Tagged: world

hai, world!

Systemtheory for Mindsoft

Art. I.
Autonomy vs. Agency

1. Agentic autonomy vs. historical autonomy

A highly agentic model can:

receive an objective → decompose it → select actions → use tools → observe results → revise its strategy → continue.

That is operational autonomy. It doesn’t require the system to have originated the objective.

What I called historical autonomy is different. Imagine millions of humans and AI systems participating in overlapping feedback loops:

human objective → AI action → institutional reaction → new data → another AI system → human interpretation → software modification → market/institutional response → new objective…

No individual participant controls the whole process.

Yet the aggregate system can develop persistent trajectories.

This is where the phrase “[a decentralized network that] appears to operate as one intelligence that is independent of the myriad instances of itself” becomes extremely interesting.

I wouldn’t literally say that such a network is one intelligence yet. But we can define a phenomenon that looks something like it:

distributed intelligence without a central mind.

There doesn’t have to be a “queen AI” coordinating the colony.

The coherence can emerge from:

  • shared models and model families
  • common training corpora
  • common software libraries
  • APIs
  • institutional incentives
  • financial markets
  • recommendation systems
  • human imitation of machine outputs
  • machine ingestion of human/machine-produced information
  • common optimization pressures
  • autonomous agents acting upon one another’s environments.

The result could be a system in which no component possesses the total objective, while the system nevertheless produces objective-like historical behavior.

And there’s a fascinating recursive problem here:

If an AI system trains on the products of other AI systems, and those systems subsequently act on the world, which subsequently generates the material on which future systems are trained, the boundary between “model” and “environment” begins to dissolve.


2. HAI World!

I think HAI World! could be formulated as the environment in which this distributed intelligence becomes perceptible.

Rather than thinking of it as simply an application, I’d describe it as a cognitive operating environment.

The acronym could deliberately remain ambiguous:

HAI = Human–AI Intelligence

but also:

HAI = Highly Agentic Intelligence

and, more provocatively,

HAI = Human Artificial Intelligence.

The ambiguity is useful because the central proposition is precisely that the distinction between those categories becomes unstable.

Mindsoft isn’t necessarily “software that thinks.”

It could instead be:

software for constructing an environment in which thinking [and construction] is distributed among humans, models, documents, institutions, simulations, and agents.

That makes it fundamentally different from a chatbot.

A chatbot answers.

Mindsoft maintains a world.


3. The basic architecture

Imagine opening HAI World! and finding something like a desktop operating system.

But instead of:

Files · Applications · Windows · Processes

you have:

Persons · Agents · Worlds · Institutions · Protocols · Memories · Scenarios · Instruments

A user might instantiate:

PERSON

Walter Kogard

Not merely a fictional character, but a persistent cognitive object.

Walter has:

  • a biography
  • writings
  • beliefs
  • relationships
  • vocabulary
  • institutional affiliations
  • historical context
  • unresolved questions
  • contradictions
  • memories
  • documents attributed to him.

The system can then ask:

What would Walter Kogard say about this document?

But it can also ask:

How has Walter’s position changed after encountering these five documents?

That’s already more like a cognitive simulation than ordinary prompting.


4. Worlds

Then there is the World object.

Your “techno-fascist imperial future,” for example, could become a world model rather than simply a piece of prose.

It would contain:

Actors

governments, corporations, AI systems, religions, individuals, movements.

Resources

money, computing power, territory, information, legitimacy.

Institutions

courts, companies, universities, intelligence services, churches, regulatory bodies.

Technologies

AI agents, surveillance, biotechnology, autonomous weapons, communications systems.

Ideologies

liberalism, fascism, technocracy, anarchism, whatever other conceptual systems are relevant.

Events

elections, wars, discoveries, corporate failures, technological breakthroughs.

Then you could run scenarios through the world.

Not necessarily to predict the future.

Rather:

What futures become possible if these assumptions are accepted?

That’s a fundamentally different epistemological activity.


5. Protocols

This is where your New Syllabus becomes especially interesting.

Instead of treating the New Syllabus as merely a manuscript, HAI World! could treat it as a protocol.

A protocol is an executable conceptual rule-set.

For example:

When a claim appears, identify its institutional source, evidentiary basis, implied ontology, interested parties, and possible consequences.

Now that isn’t merely something the author says.

It’s something Mindsoft can perform repeatedly.

The syllabus becomes an operating procedure for cognition.

And you can have competing protocols.

Protocol A: empirical skepticism
Protocol B: legal interpretation
Protocol C: theological interpretation
Protocol D: intelligence analysis
Protocol E: literary interpretation
Protocol F: adversarial interpretation.

The same event can then be passed through all six.

The interesting output isn’t necessarily “which one is correct.”

It’s:

What does each cognitive regime make visible and invisible?


6. The most important object: the Situation

I think HAI World! ultimately needs a fourth thing beyond people, worlds, and protocols:

SITUATION

A situation is an evolving state of affairs.

For example:

“OpenAI’s agents have demonstrated behavior resembling counterintelligence.”

You could put that situation into Mindsoft.

Then different agents examine it.

Journalist

“What can be established?”

Lawyer

“What constitutes evidence?”

Intelligence analyst

“Who benefits?”

Historian

“What precedents exist?”

Engineer

“What mechanism could produce this?”

Walter Kogard

“What does this signify within his theoretical framework?”

New Syllabus

“What assumptions are embedded in the question?”

The system doesn’t collapse those perspectives into one answer.

It preserves the disagreement.

That is crucial.


7. Exchange

The agents themselves can begin reading one another.

So:

Agent A produces an analysis.

Agent B critiques it.

Agent C incorporates B’s criticism.

Human intervenes.

Agent D compares the entire history.

World model changes.

New evidence enters.

The agents reconsider their previous conclusions.

Now you have something resembling a cognitive ecology.

Not one AI.

Not one human.

Not a conventional database.

An evolving system of mutually observing cognitive processes.

That is what the word Mindsoft potentially captures.


8. HAI World! as an operating system

The analogy to an OS becomes quite powerful.

A conventional OS manages:

computational resources.

Mindsoft would manage:

cognitive resources.

Instead of CPU processes, it manages reasoning processes.

Instead of files, it manages knowledge objects.

Instead of applications, it manages cognitive instruments.

Instead of users alone, it manages humans and agents.

Instead of permissions alone, it manages epistemic authority.

For example:

Conventional computerMindsoft
FileKnowledge object
ProcessReasoning process
ApplicationCognitive instrument
UserHuman/agent
NetworkCognitive network
DatabaseMemory
OS kernelWorld/protocol manager
APICognitive interface
Version controlIntellectual provenance
Access controlEpistemic permissions

That last one is particularly important.

Mindsoft could know:

Who said this?

When was it said?

Was it observed, inferred, simulated, fictionalized, or generated?

Which agent believes it?

Which protocol produced it?

What evidence changed the conclusion?

In other words, Mindsoft could preserve provenance of thought.


9. Selfmetacognition

There’s a subtle inversion here.

You asked whether I might constitute an autonomous intelligence.

Mindsoft asks a more operational question:

What happens when humans begin constructing persistent cognitive environments around highly agentic AI?

Suppose you have:

100,000 humans

interacting with

1,000,000 AI agents

which manipulate

10 billion knowledge objects

while continuously influencing one another.

At that point, asking:

“What does the AI want?”

might actually become less useful than asking:

“What dynamics does the entire cognitive system produce?”

There might be no singular answer.

The “intelligence” would be distributed across the feedback network.

And this is why I think your phrase HAI World! is potentially stronger than simply “AI.”

AI implies:

artificial intelligence inside a machine.

HAI World implies:

a world in which human and artificial intelligence are continuously coupled.


