Digifesto

I had a wonderful time at FAccT 2026 in Montreal. I was at the first FAT* in 2018 and thought it was doing something important — creating an intellectual space for serious thinking about powerful socio-technical systems in a way that’s consistent with computational thinking. Prior to that conference, I didn’t know where to publish work along those lines. This year was my third time publishing at it, second time presenting. This year, I presented a paper that was all about causal modeling in service of privacy-by-design, which brings closure on a long engagement with trying to mathematize social norms. I’m satisfied by how we did this, and the approach is very extensible. I intend to build on it in various ways for the rest of my career.

At one moment of the conference, in one of the socials, there was a bit of a philosophical exchange. I discovered that I am not the only person in the world that subscribes to both enactivist and transcendental pragmatist principles, and in fact these approaches seemed to be an increasingly good fit for the direction of the field, though I did hear Agre and postmodernism mentioned a few times.

So, happily, I’m feeling settled in what have been my two greatest intellectual preoccupations: the question of what is true, and the question of what is right or good. Provisionally — and I suppose this sort of thing is always provisional — I feel well educated on these matters, and have tested several theories, and been wrong enough times, to have a rough idea of the right methods for approaching these problems. I’ve made a good deal of progress by accepting, with some humility, that there is maybe not so much room for innovation in these areas as one might have hoped in earlier years. The conclusions (so far) of the process of inquiry are mundane, not spectacular or ‘radical’. However, it is comforting to have greater confidence in common sense than I once did.

To try to put it briefly, I think the following is the case. We are individually and collectively alive, and this is a condition for our knowledge and relationships with others. Knowledge, and cognition more generally, is a process of adaptation whereby a living system responds to change and maintains viability over time, as it is structurally coupled with their environment. An individual’s mental habits are those that survive experience and inquiry and, above all, maintain the life of the individual. The ‘contents’ of the mental states of the individual are those representations, coupled bodily with the environment, which capture useful sensorimotor regularities of their local world. In this sense, knowledge is embodied, personal, and particular, at the individual, ‘ontogenic’ level. (This is all ‘enactivism’ in a nutshell; it is also ‘pragmatism’ in Peirce’s sense; and something borrowed from traditional philosophy of mind.)

However, no individual exists alone. We are born with chromosomes from two parents. We are raised, live, and die in society. The collective social organism is also alive, and must maintain its viability over time. The development of language, institutions, communication systems — including the legal system, property laws, and markets — are a kind of ‘cognition’ at the collective, or ‘phylogenic” level. It is at this level ‘objectivity’ is constructed; knowledge can be ‘transcendent’ of individual bodies because its meaning comes from its use in social forms. As a specific accomplishment of certain kinds of social systems, we get general representations of the world that are reliably ‘true’. And, as a specific accomplishment of certain other kinds of social systems, we can get representations of social behavior that are reliably ‘good’ or ‘right’, mainly because they interactively maintain the viability of the collective, and the individual, dependent on it, within it. Considering society decomposed into separate mutually supportive but distinctly personal spheres of activity, we get Contextual Integrity, and the implied norms of personal information flow. Considering society in its broadest sense, we get Dewey’s notions of social democracy, and ultimately Habermasian notions of legal legitimacy.

Thus construed, we have lots of room to improve ourselves in both knowledge and wisdom. This is primarily achieved by the improvement of institutions and social forms, as these are the harnesses which distinctly embodied agents create objective representations. Computational social science remains a worthy pursuit as a means to these ends. The ultimate end is survival and flourishing of humanity — one’s descendants, one’s society, one’s ecosystem — which is an intrinsic motivation which grounds the whole process transcendentally.

I’m grateful to Christoph Salge for working with me on a paper about enactivism and the legal responsibility of AI systems, which has refined and improved my confidence in these points.

The above is, I suppose, all well and good, but it’s incomplete in at least two respects, which I find bothersome. These two issues are at the heart of many of today’s deepest political conflicts, and I suppose they reflect inherent instabilities in the characterization of truth and goodness described above.

The first is the problem of tribes, or nations. Individuals can to some extent choose which collectives they are loyal to, and social collectives come into conflict. Universalist ethics are a longstanding ideal, but frequently come into conflict with particularist loyalties to tribe, race, state, etc. Some amount of loyalty to family seems essential for viability and is broadly good. When tribal conflict leads to war or subjugation, that is often not good. There is both cooperation and defection by tribes; tribal boundaries are unstable; tribes have their own local knowledge and customs and these can be in conflict with universals. A great deal has been written about this in various fields and I’m finding it so intractable that it has become tedious.

The second is the problem, or solution, of wealth. I’ll admit that I wish I had much more to say about this than I currently do. For one, while I believe I have a pretty good idea of what truth and ethics are, I do not have a similarly grounded concept of what wealth is. And yet, the distribution of wealth is the single greatest political and moral concern of our society, besides, maybe, the relations between tribes. Wealth cannot be the same thing as truth, and it cannot be the same thing as ethics — the tension between the three is obvious; and yet it seems connected to both in intrinsic ways. Some amount of wealth is necessary for the survival and flourishing of the individual and the collective. Wealth is sensitive to institutions — property and liability regimes, markets, and so on — but what makes these institutions proper or desirable? The assumptions of the prevailing theory often seem weak on inspection.

This latter issue is the subject of economics, but I have not yet been able to find economic theory that is on enactivist or systems-theoretic grounding. I have come to the conclusion that it doesn’t exist yet in a convincing or generalizable way, and it’s a problem my work is pointing at. A big methodological gap is in computational methods that are a good fit for the problem. This is what I’m most interested in advancing in the short term.

References

Maturana, H. (1988) Ontology of Observing: The Biological Foundations of Self-Consciousness and of The Physical Domain of Existence. https://reflexus.org/wp-content/uploads/oo3.pdf