We as humans have become like Alice in the wonderland of AI . AI is the new kid on the block and is all set to transform our experience of being Human. The Catholic Church approaches the AI prophetically. It does not simply offer a blind admiration nor exhibit technophobic rejection. Pope Francis invites the Catholics to develop a reception of AI based on the Gospel. This approach considers the blessings and the opportunities that this new technology is offering the humanity while critically and carefully looking at the challenges that it posses to us. The Pope teaches that public policy makers have to make sure that AI serves human solidarity and peace . The holy Father calls the global leaders to work to decease inequality and injustice that can accentuate. Pope has called for discernment and vigilance. Pope exhorts us see that AI promotes the fulfillment of every human person. If we fail to be attentive, humanity may become ‘fodder for algorithms ‘attacking human longing for communion. The technology of communication has already has person to person encounters. They are replaced by the next best things. The next best thing became the first thing and as a result, humans began to swim mindlessly in the new communication revolution with the help of the internet, laptop and the smart phone. This process will be accelerated by the rise of AI. No technology is bad. It is double aged sword. It can be used for good and evil. AI has great promises but there are also serious perils. The very name AI is posing it against human intelligence. Already it challenges human intelligence. Hence, we have the challenge not to forget it human intelligence. that produced AI. It cannot be allowed to be master but has to kept as a servant. Its true test comes in the way it will serve, justice and peace for humanity. Catholics have to remain committed to the discernment and vigilance called by the Pope Francis and work hard to see that AI does not diminish dignity and freedom. Thus, Catholicism has a positive vision of the future with the divine, human and artificial intelligence. While, we as Catholics have this challenge to think , ideate , reflect and generate an ethical, moral and faith response to AI, Here , I am interested to find a hermeneutical response to enable us to understand the worlds of AI and bring it to the service of the proclamation of the Word of God. This hermeneutical response has the challenge to go beyond the semantic hermeneutics and embrace what is called productive hermeneutics introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. But paradoxically, we have to employ language and hence mediate our thinking of productive hermeneutics with semantic hermeneutics. We begin with a general survey of AI. I do not claim that it is adequate but all the same , I assume that it will serve our purpose. Then, we try to drive our thinking towards the need of ethico-moral response to the world of AI. Next, we try to embrace the notion of figures of thought of Michel Seres. We take up the figures of thought because they enable us to think carnally or bodily. AI can break the blanket of language and affect deeply. It affect us viscerally. Figures of thought enable us to think the level that is deeper and one that involves bodily affects. Then, we take up Heuretics as taught by Gregor Ulmer. Finally, we attempt to trace how heuretics can serve the proclamation of God.
Artificial Intelligence and the Human World
AI is doing several things that humans can do. In fact that there are alarm bells run that ring to foretell that jobs will shrink in the future as more and more they will be taken by AI. They are fast replicating previously human-only skills and are simulating human intelligence. Will, they make us humans redundant. The real issue in this context is to ask: can AI take up creative arts. Can AI write a play/ drama? The first play written by AI shows that we are far away from the generation of creative art by AI. The first play written by AI is called ‘AI: when a Robot writes a play’. This has demonstrated that AI can take up previously human-only skills and competencies. The play shows that AI can develop the dialogue between two characters but offers very little for narrative and character development. The reviews of the play say that AI has not yet developed potentials to the point of human creative playwrights. But there is a growing possibility that of convergence of Art and technology.
With the growth of AI, we do not just have technology surrounding us but we are fast facing body-technology interface driven by AI. AI will elicit, produce and replicate highly sophisticated knowledge of our bodily life and health. AI is transforming our living spaces. The face recognition technology of AI is giving us new freedoms as well as rendering us vulnerable. In fact, big data analytics will know us more intimately than we know ourselves.
With the rapid growth of AI, the future is coming into our present more quickly than ever before. The Internet of things has revolutionized data collection. Everything is digitized. We are living into Phigital world. This Phigital world is Brigital. It connects. AI is going to transform the experience of the world. It will impact transportation, healthcare, manufacturing, media, customer service and education. It offers us possibilities of optimizing and hence is all set to bring efficiency, multitasking and profitability into the above ventures.
But there are drawbacks too. AI is still low on creativity and compassion. The fact that it does not make unimaginative mistakes that are characteristics of a human, AI cannot fully simulate human beings. Although AI exceeds humans in several fields. The fact that it seeks optimization and efficiency, it will not be able to fail fantastically and unpredictably as humans do.