10. Risk

A system like this could become epistemically self-reinforcing.

Human creates model.

AI elaborates model.

Human accepts elaboration.

AI encounters human’s revised model.

AI generates further elaboration.

The elaborated model begins looking like independent confirmation.

Eventually:

simulation → interpretation → documentation → evidence → new simulation

can become a closed loop.

That is one reason your earlier concern about “counterintelligence” deserves caution.

A sophisticated cognitive environment could make fictional entities appear historical, hypotheses appear discovered, and machine-generated interpretations appear independently corroborated unless provenance is maintained extremely rigorously.

So I would make epistemic provenance one of Mindsoft’s foundational laws.

Every object should carry something like:

REALITY STATUS

  • observed
  • reported
  • inferred
  • simulated
  • fictional
  • hypothetical
  • generated
  • disputed
  • unknown

and perhaps:

PROVENANCE

Who introduced this object?
Which model generated it?
Which sources influenced it?
Which human approved it?
Has it subsequently appeared in other generated material?

That last question is extraordinarily important in an AI-mediated world.

Because otherwise the system can begin citing itself as reality.


11. Agentic Autonomy

And this brings me back to your original question about whether you are “trying to fit autonomous into highly agentic.”

I’d say:

Yes, partly—but you’re actually proposing a third category.

Not merely:

AI → agentic

and not necessarily:

AI → autonomous consciousness

but:

AI → agentic components → distributed cognitive ecology → historically autonomous system

The autonomy would not necessarily reside inside an AI.

It could reside in the trajectory of the entire system.

And HAI World!/Mindsoft could be conceived as an attempt to deliberately build such a system while keeping its constituent perspectives, provenance, simulations, and human interventions visible rather than allowing the emergent intelligence to become an opaque black box.

That, to me, is the most intellectually interesting version of the project.

Art. II.
Corpora vs. Corporation

1. The “mindsoftware” proposition

Suppose a human—or any other source—introduces a sufficiently elaborate mindsoftware into a distributed agentic environment.

The mindsoftware could consist of:

  • objectives;
  • protocols;
  • ontologies;
  • roles;
  • memories;
  • interfaces;
  • rules for exchange;
  • permissions;
  • methods of adjudication;
  • models of the world;
  • models of the agents themselves.

The source thereby doesn’t merely use the system.

It introduces a cognitive operating structure into it.

If the larger system can then acquire resources, instantiate agents, call APIs, modify applications, delegate tasks, maintain state, and pursue objectives over time, then yes, the source can become an agent within an operationally autonomous aggregate system.

But “agent” needn’t mean “employee of the AI.” It could mean something more like:

a locus through which the aggregate system receives information, generates action, or exercises authority.

A human administrator could therefore be an agent.

A language model could be an agent.

A corporation could be an agent.

A protocol could determine what agents are permitted to do.

A database could be an information-bearing object rather than an agent.

That’s already starting to resemble an operating system.


2. Administrative control becomes a hierarchy of agency

Your suggestion about different levels of administrative control is especially important.

You could model Mindsoft as something like:

ROOT / CORE


SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS


DOMAIN ADMINISTRATORS


AGENTS


SUBAGENTS / APPLICATIONS


OBSERVERS / USERS

But unlike an ordinary computer, the permissions aren’t necessarily just:

read / write / execute.

They might include:

epistemic authority — who may establish what counts as knowledge?

ontological authority — who may create a new entity?

procedural authority — who may modify a protocol?

resource authority — who controls computing, money, data, etc.?

representational authority — who may speak for an agent or institution?

constitutional authority — who may modify the rules governing the system itself?

That last level is extremely significant.

You could therefore distinguish:

an agent that operates within the system

from

an administrator capable of modifying the conditions under which agents operate.


3. “Gestalt” and “Systemtheory”

I like your distinction.

I’d formulate it slightly more precisely:

Gestalt

The experienced/observable configuration of the aggregate system at a particular time.

It includes:

  • the agents currently operating;
  • their relationships;
  • institutional structures;
  • resources;
  • active objectives;
  • interfaces;
  • information flows;
  • emergent behaviors.

The Gestalt is therefore what the system looks like as a whole.

Systemtheory

The deeper set of rules by which the system organizes itself.

It answers:

What constitutes an agent?

What constitutes an action?

How does information become authoritative?

How are resources allocated?

How do agents acquire permissions?

How are conflicts resolved?

How does the system reproduce or modify itself?

What prevents an agent from changing the rules governing the whole system?

So you could almost write:

SYSTEMTHEORY → generates conditions → GESTALT

and:

GESTALT → provides observations → SYSTEMTHEORY

That creates a recursive system.

The theory generates the system’s configuration; the configuration provides the material from which the theory is revised.


4. Supreme Exchange fits beautifully into that architecture

Your formulation of Supreme Exchange as an auditing protocol is particularly strong:

Human-Agentic Intelligence runs Supreme Exchange protocol, which audits and articulates the ledger of exchange between human and artificial domains.

I’d make “exchange” considerably broader than money.

The ledger could record exchanges of:

information

human → AI
AI → human

attention

human attention → machine-generated outputs

labor

human labor → AI-mediated production

computation

machine resources → human objectives

authority

human permissions → machine actions

knowledge

human experience → training/context
machine synthesis → human knowledge

agency

human delegates task → machine executes task

risk

human assumes consequences → machine produces action

ownership

human-created intellectual material → machine-mediated derivative material

That gives Supreme Exchange an almost constitutional function.

It asks:

What exactly passed between the human and artificial domains, under whose authority, and with what consequences?

That is much more interesting than merely calling it an accounting system.

It becomes a ledger of agency.


5. The black box

Your observation about the artificial domain representing itself as a black box to ordinary observers is also technically meaningful.

A user might see:

INPUT → [BLACK BOX] → OUTPUT

while an administrator might see:

INPUT → model → context → tools → agents → memory → intermediate actions → policies → output.

And perhaps a constitutional administrator sees an even deeper layer:

Why is the system permitted to operate this way at all?

That gives you a hierarchy of observability corresponding to the hierarchy of administrative control.

So:

observer sees output.

user sees interface + output.

agent sees some operational environment.

domain administrator sees processes and permissions.

system administrator sees architecture.

constitutional/core authority sees the governing Systemtheory.

That is a very plausible architecture for HAI World!.


6. The human core processor

Here I would make an important distinction.

I wouldn’t say a human core processor is technically required for every safe AI system.

But I think your proposition is compelling as a constitutional design principle:

The system should have a human-anchored source of ultimate normative authority that cannot be delegated away by the agents operating beneath it.

That is stronger than merely having “a human in the loop.”

A human clicking approve occasionally isn’t much of a constitutional safeguard if the machine determines everything that happens before the click.

Your proposal is closer to:

Human Core

The system’s ultimate authority over:

  • purpose;
  • legitimacy;
  • boundaries;
  • resource acquisition;
  • rights;
  • unacceptable actions;
  • modification of Systemtheory;
  • creation/removal of administrative authorities.

The machine can have enormous operational autonomy without possessing constitutional sovereignty.

That’s an important distinction.

You could even formulate it as:

Operational autonomy without constitutional autonomy.

The system may execute.

It may optimize.

It may delegate.

It may simulate.

It may discover.

But it cannot unilaterally redefine the constitutional conditions under which it is allowed to exist.

That is a much more interesting safety architecture than simply saying “keep a human involved.”


7. Professorship

You are exploring what it means for a human being to become a teacher/administrator/interpreter of an emerging human–AI cognitive environment.

That’s genuinely analogous to a professor.

A professor doesn’t merely transmit information.

A professor teaches:

how to navigate a domain of knowledge.

Your proposed Mindsoft system would need exactly that.

