Jan-Boje Frauen

This essay analyzes Anthony Burgess’s “answer to Orwell” in his 1962 dystopia The Wanting Seed. It claims that the cyclical dynamic of liberal, oppressive, and conservative phases that critics have traditionally taken to be Burgess’s anti-Orwellian philosophy of history is balanced in the novel by an alternative picture of perpetual war, which may even be seen as the beginning of the Orwellian end of history. The text overlays these two interpretations, and it is not possible decisively to favor one over the other. The protagonist’s final existentialist insight is that we must “try to live” whatever world and history it is we live in.

In 1949, George Orwell had suggested that the dystopian course of history was to subject the manifold to control, that order was going to get imposed upon diversity, unyielding and merciless, final order even. In 1978, Anthony Burgess answered with the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy, objectively a measure of disorder and subjectively a measure of ignorance, is endlessly bound to increase. Instead of ending in the Orwellian "Singularity" of total control, history is bound to dissipate into Chaos that defies sense and meaning.

Wherever organisms engage in internal sign processing to represent and respond to their environment, subjective awareness and agency emerge. Through connectivity, they form structures from which “super-agents” with higher levels of awareness and agency can emerge. An increase in subjectivity is thus congruent with an increase in the processing of the physical world through animation. If there were a final end to the increase of agency and awareness in freedom and consciousness, this absolute would fully reflect physical causation in itself. In this picture, subjectivity is thus compatible with physical determinism and yet substantial because it posits causation as much as it is made by it.

This paper attempts to show how the inherent structure of human becoming is evolutionarily determined to work toward a “meta-system transition” to a higher order of control with a growing risk of extinction as humanity approaches the “event horizon.” The “double helix” of progress technological and social caused manifold cultural surface structures according to the law of increasing entropy, which, however, are mechanically determined to reunite following the same law. Separate individual centers of cybernetic processing thus gradually turn themselves into discursive (“neural”) units, possibly collapsing into a super-conscious single will once information transmission in the network reaches a certain density and noise decreases below a certain threshold.

This article brings together transcendental philosophy, biosemiotics and quantum mechanics to derive a unified theory of biological, sociocultural and cosmological evolution. It is argued that all three of them are characterized by the evolution of emerging subjectivity from the objective world following a natural law of emergence. The determined final end of causation, it is argued with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Willhelm Joseph von Schelling and John Archibald Wheeler, is to posit its own creation in observation.

This paper analyses human connectivity as a process of semiotic emergence guided by semiotic scaffolding. In its first part, it is discussed that emergence comes at a cost: the internal Umwelten and external environments of individual agents must be tightly scaffolded by the super-structure to emerge a higher order of semiotic freedom. The second part examines how the emerging scaffolding has its roots in the individuals’ agency but is joined by downward causation through institutions historically. It is argued that the Internet has the potential to structurally increase institutional scaffolding manifold. In an environment augmented by the virtual and in Umwelten shaped by it, entropic behavior of individual agents becomes subjectively inconceivable and objectively impossible. In the third part, it is argued that through the emerging intersubjective Umwelt, a new “interface” develops for the individual to connect to the outside. Internally, this “interface” scaffolds the individual for the super-structure. Externally, it can be seen as a “meta-membrane” for an emerging super-agent. Its semiotic freedom and subjectivity go beyond what an individual human being can experience. In return, the tightly-scaffolded Umwelt and environment of individuals in this condition might lead to a transition in the workings of individual consciousness. In super-connectivity, the temporal “person” might become a tool that is no longer needed in intersubjective interaction. However, this would neither entail a loss of conscious experience nor of subjective uniqueness.

This article starts from the observation that the self (“I”) appears to be a kind of singularity. It is something that information collapses into. Following this thought, this paper presents the unconventional interpretation of the singularity metaphor as newly emerging, higher-order subjectivity. Its goal is to inquire into the cognition of the emerging higher-order subject and the change in individual units’ subjectivity caused by the transition. First, it asks what kind of superintelligence would emerge in a singularity interpreted in this way. This is important to consider, because it is not all that clear what “superintelligence” means if one goes away from defining it by the complexity of algorithms and lays the focus on subjectivity instead. Then, the paper looks at the individuals that constitute the emergence of superintelligence. First, it analyzes what it would take for human connectivity and intersubjectivity to increase to a singularity threshold. Building upon this, it attempts to analyze how superconnectivity might change the individual agents involved in the process. The thesis is that the extended spatiotemporal perspective of the super-agent is bought by decreased individual self-awareness.

Abstractabstract:This article examines the connections between social perfectibility and individual identity through George Orwell's famous non-place "Oceania" in 1984 (1949). It is argued that "Ingsoc" Party members see reality filtered through "collective solipsism," which is a mirage that is superimposed upon the material state of affairs in individual perception by the augmentation of every individual's environment with constant feedback from the social superstructure. Thus, perceptions, memories, and possibly even personalities are constructed situationally as fit for the superstructure. Due to the constantly intensifying regress of cognitive and material enabling factors, this "collective delusion" will detach itself from the material realm completely in 2050 when individual consciousness fully dissolves into Big Brother's super-mind. 1984 thus depicts a dystopian-utopian, "blackwhite" society on the "event horizon" to a "singularity," which will emerge when the state or collective becomes an absolute and no traces of private life remain.

This article argues against scientistic arguments of the redundancy of religious belief structures due to the explicability of the physical world, as exemplified here by a discussion of the “popular science” of Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss. It is claimed that the root of belief in “sense” is in animation, rather than in cosmological creation myths. The paper displays that the ideal of the absolute is linguistically signified by the termini “survival” and “freedom” in human understanding. However, it does not appear through human understanding as an illusion stemming from the illegitimate inference of a pantheistic spirit or prime mover. Instead, human reason builds an analytical understanding upon a fundamental instinct, which long predates human-level consciousness. Approaching the subject’s role in the physical world, the article displays that animation itself, as the primal form of awareness and agency, is the urge to overcome an inherent antagonism in the structure of being. It is argued that the cosmological argument is mirrored by an argument that has no strict theoretical cogency, but is likewise irreducible and irrefutable by science. Science investigates the object empirically but has limited explanatory capabilities when it comes to subjective being.

This article argues that the first-person narrator and antihero of Anthony Burgess's famous dystopia is far from being the symbol for human freedom he has traditionally been taken to be. Quite the opposite, he is to be seen as a symbol for human “self-imposed nonage” at every point of the novel: from his alleged rebellion to his farewell to rape and aggression in the final chapter. All of his apparent acts of freedom are determined by the dynamic interplay of biological disposition and political exploitation. Burgess's theory of freedom, however, is more sophisticated than Alex's “turnspit freedom.” It is displayed in two minor characters, F. Alexander and the prison chaplain, modelled on Burgess and his cousin the Catholic Archbishop George Dwyer, respectively, who display “political awareness” that leads to decisions based on informed judgment.