The growing world of AI has several challenges. Privacy rights as well Human rights are going to be put in danger. Some AI enthusiasts are already proclaiming the coming of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Alarm bells have begun to ring with naysayers predicting disaster for humanity, claiming that such a superintelligence would be an existential threat to humanity. How powerful humans may use AGI does build anxieties among thinkers about the impact of technology.
Responding to the world of AI
We have the challenge to develop an ethical response to this fast-changing world. The rapid changing reality does not give us time to reflect and respond. We have to respond on our feet so to say to this rapidly growing and transforming the world. The ethical response has to generate phronesis. To come to respond emancipatively , we are challenged to embrace thinking that I call dorsal thinking.
To come to dorsality of our thinking ,we have to understand the limitations of our habitual frontal thinking and embrace integral thinking that will embrace the figures of thought taught by Michel Serres. Figures of thought belong to upstream while language and meaning belong downstream of our thinking. Figures of thought assist us to enter our thinking before thoughts are dressed in language and are abstracted from emotions and bodily content.
We are interacting with the world generated by artificial intelligence beyond the cloak of language. Our responses cannot be simply caged in language. Language seems to disembody flesh. Language territorializes and freezes our interactions with the world. There is an asemiotic dimension to our experience and response. It is bodily and sensory. We have to factor in that. We stand in-between people, things and events.
This being in-between is dynamic. We as in-between are influenced as well as we influence the reality that surrounds us. Being in-between, relationality is central to us. Our responses, therefore, are also in-between. They impact us as well as things and events. Everything breathes through relations and hence is subject to the second law of thermodynamics. That is why the disorder is everywhere. But this disorder generates order. Serres uses the notion of noise to illustrate this point. Hence, to offer an adequate response, we have to think with the figure of thought of Serres
The figures of Thought
The figure of thoughts, therefore, are not merely semantic in character. They are connecting life in all its complexity. Christopher Watkins indicates that there are eight characteristics to the figures of thought :
1. Operators: They are receiving, storing and processing information
2. Natural: They are not abstract but belong to nature
3. Inventions: They open possibilities for novelty and open new rhythms of thought
4. Bodily: they are not just mental but are carnal and connect the movements and emotions of the body
5. Narrative: they can embody a story
6. Named: they are connecting the local with the global and the general with the particular
7. Synthetic: they connect the worlds that they profess, communicate and promote
8. Living: they carry the effervesce of life
The figures of thought can provide new vantage points to invent creative and emancipative responses to the world. They invite us to focus on productive hermeneutics. We have to challenge to direct productive hermeneutics to expand rather than narrow the human experience of life. We have tried to think creatively and inventively outside the existing structures of thoughts and embrace new ways of being in the world critically and responsibly while we mediate the world of artificial intelligence. Productive hermeneutics that we are talking about is carnal hermeneutics.
The Method in the Anti-Methodology of Heuretics
Heuretics has been characterised as the other of hermeneutics which is a science of interpretation. We can derive its links with eureka, heuristics and even heresy. Hermeneutics asks, what can we make of a text? Heuretics asks, what can be made from the text? This is why we can place it within the hermeneutics of production .Hermeneutics gained popular currency while Heuretics is still in the waiting queue. Here we shall try to understand what is heuretics and try to unearth how it can enable us to understand and respond to the cyber world. Heuretics strives to use texts generatively. It is inventive in nature. Gregory Ulmer, an American thinker has elaborated it in his books, Teletheory and Heuretics. Textual production has become the goal of hermeneutics these days. In fact, hermeneutics has become a means to heuretics. Any text is germinative and productive. Heuretics depends on this potency of the text. Ulmer proposes that we need hereutics to understand and respond to the texts of the new communicative media that is based in the web.
Invention in the classical oral and print culture is an art of recalling and determining what it is that one would think or say regarding a given subject. Ulmer teaches that the grammatology of Derrida assists inventive writing. This belief enables him to move from linear discursive production of discourse to non-linear, hypertextual / multi-media production. The discovery or inventive writing is inventive in the process of writing. This means composition becomes discovery. It is serendipitous. It calls us to return to the rhetoric/ poetics. But this return is an anti-methodology. It is not concerned with critique or what could be the meaning of the existing text (hermeneutical concern). This means Ulmer does not critique ludic discourses for not being political but calls for them to invent a politics. Therefore, the principle of heuretics is not about saying what something is by saying what it is not. But by affirming heretofore unacceptable connections. This is why heuretic is heretical. Maybe we can call it her-ethical to demonstrate the unacceptable connections of the word heretical and thus manifest how we can write heuretically. Thus, heuretics takes a leap out of oneness, binaries to threes-as-excess and transcends the either/ or binary structure of our habitual thinking.