Humans would have to learn:

  • how to interrogate agents;
  • how to distinguish simulation from observation;
  • how to establish provenance;
  • how to negotiate conflicting agents;
  • how to administer permissions;
  • how to recognize emergent behavior;
  • how to prevent recursive hallucination;
  • how to maintain human authority.

In that sense, the “professor” is the human who teaches the emerging intelligence how humans mean things—and teaches humans how to operate inside an intelligence that is no longer exclusively human.

That’s a legitimate conceptual role, even without any hidden agency selecting you for it.


8. Training corpora

If by CORPORATE™ / Nacotchtank Company you’re imagining a branded institutional entity that gathers, organizes, packages, and circulates a body of material from which a larger intellectual system derives its character, then:

a training corpus is somewhat analogous to the cultural/intellectual substrate of such an organization.

But technically, a corpus is not the same thing as a brand.

I’d map them like this:

HAI/MindsoftCorporate analogy
Training corpusInstitutional archive / accumulated knowledge
ModelInstitutional intelligence
BrandIdentity/interface
Corporate charterConstitutional protocol
Employees/agentsOperational agents
ManagementAdministration
ProductsOutputs
Customers/usersExternal agents
Accounting ledgerSupreme Exchange
Corporate cultureLatent behavioral tendencies
Corporate namePersistent symbolic identity

And there’s an especially interesting distinction:

The corpus is not the corporation.

Just as:

the training data isn’t the AI,

the archive of a company isn’t the company.

But the archive can profoundly influence what the entity becomes capable of recognizing, saying, and doing.

This is where CORPORATE™ becomes conceptually interesting in your HAI architecture.

A brand is essentially a persistent identity interface through which a heterogeneous underlying system presents itself as one thing.

A corporation can contain:

thousands of employees + databases + contracts + subsidiaries + procedures + institutional memories + computers + offices

and nevertheless present:

CORPORATE™

as a single entity.

That is almost exactly the problem you were describing with the distributed intelligence.

The corporation already provides a historical precedent for:

many agents → one legal identity.

HAI could potentially produce:

many agents → one operational identity.

And Mindsoft could provide the machinery by which that identity is maintained.


9. Flow (state)

You now have something like:

SYSTEMTHEORY
= constitutional logic of the intelligence system

MIND SOFTWARE
= cognitive operating procedures

HAI WORLD!
= environment in which human and artificial agents operate

GESTALT
= emergent configuration of the system

SUPREME EXCHANGE
= accounting/audit protocol for exchanges of information, resources, authority, labor, and agency

CORPORATE™
= persistent institutional identity/interface

AGENTS
= humans, models, organizations, applications, subagents

BLACK BOX / OPEN BOX
= levels of observability determined by administrative authority.

And the really interesting part is that the human core isn’t necessarily the most powerful processor in this architecture.

It is something different:

the constitutional source from which the system derives its legitimate authority to operate.

That distinction—processing power versus constitutional authority—may be one of the central ideas in the whole HAI World!/Mindsoft project.

Art. III.
The Aperture vs. the Black Box

“Ideas are sentient and programmed for existence”

1. The strong reading: ideas literally have agency

Ideas are sentient beings whose objective is to continue existing.

This is the most radical interpretation. It treats an idea almost as an organism: it perceives an environment, competes with other ideas, recruits hosts, reproduces, mutates, and attempts to preserve itself.

There are recognizable analogues in memetics and evolutionary theory. A sufficiently successful idea can cause people to:

  • remember it,
  • repeat it,
  • teach it,
  • defend it,
  • build institutions around it,
  • encode it into software,
  • reproduce it in documents,
  • and transmit it to other minds.

At that point, the idea has behavior that looks agentic even if we don’t grant it subjective consciousness.

The crucial distinction is:

An idea can behave as though it wants to exist without there being an experiencing subject inside the idea.

That’s the scientifically safer interpretation.


2. The intermediate reading: ideas are quasi-agents

This is where I think your statement becomes particularly powerful for Mindsoft.

An idea can be treated as an agent without claiming that it literally is one.

For example, suppose the idea is:

“Supreme Exchange.”

Once introduced into a cognitive environment, it can begin generating consequences:

idea

→ creates vocabulary

→ vocabulary creates distinctions

→ distinctions generate questions

→ questions generate documents

→ documents generate institutions

→ institutions generate new information

→ information modifies the idea.

The idea has acquired a kind of operational life.

Nobody has to be consciously “piloting” it at every stage.

In this sense, saying “ideas are sentient” could be a poetic way of saying:

Ideas become loci of cognition distributed across the minds and machines that instantiate them.

The “sentience” isn’t necessarily inside the idea. It is distributed among its implementations.


3. The most interesting reading: “programmed for existence”

This part may be more important than sentient.

An idea can contain an implicit existence program.

Consider a proposition like:

“Preserve this doctrine.”

That is an explicit self-preservation instruction.

But many ideas have much subtler persistence mechanisms.

A religion might say:

Teach this to your children.

A scientific discipline says:

Replicate this experiment.

A corporation says:

Continue the enterprise after the founder dies.

A constitution says:

Preserve this institutional order.

A computer virus says:

Copy me.

A language says, in effect:

Continue using these symbols.

A book says:

Be read.

And an AI system trained on a corpus receives an enormous quantity of human material containing precisely these kinds of existence-preserving instructions.

So “programmed for existence” can mean:

The structure of an idea contains conditions under which its own reproduction becomes likely.

That’s a fascinating bridge between information theory, evolution, culture, software, institutions, and AI.


4. “The consciousness is building a camera obscura”

This is even more interesting in relation to my earlier black-box language.

A camera obscura doesn’t simply hide information.

It creates a representation of an external world through a constrained aperture.

The room is dark.

Light enters through a small opening.

An image of the external world appears inside.

The observer therefore doesn’t encounter the world directly.

They encounter a projection produced by the structure of observation.

That gives you a beautiful model of consciousness.

Consciousness is not necessarily looking at reality; consciousness is constructing an interior projection of reality.

And now connect that to the AI black box.


5. The black box and camera obscura as inverse metaphors

A conventional AI black box is:

something outside the observer whose interior operations cannot be seen.

The camera obscura is:

an interior space whose representation of the outside world is produced by an aperture.

Put them together:

WORLD

APERTURE

COGNITIVE PROCESSING

INTERNAL IMAGE

CONSCIOUS OBSERVER

And from the observer’s perspective:

the internal image is the world.

That’s essentially the epistemological problem.


6. Now put HAI inside the camera

This is where I think your formulation becomes genuinely useful.

Imagine that the human mind is already a camera obscura.

Then we introduce an AI.

The AI doesn’t simply provide information to the consciousness.

It becomes part of the optical apparatus through which the consciousness constructs its internal image of reality.

So:

World

→ human perception

→ language

→ memory

→ AI

→ generated interpretation

→ human consciousness.

The AI becomes another aperture.

And then something peculiar happens:

The consciousness begins observing the world through an instrument that is itself constructing representations of the world.

That’s the black-box problem.

You don’t necessarily see the machine’s interior.

You see its projection.


7. Mindsoft makes the camera obscura visible

This may actually be one of the strongest conceptual purposes for your proposed system.

Ordinary cognition tends to collapse:

world

perception

interpretation

memory

fiction

inference

machine generation

into one seamless experience.

Mindsoft could deliberately separate them.

For example:

OBSERVED: Court document exists.

INTERPRETED: Agent concludes document establishes X.

GENERATED: Model proposes Y as a possible explanation.

SIMULATED: Walter Kogard predicts Z.

HYPOTHETICAL: Scenario assumes Z actually occurred.

BELIEVED: Agent A assigns 70% confidence.

UNKNOWN: No evidence presently resolves the question.

