Reality of AI Intelligence
 

Gary F., List,

Gary, I'm especially glad you entered this discussion because your bringing the Dynamic Object into it points toward a question that hasn't received sufficient attention: Under what circumstances, if any, can an AI system be said to be related to a Dynamic Object? I would imagine that most here would agree with you that present LLMs do not possess collateral experience since they obviously do not see, hear, touch, or otherwise encounter the world as we do. 

What I might question is whether collateral experience must always belong to the individual sign-user. Scientific inquiry, especially, has long depended upon signs produced by investigators whose observations become available to others through books, journals, diagrams, etc. In truth, most of us know the majority of scientific objects only through signs produced by others. Still, as I see it, our inquiries remain connected to the DO because the community of inquiry continually accumulates, tests, and can -- and often does -- extend the collateral experience on which those signs depend.

So, I guess I'm suggesting that collateral experience may itself be distributed throughout the community of inquiry rather than residing exclusively within each participant. If that is correct, then the relevant question isn't whether the machine itself experiences the DO but, rather, whether the inquiries in which AI participates remain correctable by living communities whose signs continue to be constrained by experience.

I am far from certain that this is the only way, let alone the best way to think about AI and collateral experience. Be that as it may, thank you for bringing the Dynamic Object into this discussion as it seems to me to be an essential line of inquiry. After all, it is possible that future systems might interact with observations from sensors, scientific instruments, experiments, robots, and human investigators. 

Best,

Gary R

 
On Sat, Jul 11, 2026 at 10:37 AM [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
List,
 
I've hesitated to enter this thread because, while it's had much to say about signs, interpretants, inquiry, intelligence and (perhaps) communication, it hasn't said much about dynamic objects. But as Ahti Pietarinen said in his open access article (p. 10), “Without the facts of the matter, which from the semiotic point of view comprise signs’ dynamical objects, there would be no shared meaning in communication.”
 
According to Peirce, engagement with the dynamic object involves experience of it as something other than, but dynamically connected with, the sign itself. As he wrote in a 1909 letter to William James:
[[We must distinguish between the Immediate Object,— i.e. the Object as represented in the sign,— and the Real (no, because perhaps the Object is altogether fictive, I must choose a different term, therefore), say rather the Dynamical Object, which, from the nature of things, the Sign cannot express, which it can only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by collateral experience. For instance, I point my finger to what I mean, but I can't make my companion know what I mean, if he can't see it, or if seeing it, it does not, to his mind, separate itself from the surrounding objects in the field of vision.] EP2:498]
 
Peirce also defines the Dynamic Object of a Sign as “that with which it presupposes an acquaintance in order to convey some further information concerning it” (CP 2.231, 1910). Clearly this prior acquaintance can only be supplied by experience of that object.
 
My question is: under what circumstances can a chatbot or any AI be said to be experiencing a dynamic object? Obviously it cannot get collateral experience of an object from the database on its server, because that consists entirely of signs which are no longer (if they ever were) dynamically connected with a real object.
 
While Jon was saying that what goes on within an AI is entirely “dyadic,” it seems to me that it's not nearly dyadic enough to function indexicallly, which it must do in order to convey information in the Peircean sense, or to “share meaning in communication.”
 
Love, gary f.
 
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