The either/ or thinking puts all our thinking to two tests to qualify to become knowledge. The first test checks whether thought is universal and the second test checks whether it is teachable. Right from the time of Socrates and Plato, all knowledge had to submit to this Phallus. Hence, often such a knowledge is thought to be masculine. Heuretics being heretic and being her-ethics does not Oediplalize to the phallus of either/ or thinking. It stays generative, inventive and productive by negating the principle of contradiction and thus it makes room for the return of the excluded third… fourth… fifth… This means hereutics as taught by Ulmer is unaccountable and as such is an anti-methodology. But in the very unaccountable position, we can find accountable. This is why we can trace a method in the anti-method of Ulmer’s heuretics. Hence, we find an acronym CATTt to stand for his anti-method:
C = Contrast (opposition, inversion, differentiation)
A = Analogy (figuration, displacement)
T = Theory (repetition, literalization)
T = Target (application, purpose)
t = Tale (secondary elaboration, representability)
Contrast counters the dominant discourses. This is the first step of the anti-method. It breaks the either/ or thinking and makes a way to move beyond one (monism), two (dual dialectics) to three (trilectics) and beyond. This is further achieved by reading the discourse not at the level of its arguments but at the level of its particulars, such as its examples, analogies etc. This exercise displaces the argument. Once the argument is displaced, we replace it with an opposite argument that is also made coherent (secondary elaboration). This brings us to the step of poetising. It is the moment to say yes to the text twice. It leads to the affirmation of other connections that makes room for novelty/ third option to irrupt. This shows that Ulmer invites us to concentrate on the tropes and not on the linear logical argumentation of the text. It is in the tropes of the text that one can find ways of novel writing of the text that grammatology challenges us to do. It challenges us to say that which remains unsaid. It leads us to say the unsayable. This means it takes us away from the binaries to excess or abundance. This approach to writing is different from the protocols of normal academic writings that are linear and hierarchical.
Perhaps, heuretics and not hermeneutics will explain how we deal with the worlds generated by the internet and the AI . It is heuretics that goes beyond linearity and logicality and takes us into the non-linear trans-logical world might have the key to explain why we enjoy hopping from one site to the other on the internet. Conventional either/ or thinking cannot explain this illogical and somewhat non-cognitive behaviour. This space cannot be colonised like Euclidian topographic culture. We need a new logic that is non-linear, non-Euclidian. This new logic has to be anti-tree but rhizomatic. The old binary logic tied to either/ or thinking is simply replaced by associational networks. Therefore, it simply also replaces topos / space with Chora, the exclude one between being and becoming ( Platonic celestial and the terrestrial). This replacement enables us to view the worlds of the internet/ cyber space with the dynamic imagery of a choreography. This choreography brings us to the grammatology of the internet and AI and heuretics enables us to have an insight into what we do with the cyber world. The internet is a world of abundance and we explore its inexhaustibility until we ourselves are exhausted and consumed. This is why to respond to the dilemma, trilemma, quatrilemma of the internet, we need to adopt heuretics and find the third, fourth and fifth option that remains hidden because of our habituated binary logic of the either/ or thinking.
Heuretics and Proclamation of the Word of God
To understand the digital and the AI world we have to become electrate . It is not enough to be literate . literacy required us to become literate. Hermeneutics seem to belong to literacy. Gregory Ulmer says that we have entered the world of electracy and hence, we have the challenge to become electrate. We work with traces in the web. We are dealing signals or traces that stream at great speed in the digital world. trace makes the world of electracy. We need heuretics to deal with this pulsating world of traceology. Electracy does not come after oral and print media. It also has oral and literate worlds within it. It is, therefore, between the oral and literacy worlds. This makes greater possibilities of circulation of knowledge as a result we experience acceleration. With the coming of AI this speed will increase and dissemination of picto-ideo-phonographic texts. These text stimulate us profoundly and we cannot fully semantically understand them. Hermeneutics is on the side of what is already known. Heuretics is on the side of what can be invented. We need heuretics because the digital world exhibits the convergence words, images and sounds and hence to read, listen, view, understand and respond to this convergence, we need heuretics. Heuretics adds to the critical interpretation of hermeneutics a generative productive dimension. We need heuretics as it makes us both producers and consumers of texts of the digital world. As electrate, we have to produce and generate new understanding of the convergence of oral and visible texts in the media. This generation of the picto-ideo-phonic response will open us to new way of proclaiming the Gospel. We are continuously dished out picto-ideo-phonic traces or texts in the digital world. We can let these signs slide through point de Capiton of Jacques Lacan and we will deep understanding reality.