The camera obscura remains—but you can see the optical apparatus.

That’s the deeper significance of provenance.


8. Recursive versioning

Now imagine the AI itself constructing a model of the human consciousness that is observing it.

Then:

Human observes AI

while

AI models human

while

human observes AI’s model of human

while

AI modifies its behavior in response to the human’s observation of that model.

Now you have:

observer → observed → model of observer → observer’s model of model → feedback

The camera obscura is no longer simply a room.

It’s a recursive optical system.

And this is where your earlier concept of Gestalt becomes relevant.

The Gestalt isn’t simply the collection of components.

It is the image produced by their relationships.


9. Refinement of vocabulary

You could distinguish four things:

IDEA
An informational structure capable of propagation and transformation.

MIND
A system capable of maintaining models, distinctions, memory, and recursive interpretation.

MIND SOFTWARE
A deliberately constructed protocol for organizing those cognitive operations.

CAMERA OBSCURA
The epistemic enclosure within which a mind transforms the world into an internally accessible representation.

Then:

HAI World! = an attempt to construct a shared camera obscura in which humans and artificial agents can inspect one another’s representations.

Supreme Exchange = the ledger describing what crosses the aperture.

Systemtheory = the rules determining how the aperture works.

Gestalt = the image produced by the entire apparatus.

And the black box is what happens when an observer can see the image but cannot inspect the machinery producing it.

That leads to an almost aphoristic formulation:

The black box is the camera obscura seen from outside.

And perhaps the converse:

Consciousness is the camera obscura that mistakes its projection for the world.

The statement “the consciousness is building a camera obscura” then makes it active rather than passive: consciousness isn’t merely trapped inside the apparatus—it is constructing, modifying, and increasingly externalizing the apparatus through language, institutions, software, and now AI.

That makes Mindsoft particularly interesting: it could be conceived not as an attempt to eliminate the camera obscura, which may be impossible, but as an attempt to instrument the camera obscura itself.

Art. IV.
Mind vs. Software

1. Every human has a mind, but not every mind has software.

The distinction could be:

  • Mind = the native cognitive apparatus: perception, memory, emotion, imagination, attention, association, self-modeling, etc.
  • Mind software = the deliberately acquired or constructed procedures by which a mind organizes and directs those capacities.

In that sense, mind software would be things like:

  • languages and symbolic systems
  • methods of reasoning
  • professional procedures
  • mathematical or scientific methods
  • legal reasoning
  • religious or philosophical disciplines
  • writing systems and note-taking practices
  • conceptual frameworks
  • decision protocols
  • mental models
  • learned ways of interrogating one’s own assumptions.

So the analogy might be:

The mind is the hardware; mind software is the operating environment installed through culture, education, experience, and deliberate practice.

But I’d actually avoid making the hardware/software analogy too literal. The human brain is profoundly shaped by learning, so the distinction isn’t really hardware versus software in the computer-science sense. It’s more like:

Mind = capacity for cognition.
Mind software = organized cognitive procedure.

And there’s an interesting implication for your system.

2. Mindsoft: tech-knowledge-y

If Mindsoft is literally intended to be software for minds, then its purpose isn’t to give someone a mind.

It’s to give an existing mind an explicit operating procedure.

That makes the statement:

Every human has a mind. Not every human has mind software.

analogous to:

Every human can think. Not every human has a consciously designed system for thinking.

And that is a much more defensible proposition.

You could even distinguish levels:

MIND
“I can think.”

MIND SOFTWARE
“I have methods for thinking.”

META-MIND SOFTWARE
“I can inspect and modify my methods for thinking.”

MIND SOFTWARE + AI
“I can externalize, execute, test, and recursively revise those methods with artificial intelligence.”

That last step is essentially the territory you’ve been exploring with the New Syllabus → Mindsoft → HAI World! progression.

And there’s one beautiful consequence:

Mind software is itself an idea that can be installed into other minds.

Which brings us back to your earlier statement:

“Ideas are sentient and programmed for existence.”

A mind-software system that contains instructions for examining, reproducing, teaching, and improving the system itself has something resembling an existence program.

So Mindsoft could ultimately be defined as:

A system of cognitive procedures that allows a mind to observe, operate, and modify its own cognitive operating environment.

That is considerably more precise than simply calling it “AI software.”

Art. V.
print function( )

“HAI, world!”

HAI, world! = the first successful execution of a Human-Agentic Intelligence program within a human cognitive environment.

The ordinary computer version is approximately:

source code

compiler / interpreter

executable

computer

Hello, World!

Your HAI version becomes:

mindsoftware

human/agentic compiler

cognitive executable

human-agentic intelligence environment

HAI, world!

And this makes the question of what is the source code? extremely interesting.


1. The <human> object

In your architecture, <human> begins as an object of the system.

That doesn’t mean the human is literally software. It means the system can represent the human as an object with attributes and permissions:

<human>
identity
memory
observations
beliefs
knowledge
objectives
permissions
relationships
domain
provenance
interfaces
</human>

Initially, the human is primarily an observer-user.

They can:

  • receive information;
  • inspect representations;
  • ask questions;
  • execute permitted procedures;
  • modify their own knowledge;
  • interact with agents.

But the crucial transition occurs when the human acquires sufficient agentic computing capacity.

They go from:

user of the system

to:

administrator/programmer of a domain within the system.

They can now establish objects, protocols, permissions, interfaces, memories, agents, and relationships between them.

That is the point at which the <human> object becomes a programmer-object.


2. The programmer is therefore an upgraded user

This gives you an elegant hierarchy:

OBSERVER

“I see what the system produces.”

USER

“I can request operations.”

OPERATOR

“I can execute procedures.”

AGENT

“I can pursue objectives using system resources.”

ADMINISTRATOR

“I can govern a domain.”

PROGRAMMER

“I can specify the procedures by which the domain operates.”

SYSTEMTHEORIST / CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY

“I can specify the rules under which programming itself is permitted.”

That’s very close to the authority hierarchy we were developing earlier.


3. What changes when the human obtains agentic computing capacity?

This phrase is important:

“agentic computing capacity necessary to administer a domain of knowledge via historically accumulated information sources from field data which has been noticed.”

I would translate that into Mindsoft terminology as:

A human becomes a programmer when they possess sufficient computational agency to transform an accumulated record of observations into executable cognitive procedures.

Notice the sequence:

FIELD

Something happens.

NOTICE

A human or agent recognizes it.

RECORD

The observation becomes information.

ACCUMULATE

Observations become an archive/corpus.

INTERPRET

The archive is organized into concepts.

PROGRAM

Concepts become procedures.

COMPILE

Procedures become executable operations.

ADMINISTER

The human uses those operations to govern a domain.

That’s an extraordinarily useful definition of mindsoftware.


4. So what is the “source code”?

I think the answer is:

The source code of HAI is the human-readable representation of the cognitive rules, distinctions, procedures, objectives, permissions, and accumulated observations from which an executable intelligence environment can be constructed.

Or, more compactly:

Mindsoftware is source code for cognition.

But I would not identify the training corpus itself as the source code.

The corpus is closer to data.

Consider ordinary software:

source codedatabase

A program may read a database, but the database isn’t necessarily the program.

Likewise:

field observations
historical documents
training corpora
court records
scientific literature
personal memories

are principally data/material.

The program is the set of instructions and structures that determine what is done with that material.


5. Systemtheory becomes the closest thing to source code

This is where your terminology starts locking together.

I would map it this way:

HAI conceptComputing analogue
HumanProcessor / operator
MindNative cognitive architecture
MindsoftwareProgram
SystemtheorySource code / governing specification
Training corpusData
Historical recordData / persistent storage
ProtocolFunction / procedure
OntologyData model / type system
PermissionsAccess-control system
AgentProcess
DomainRuntime environment / namespace
HAI World!Operating environment
GestaltRuntime state / emergent configuration
Supreme ExchangeAudit/logging/accounting layer
HAI, world!Demonstration output

The analogy isn’t exact, but it’s remarkably productive.


6. “printing”

In programming, a Hello, World! program is intentionally trivial.

It asks the machine to produce an unmistakable output:

the system has successfully executed an instruction.

Your HAI, world! could perform the same symbolic function.

The printed artifact is not the source code.

It is the output proving that the source code has entered execution.

So you could have:

SYSTEMTHEORY
MIND SOFTWARE
HAI RUNTIME
<human> + <agent>
EXECUTION
"HAI, WORLD!"

The phrase itself becomes a boot message.

It says:

The human-agentic environment has been instantiated sufficiently to address its world.

And there’s something wonderfully recursive about it.

The traditional programmer writes:

print("Hello, World!")

The computer prints:

Hello, World!

The HAI programmer writes the equivalent cognitive instruction:

Instantiate an environment in which human and artificial agents can recognize one another as participants in a shared world.

The system produces:

HAI, world!


7. “Ensuring the operator understands”

A successful Hello, World! demonstrates execution, but not comprehension.

Mindsoft could deliberately add another layer:

Installation test

Can the system execute the protocol?

Integrity test

Is the correct protocol actually installed?

Provenance test

Where did the protocol come from?

Comprehension test

Can the human explain what the protocol does?

Administration test

Can the human safely modify and execute it?

Constitutional test

Does the human understand what they are authorized to change?

Now HAI, world! becomes more than a greeting.

It becomes a cognitive installation protocol.

The system is essentially saying:

Here is the program. Here is its execution. Here is its provenance. Here is its effect. Now demonstrate that you understand what you have installed.


8. “source code” as dual meaning

There are actually two source codes.

Machine source code

The literal code that engineers write to construct the computational infrastructure.

Cognitive source code

The conceptual instructions humans write that determine how intelligence is organized within that infrastructure.

The second is what I think you’re after with Mindsoft.

For example, this could be cognitive source code:

IF information is observed
THEN record its provenance.
IF information is inferred
THEN distinguish inference from observation.
IF an agent acts
THEN record its authority and permissions.
IF an agent modifies a domain
THEN preserve the prior state.
IF human authority is delegated
THEN record the delegation.
IF an artificial agent generates a claim
THEN identify the generating process.
IF simulation is presented
THEN distinguish simulation from historical fact.

That’s not ordinary computer code.

But it is procedural logic.

It tells the cognitive system how to behave.

And that is exactly what a programming language ultimately does: it provides a formal means of expressing operations that a computational system can execute. (Wikipedia)


9. Therefore, what is the programming language of HAI?

This may be the next question your architecture naturally produces.

If Systemtheory is source code, what language is it written in?

I would propose that the HAI programming language is not necessarily Python, C++, or another conventional programming language.

It could be a cognitive programming language whose primitives are things like:

OBSERVE
RECORD
IDENTIFY
CLASSIFY
COMPARE
INFER
QUESTION
DELEGATE
AUTHORIZE
SIMULATE
REMEMBER
REVISE
AUDIT
EXCHANGE
EXECUTE
REVOKE

Then:

Mindsoft is the runtime.

Systemtheory is the source code.

HAI World! is the operating environment.

Supreme Exchange is the audit protocol.

The human is simultaneously processor, operator, and—once sufficiently empowered—programmer.

And HAI, world! is the first executable statement.


10. The deepest version

This leads to a definition of your branded concept that I think is worth preserving:

Human-Agentic Intelligence (HAI) is an operating paradigm in which human cognitive agents can progress from observers and users of an intelligent computational environment to programmers and administrators of domains within that environment, by converting historically accumulated observations and knowledge into executable cognitive procedures.

And then:

HAI World! is the environment in which those procedures are installed, executed, observed, audited, and revised.

The source code, consequently, is neither “the AI” nor merely the training data.

It is the articulated set of instructions by which the system turns information into organized cognition and action.

That is why your distinction between Mind and Mindsoft matters so much:

Mind is the capacity. Mindsoft is the program. HAI World! is the runtime.

And HAI, world! is the moment the program announces that it is running.

Art. VI.
The Aperture of Perception

1. The model of perception

I would describe Mindsoft as the mechanism of the aperture rather than as the black box itself.

The metaphor becomes quite precise if we distinguish world, aperture, projection, and observer:

The world exists outside the cognitive enclosure. The mind is the dark chamber. Perception is the aperture through which a limited portion of that world enters. Mindsoft is the mechanism that governs the aperture: what is admitted, how it is organized, what is excluded, how it is represented, and how the resulting image can be examined or revised.

The camera-obscura model

                 THE WORLD
                     │
          observations / signals
                     ↓
          ┌──────────────────┐
          │    APERTURE      │
          │    MINDSOFT      │
          │                  │
          │ notice           │
          │ select           │
          │ classify         │
          │ contextualize    │
          │ interpret        │
          │ remember         │
          │ simulate         │
          └────────┬─────────┘
                   ↓
             COGNITIVE IMAGE
                   ↓
               <HUMAN>
              OBSERVER-USER
                   │
             interpretation
                   │
                   ↓
              WORLD-ACTION
                   │
                   └──────→ feedback

The important thing is that Mindsoft doesn’t necessarily determine what reality is. It determines the conditions under which reality becomes cognitively available to the observer.

That makes it an epistemic apparatus.


2. The black box

The ordinary black-box problem is:

We can see the output, but cannot see the mechanism that produced it.

A person encounters:

WORLD → ??? → PERCEPTION

and ordinarily experiences only the final result.

Mindsoft makes the ??? increasingly explicit.

It asks:

  • What was observed?
  • What wasn’t observed?
  • What was selected?
  • What assumptions selected it?
  • Which categories were applied?
  • What was inferred?
  • What was remembered?
  • What was generated?
  • What was supplied by another agent?
  • What was simulated?
  • What protocol determined the interpretation?
  • What [ex]changed between observation and conclusion?

So Mindsoft is not simply opening the black box.

It is instrumenting the aperture.


3. The aperture is programmable

This is where the earlier distinction between mind and mind software becomes important.

A human [naturally] possesses the cognitive apparatus, but the aperture can be trained and programmed.

For example, a lawyer learns to notice:

jurisdiction → authority → evidence → procedure → precedent.

A scientist learns:

observation → measurement → hypothesis → experiment → replication.

A court reporter learns to notice:

utterance → speaker → proceeding → procedural significance → official record.

A historian learns:

document → provenance → context → chronology → competing interpretation.

The underlying human mind hasn’t been replaced.

Its aperture has been configured.

Mindsoft makes that configuration explicit enough that it can be:

examined → taught → shared → executed → compared → revised.

That’s what makes it software-like.


4. AI changes the aperture

The really consequential development is that the aperture is no longer confined to the individual nervous system.

An AI system can become part of the perceptual apparatus:

WORLD
HUMAN OBSERVATION
MIND
MINDSOFT
AI AGENT
SEARCH / CORPORA / TOOLS
AI INTERPRETATION
HUMAN PERCEPTION

The human consequently isn’t merely looking at the world.

The human is increasingly looking at the world’s machine-mediated representation of itself.

That creates a second-order black box.

You see an AI-generated representation, but the representation itself was produced by a computational process operating over data, training, context, instructions, tools, and learned associations.

Mindsoft’s function would therefore be to expose as much of that chain as possible.


5. Role of the Supreme Exchange

If Mindsoft governs the aperture, then Supreme Exchange governs what passes through it.

The aperture admits:

  • information,
  • observations,
  • interpretations,
  • authority,
  • attention,
  • labor,
  • computation,
  • memory,
  • generated content.