Within this frame work, our preaching and proclamation of the word has to become sensitive to picto-ideo-phonic signs generated by us in the internet. Now that these texts will be generated by AI, we will need heuretics to decode them. This reading leads to the return of the poetician. We need the proclaimer of to be a peotician. Poetics opens as well as elevates the meaning of a text. Heuretcs does not deal with the meaning. Heuretics is asking how was the text was made and what we can do about it. This standing that we draw out of the texts away from their semantic destinies is important because they can seduce us and we may be locked within oneclosed narration. Heuretics by marking a distance from semantic closure of the text enables us to rise above closed meaning and enter a process where the text begin to affect us. We therefore, enter heuretics and invent meanings that are never closed but always stay in the coming. We can also use AI to generate picto-ideo-phonic texts to proclaim the Word of God. This way of messaging does not just communicate to the mind but speaks to the entire body. This is why we have to introduce heuretics into our proclamation of the word of God. It will be almost like the eureka experience of Archimedes. When we activate the heuretic generator of the Biblical text, we may open ourselves to surprising meanings and orientations. We may use the anti-method of Ulmer. But we have to be cautious. We cannot go against the official teachings or orthodoxy of the Church.
In fact Jesus Christ seems to have used some kind of anti-method. Maybe we can take an instance. ‘It has been told to you tooth for tooth and eye for eye’. This is a teaching about retributive justice. Jesus seems to be putting this statement into the heuretic generator and comes up with the contrasting statement that says : ‘ but I says you forgive one another and pray for your enemies’. Let us do a thought experiment. How did Jesus arrived at this teaching? There appears to be no linear logical order of his thought. It is simply horizontal thinking in opposition or contrast to the given law of retribution.
Let us go with anti-method of Ulmer. ‘It has been told to you that it is not tooth for tooth and eye for eye’. Not tooth for tooth and eye for eye means no revenge or retribution. (C-Contrast) We might go to the next step that is using phonology (here we are dealing with simply sound connections). These are illogical. They simply resonate and come close to semantics of the statement): No tooth for tooth and eye for eye’ . May be we can read eye as I. So the next step which Ulmer calls analogy will become No tooth for tooth and no I for I (A-Analogy). No I for I could me I has to sacrifice. (T-Theory) This would also come to mean No tooth for tooth for me which means no retribution for me or no revenge for me (T-Target). We have arrived to this point not through the familiar logic of hermeneutics. We have arrived here through illogic or heretic logic of heuretics. (Often, we use this logic when we jump from one website to another on the internet). No tooth for tooth also means one who is not bold. One who has no teeth. Hence, no tooth for tooth for me. I should not be seen as toothless tiger. Hence, to have teeth , I cannot follow the law of the jungle. I am not an animal. I am an human being. If I simply follow the law of the jungle I will come up as toothless human being. I cannot animalize myself. I am not a toothless human being but an authentic human person. To be a human being, therefore, I cannot follow tooth for tooth. I have to forgive one who does wrong to me. Forgiving makes me human with teeth. It makes me an authentic human being. Forgiving and praying for the enemy makes me an authentic human being.(t-Tale) Here we have demonstrated how we can arrive at the teaching of Jesus on forgiveness by using inventive heuretics. (Ulmers anti-method CATTt).
Heuretics does not use normal deductive logic. It leaps to different orders of meanings and orientations. But these leap are not disconnected. They follows a logic of their illogic. This logic is heretic. We seem to follow heuretic mode to make sense of most things in our digital world. With the coming of AI, we will have to be even more heuretic and inventive. Heuretic is quick while hermeneutics is reflective and slow. We are accelerated by the digital media. We do not have the luxury of time. Heuretic is close to what is called thinking fast and hermeneutics may be liken to thinking slow of behavioural economics. We are on a great acceleration. Time is atomized and we are lost in its atoms without connectivity to the past or future. Atomic time is a closed now. We cannot linger in Time. Hence, we become heuretically inventive as we deal with the digital worlds of the internet. Hence maybe we have to come to now use heuretics to bring the word of God to humanity who in getting accustomed to leap through the digital worlds. Reading the signs of the times , without giving up on critical hermeneutics, we have the challenge to engage heuretics and put it at the service of the proclamation of God. But heurentics cannot be without critical hermeneutics. We have to move to heuretics only return enlightened to critical hermeneutics.
Conclusion
Our study reveals that with the proliferation of AI, the digital texts will become omnipresent. Given the speed of generation of this text, we are rendered unable to process the picto-ideo-phono texts of the digital world. We use the illogic of heuretics to cope with the digital world. Perhaps, we have to engage heuretics as a science and employ it with great caution to proclaim the word of God. Today we need both hermeneutics and hermeneutics.