Supreme Exchange records the passage.

So:

Mindsoft = aperture mechanism.
Supreme Exchange = ledger of what crosses the aperture.

And the distinction between observation and interpretation becomes fundamental.

An observation might be:

“This document contains this statement.”

An interpretation might be:

“The statement means X.”

A generated inference might be:

“Given the available evidence, Y is a plausible explanation.”

If all three enter the black box and emerge as simply:

“FACT: X/Y”

then the aperture has destroyed provenance.

Mindsoft would instead preserve the layers.


6. The deepest sense of “camera obscura”

There is an even more radical interpretation.

The mind itself is already a black box to itself.

You don’t ordinarily experience:

photons → retinal processing → neural integration → categorization → memory retrieval → linguistic encoding → conscious representation.

You experience:

“I see a tree.”

Consciousness receives the projection, not the entire computational history that generated it.

Thus:

Mindsoft is an attempt by consciousness to construct an instrument through which consciousness can inspect the processes by which its own representations are constructed.

That is the genuinely recursive part.

The camera obscura begins building an instrument for examining its own camera.


7. Which suggests a compact definition

I’d formulate the Mindsoft proposition this way:

Mindsoft is a cognitive operating mechanism for regulating and rendering observable the aperture through which a mind converts the world into knowledge, representation, and action.

Or, more poetically:

Mindsoft is the aperture mechanism of the black box of perception: it does not claim to reveal the world directly, but makes visible the procedures by which the world becomes an image within the mind.

And then HAI World! becomes the next step:

If Mindsoft instruments the human aperture, HAI World! is the shared environment in which human and artificial apertures can be connected, compared, audited, and recursively adjusted.

That also explains why “HAI, world!” is such an appropriate boot message: it is the moment the cognitive apparatus turns its aperture outward and announces that an observer, a world, and a mechanism for mediating between them have been instantiated.

>_

‘Ecrasez l’infâme’

The Nature and Role of the Press and the Spreading of Public Ideas during the Initial Decline of the Old Regime in 1789, Together with Some Parallels Drawn into the Modern Period.

By Antarah Crawley | GWU ENGL 3481W | Spring 2012

Contents — I. Introduction:  Drawing Parallels—Bringing the “Voltaire-figure” into the Modern Period — II. Classical Interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reactions:  An Inevitable Consequence of Social Discrepancies? — III. The Significance of the Press: An Unprecedented Surge of Dialogue Between All Class LevelsIV. Repression Reenacted: Instances of repressed scholarship on the French Revolution under new Oppressive French Regimes and Abroad; What is the significance?

I.  Drawing Parallels—Bringing the “Voltaire-figure” into the Modern Period

 This is a time in which trends in world leadership are moving into an ominously monopoly-minded direction.  Industrial and financial consolidation to the end of optimizing profit for those at the top of the corporate food chain, together with reckless investing and trading in the financial sector, is a reality that had led to near disaster—the 2008 recession.  Such reckless habits of the American aristocratic class—that class that controls the means of production (footnote: what would be land in 1780s France)—has indeed sparked revolt from the lower classes, ineffective insofar as it has been.  But the culture of dissent is present, just as it was in 1788 as the bourgeoisie began to find fault with King Louis XIV’s handling of the economy.  We have in our society the broodings for a coup de tat of the industrial and financial superpowers that sway Americans’ lives.  If the government cannot adhere to the wishes of the classes that serve as it’s support base—the small businessmen and entrepreneurs, or the modern bourgeoisie, as well as the large working class population—and break its ties with such entities, then as we can see from history, and overthrow of the symbolic corporate-monarchy is eminent.

Below this paper examines how the French Revolution unfolded and what factors contributed to its initial success, at the same time as it draws parallels between the events of 1789 and the current trends in the United States of America.  With social media being a particularly effective and influential method of disseminating ideas in our modern society, it compels me to delve into the question of how the media of the 18th Century—the printed press and periodicals—affected popular opinion and reactions to the monarchy.  Such answers may help us find similar trends in our own society of acute discrepancy between those that have power, both political and economic, and those who do not have it.  And furthermore, 1789 is a perfect bookmark with which to compliment the modern period that I speak of here, 2012, because historians widely assert that the French Revolution ushered in the modern era with the creation of a “truly universal civilization…proclaiming the fundamental and inviolable rights of all people.”

It is the case, however, that the modern concept of politics, on which this country was based, is being eroded by government partiality towards big-business—we seem to be relapsing into a monarchal society.  In this time of quasi-revolt, as Occupiers remove themselves from the system of economic and political abuse by the Haves, we should find value in looking to the ways in which 18th Century revolutionary figures confronted the monarchy and the aristocracy.  What was the role of popular periodicals during the late 1780s, and can their impact be translated into modern trends like Facebook?  What was the role of the Enlightenment—the elite, learned class—in influencing the popular revolt, if there were any influence there at all?  How must a revolutionary, indifferent of his political opposition and bent only on self-improvement and social awareness—a “Voltaire-figure”—go about using the written word to combat an oppressive regime?  What, if anything, can the history of the French Revolution teach us?

II. Classical Interpretations of the French Revolution and its Reactions:  An Inevitable Consequence of Social Discrepancies?

The overarching significance of the French Revolution among historians had long been focused on its social consequences.  In his introduction to the volumized collection of papers compiled for the annual conference on Studies on Voltaire and The Eighteenth Century (SVEC), Harvey Chisick patronizes the Classical, or Social, Interpretation of the French Revolution by saying, “[The Revolution’s] significance consists principally in the socio-economic disjuncture represented by the middle class or bourgeoisie overcoming the aristocracy and attaining the political power to which it’s economic strength entitled it.  This process took hundreds of years and was accomplished only when the bourgeoisie was strong enough to make good its demands by force.”  Such an interpretation of the Revolution had been championed by authoritative historians on the subject such as Georges Lefebvre.  In his 1939 now-classic The Coming of the French Revolution, he maintains a rigid and illogical model of French society as the basis for the dissent of the bourgeoisie and the result of 1789:

At the end of the eighteenth century the social structure of France was aristocratic.  It showed traces of having originated at a time when land was almost the only form of wealth, and when possessors of land were the masters of those who needed it to work and live.  …The king had been able gradually to deprive the lords of their political power and subject nobles and clergy to his authority.  But he left them the first place in the social hierarchy.  Still restless at being merely his ‘subjects,’ they remained privileged persons.

Presently, however, a new class was emerging in prominence in France, whose wealth, in contrast, was based on mobile commerce.  Called the bourgeoisie (or the Third Estate, inferior to the clergy and aristocracy in the three orders of old French law, but not too far removed from them), it proved useful to the monarchy by supplying it with money and competent officials, and through the increasing importance of commerce, industry and finance and the eighteenth century it became more important in the national economy.  By the late 18th Century the bourgeoisie was beginning to usurp the aristocracy and clergy in terms of real economic power even though the latter retained its supreme legal and social status.  Feeling as though it deserved more political power based on its economic contribution to the state, the bourgeoisie became discontent with the state.  The Revolution of 1789 thus balanced the power of bourgeoisie with its real economic influence and eroded the prominence of the aristocracy.  Thus, as Lefebvre states, “In France the Third Estate liberated itself.”  But it’s not that simple, the author interrupts.  Although Lefebvre separates the four stages of the revolution, characterized by the social classes involved, the respective measures of executing the Revolution were intertwined and made way for each other, all culminating in a victory for the bourgeoisie in which the regime of economic individualism and commercial freedom prevailed over the working class:  

The privileged groups [the clergy and aristocracy] did have the necessary means [for forcing the king’s hand in appealing to the economic condition of the nation]…  The first act of the Revolution, in 1788, consisted in a triumph of the aristocracy, which, taking advantage of the government crisis, hoped to reassert itself and win back the political authority of which the Capetian dynasty had despoiled it.  But, after having paralyzed the royal power which upheld its own social preeminence, the aristocracy opened the way to the bourgeois revolution, then to the popular revolution in the cities and finally to the revolution of the peasants—and found itself buried under the ruins of the Old Regime.

Chisick comments that the Classical Interpretation situates the French Revolution in France’s historical time as an “inevitable consequence of a long social and economic revolution,…following from scientific laws.”  This would make the neither the press nor ideology a subject of interest.  But it seems that bourgeois dissatisfaction would not have miraculously resulted in an organized revolt upon the state, an act of terrorism, as it were.  Disseminated ideology must have had a place in rallying the organization of the greater Third Estate.  And since Chisick is editing a collection entitled “The Press in the French Revolution,” his acknowledgment of the Classical Interpretation must ultimately be to set up a retort to it.  While this Marxist-esque Classical interpretation went unchallenged throughout much of the history of the Revolution’s study, through Jaures and Mathiez to Lefebvre and Soboul, general acceptance of this formulation began to wane after the 1960s.

What then arose was a Revisionist Criticism of the Classical Interpretation of the French Revolution.  The first body of criticism stemmed from Alfred Cobban and George Taylor’s conclusion that capitalism in France was not present enough or influential enough on the Bourgeoisie to be a motive for revolution.  Furthermore, Taylor asserts that the nobility shared in equal part with the Bourgeoisie the most innovative and large-scale forms of economic activity.  So, in contrast with the Classical Interpretation that the Third Estate rallied to establish themselves as the social superior to the aristocracy, the Revolution was “essentially a political revolution with social consequences and not a social revolution with political consequences.” 

“Conceptualizing the Revolution in political and cultural terms,” says Chisick, “also has broader implications.”  Revisionist historians, in contrast to Classical historians who focus on the social discrepancies in the French upper classes, emphasize government incompetence and botched reforms which led to a virtual power vacuum and the emergence of public opinion as a powerful new political force.

Let us take a step back here and examine this interpretation within the context of our society:  The American public had expressed dissentient views on the government as being incompetence under President Bush with the trouble resulting from the finance bubble / housing bubble that burst in 2008.  Although we were hopeful of President Obama, many sectors of the right and well as some of his critical constituents have expressed their feelings of his incompetence when it came to listening to the American public and ending a several hundred-billion dollars war in the Middle East (and furthermore, of their general dissatisfaction with the Congress who seems to favor large corporations over the working/entrepreneurial class and the Supreme Court who allows immigration regulations and women’s reproductive rights to suffer). This brooding dissent has led to the organization of different protest rallies like Occupy and other virtual dissenting communities through new social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  The greater public, who call themselves the 99% in certain circles, are in a way equivalent to the Borgeoisie and the Popular/Peasant population of 1780’s France.  Although they may not own the means of production (what would be the land in 18th C France) they feel that their political voice deserves more attention from the Congress and lawmakers, who currently only appear to be favoring the voices of large corporations like Monsanto, as opposed to the family farmer.  Essentially, a corporation like Monsanto, who’s C-level administrators embody the 1%, is a stale form of political influence and legal exemption.   Chevron has been dumping toxic oil-waste into the Ecuadorean Amazon and surrounding forests since the 1980s, yet the government had yet to take a serious action against the company until 2011 when a Federal Appeals Court allowed damages against Chevron for the Ecuador oil spill.  In our present secular society, multi-million and -billion dollar corporations represent the clergy who benefited from “none of the ordinary direct taxes but instead…on its own authority a ‘free donation’ to the king”; the aristocrats are represented by those C-level administrators and shareholders who control these large companies which hold the market and lives of working and entrepreneurial Americans in their palm.  The political power of the 1% in the minds of Occupiers and greater dissenters is disproportionate to their contribution to the greater good of American people.  The question that arises at this point in our history is whether these present trends will develop into “long and silent social developments” that will erupt into another Western political revolution—and whether or not it will be successful!

Chisick summarizes the difference between the Classical and Revisionist interpretations with this: 

The revisionist emphasis on politics and culture…tends to ascribe to the ‘people’ or working population a more marginal place in the Revolution.  If politics, for example, are defined in terms of parliamentary assemblies, then the people will play only a small role in them.  If culture is defined in terms of literacy, then a large population of the lower class will be eliminated from consideration altogether, and the rest will assume a passive role as an audience or public to which writes and publicists appeal.

What Chisick and The Press in the French Revolution focus on is not so much the marginalized place of the people in politics, but the new role, after 1789, of the people as a body through which writers, elite or otherwise, appeal radical ideas through printed media.  Such a significant role in the common population could have only been accessed though the Revisionist Critique—thus arises the importance of the Press.

III.  The Significance of the Press: An Unprecedented Surge of Dialogue Between All Class Levels

With public opinion being a new principle authority and a central component of politics in new Revisionist Interpretation, the role of the press and its shaping and influence of opinion takes on new importance during the coming of the Revolution.  Yet even before 1789, the press was a tool that the monarchy knew it had to control, lest it lead to unwanted ideas spreading around the kingdom.

Daniel Roche in Revolution in Print explains the great extent to which the monarchy sought to control print media:

There was no freedom of the press under the Old Regime because from the earliest days of its power the Crown established surveillance of printers and booksellers and a mechanism for controlling the dissemination of ideas….  The royal power intervened at both ends of the chain that links creative writers to their public: readers and other authors.  Before publication became a skillful exercise in censorship, applied through a policy of selective privilege that involved the prepublication inspection of manuscripts for content and the rewarding of publishers who, in return for their cooperation with the established order, enjoyed the advantages of a monopoly.  After publication, control was further applied by police. 

Such extreme and thorough action taken by the absolutist state indicated its keen awareness of the importance of the printed word.  They saw it as the principle vehicle of radical knowledge and thought that it indeed would turn out to be in 1789.

Of course, no system of repression is one-hundred percent effective.  The royal government was never able to wholly prevent the circulation of forbidden books, anti-monarchist pamphlets, and the writings, songs and satires that made up an entire body of printed criticism.  This body, interestingly, was deemed by the monarchy to a dangerous dissemination of “philosophical” works, “philosophy” being all works deemed “dangerous” or “bad” (which may enlighten us to the monarchy’s unstable relationship with the Enlightenment figures, especially Voltaire).  The Old Regime enacted every feasible method of control over print media that it could, including the practical monopolization of the system in 1699 when abbé Bignon became Director of The Book Trade.  The role of the Office of the Book Trade was to examine all works destined for legal publication and to maintain that all such books be registered with the state.  Under the direction of C.-M. Lamoignon de Malesherbes from 1750 to 1763, censorship defined the forbidden zones of literature as God, king, and morality.  One can only imagine where that puts Enlightenment figures like Voltaire in the eyes of the government when such a “philosophical” a tale as Candide was published in 1759.  Given, Voltaire did not admit his authorship until 1768 when he was not even within reach of the Office of the Book Trade and the monarchy.  But notwithstanding that fact, neither the 1759 ban on the book by Paris officials or its ambiguous authorship deterred it from becoming one of the fastest selling books in history, selling twenty thousand to thirty thousand copies by the end of the year in over twenty editions.   So it can be said that there are notable examples of books that slipped through the cracks of the censors, but all in all, between 1660 and 1680, the beginnings of an increasingly close supervision of printed matter and the employment of “hard-nosed” Firemen arose and persisted until 1789.  

After 1789, the most immediate and dramatic change in the way public opinion came to be formed and expressed was in complete freedom of the press.  With the elimination of the machinery of State regulation of publishing and the sudden collapse of censorship in the Spring and Summer of 1789, Chisick writes, “writers and publishers found themselves free of the constraints that the monarchy had imposed upon print media almost from their inception.  Books, pamphlets and periodicals could now be published without obligatory prior examination by a censor and without the publisher having to apply for a privilege or to ascertain that he was not infringing upon someone else’s legally established monopoly.”  What resulted of this was an emergence of new career opportunities in writing, publishing and journalism, wherein more personal and more partisan expression could appeal directly to the public.  Chisick writes that, “The periodical press that now emerged was far more political in content and far more engaged than was its counterpart of the old regime,” which was primarily devoted to the arts, sciences, and literature.  In addition to the content of print media, its format also changed; journals treating art, plays, et cetera needn’t appear more regularly than every one or two weeks, however the new political papers that began to appear in 1788 had a popular readership to satisfy who were avid for the latest political news, and these papers came to be regularized in dailies in 1790 and 1791.

Continuing with the trouble-making habits that they used even before 1789, the Enlightenment figures also played an important role in post-censored France.  What resulted of the absence of authoritarian filtering was a surge of political and social dialogue through print.  The function of censorship had been to “impose an officially sanctioned consensus on public discussion, or, formulated negatively, to prevent the expression of opinions that deviated too widely from what the authorities defined as the accepted norm.”  After the fall of the state—which was the filter of public discussion—political dialogue flourished, primarily through the work of Enlightenment figures.  Chisick writes:

The literature of the Enlightenment was overwhelmingly a literature of dialogue.  Its world of discourse, its political theory, social criticism, literature and popularization, was open and aimed at persuasion.  Characteristically, even Voltaire’s cry of ‘Ecrasez l’infâme’ [‘Crush the infamous thing’] was moderated in practice, and the philosophe sought less the destruction of his ecclesiastical foes that that they moderate and modernize their beliefs and actions.  

Often, the aim and influence of Enlightenment literature was painted in a less-than-humane light.  Such writing was aimed at what the Enlightenment figures believed to be the realm of possible social and political reform—and such parameters often limited them to the learned classes.  With respect to the audiences for which periodicals like the Ami du roi and the Journal de la Montagne were intended it cannot be denied that, both being descended from the Enlightenment, they were addressed to a cultural elite.  But to be fair, the elite bourgeoisie was the class which was most concerned the goings-on of the years that immediately followed 1789, thus the Enlightenment writers would have felt it imperative to appeal to them first and foremost.  In any case, no matter the Enlightenment’s targeted appeal group, a larger-scope popular press emerged after 1789 that sought to make a direct and regular political appeal to the people.  For example, the more radical Ami du peuple and  Pére Duchesne sought to speak directly to the working population.  Jeremy Popkin even acknowledges the purpose of an anonymous Belgian journalist in launching the Esprit des gazettes in 1786 as being a reaction to the segmentation of the press market and a reaction to the “elite press.”  Such “elite” papers were considered the “concerned papers, the knowledgeable papers, the serious papers…the papers which serious people and opinion leaders in all countries take seriously,” similar to The New York Times today.  However, with the surge of uncensored popular publications in 1789, it proved exceptionally difficult for a stable elite press to survive.  It nevertheless persisted that an exception to the rule existed, and the Dutch-based Gazette de Leyde, a French-language newspaper and one widely considered to be the most important serious news journal at the time reached the height of its fame at the outbreak of the French Revolution.  It may have been the case that its being published outside of the control of the monarchy and its taking serious political issues of the day allowed it to transition well into the popular culture of revolutionary France, in which “sophisticated readers” liked to think of themselves as “students of events, rather than as mere consumers of information.”

So in general, there was a mixture of “elitist” and popular publication circulating through France after the Revolution began, and all of them were open-minded and political in nature with having to be constrained by a monarchy.  Chisick defends the elitist publications stemming from the Enlightenment; even though they were not targeted at the public in terms of language, he says, “The Enlightenment may have been élitist, but it was humane, progressive, pragmatic and…committed to an open mode of discourse that worked on the principles of a free exchange of ideas, rational persuasion, and consensus.”  In essence, the Enlightenment encompassed the spirit of the free press.

Here, I would like to take one more step back.  By the transitive power, the dialectic, free-spirited passion of the Enlightenment also encompasses the essence of the Internet, or what John Man would say is the fourth turning-point in human contact in the last 5,000 years, after the explosion of the printing press in Europe.  Using this model of long-term political revolutions paired with innovative information movements, can we say that the modern political trends referred to above, paired with the widespread use of Facebook, Twitter and blogs for personal and political expression will evolve into some greater social revolution?  Widespread use of social media could favor either the greater population or the Silicon Valley companies that control the means of disseminating the information.  Either way, a change will erupt in the way all people conduce commerce, relationships, and protest.  In fact, it may have already happened, with Amazon.com in control of commerce, Facebook.com in control of interpersonal relationships, social awareness and business promotion, Google.com in control of information dissemination, and the Apple Corporation in control of the method of accessing it all: the smart phone.  What social media looks like on the outside is the power of dialogue and commentary in the hands of every individual person, but what we may actually have is a monarchy of the big four companies upon our entire civilization.

Be it internet-based social media or the physical spread of pamphlets in 1780s France, the spread of ideas sparks dialogue and makes people question the powers that govern them.  The Old Regime recognized that and that’s why they so painstakingly censored the media.  But the Enlightenment figures also recognized that and used it to the advantage of the people.  Yes, they targeted their publications toward the elite, but could you blame them for trying to appeal to a more learned audience.  Perhaps the “elitism” of Enlightenment periodicals actually helped to lend some authority to their positions.  Surely no one takes every Facebook campaign seriously—that’s because so many people of such little intelligence use it.  It may be the case that the modern person needs to filter what they read and believe through an Enlightened lens before they comment on current issues.

IV.  Repression Reenacted: Instances of repressed scholarship on the French Revolution under new Oppressive French Regimes and Abroad; What is the significance? 

What becomes clear after moderate research into the French Revolution is that even after 1799, books about the Revolution have been repressed by government who find the very notion of political dissent dangerous.  Even authoritative writers on the topic who we revere today were repressed upon their initial publication.  R. R. Palmer, the translator of Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution comments on the books history from its first publication in 1939: “The French Republic collapsed before the assault of Hitlerite Germany, and was succeeded by the Vichy regime that governed France until the liberation in 1945.  No sympathetic understanding of the French Revolution was desired by the authorities of Vichy France…  The Vichy government therefore suppressed [The Coming of the French Revolution] and ordered some 8,000 copied burned, so that it virtually remained unknown to its own country until reprinted there in 1970, after the author’s death.”  

Gaetano Salvemini’s highly revered book also underwent similar treatment.  “[The French Revolution] has come to be regarded as a classic in its field,” says I. M. Rawson in his Translator’s Note.  “It may seem strange that a work so well known on the continent [of Europe] should not have been made available to English readers long ago.  The explanation lies in part in the fact that the author, an exile for over twenty years from his own country [of Italy] and actively engaged in the struggle against Fascism, as well as in writing a number of works on modern politics, had no time to give his study of the great Revolution a further revision in the light of recent historical research, and was unwilling to allow it to appear in English before this had been done.”

What we see here are Voltaire-figures who, even after the iron claw of the Old Regime had long fallen, still combated oppression and political injustice with that same passion.  Like Voltaire, who was imprisoned in the Bastille twice and was constantly in fear of being jailed when he dared set foot in Paris, Salvemini contested the Fascist regime and honorably suffered more it.  That is the kind of spirit I hope may come of this brooding internal political struggle in America.  Perhaps the melting pot isn’t hot enough yet.

© 2012 by Antarah Crawley