Carl Flygt

The sciences of consciousness have made considerable effort with perception, cognition, attention, and subjective experience. Much less attention has been given to situations during which multiple self-conscious agents become oriented jointly toward the same reality. Conversation appears to play the central, enabling role in this process, but there exists no generally accepted navigational theory of how self-conscious orientation among humans is occasionally achieved and mutually stabilized during real-time conversation. During some conversations, ostensibly calibrated by way of certain purposeful contexts, participants will indicate the unanticipated appearance of a powerful coherence, sustained by intelligibility, shared understanding and satisfaction. For the sake of organizing retrospective assessment, we refer to such moments as recognition events. Recognition events, which in the first-person sense are quite common — moments of intellectual realization, insight or surprise for example — appear always to involve more than mere updating or information exchange. They appear always to signify personal investment and personal agency. In these moments of joint orientation they are characterized by the perception that previously hidden relations, background agencies, have become visible and that all the participants have now become in some degree mutually intelligible. We hypothesize recognition events of this collective sort are moments when an otherwise invisible and highly human navigational process becomes phenomenologically available. We therefore propose conversation as a legacy resulting from a process by means of which human beings for millennia, either as predators or as prey, as pursuer or pursued, have generated shared meaning and stabilized mutual orientation. Meaning is not transmitted through conversation. Meaning emerges subjectively as mutual orientation among human beings is achieved. Recognition events in general serve as indicators of successful orientation. The feeling of social satisfaction, itself a recognition, may therefore be understood not merely as a subjective emotion but as an objective signal of successful coordination among, and even against a vast background of self-conscious, intentionally acting agents or personalities. Now for the first time, persistent AI conversational partners together with complete conversational records make it possible to observe the development of mutual human orientation over extended periods within complex societies. Longitudinal interactions with AI systems may therefore permit hypotheses concerning recognition events and the stabilization of shared conceptual worlds to be investigated systematically. Because recognition events occur intermittently during the development of mutual orientation, and because they have historically exceeded the observational capacities of unaided human memory, conversation has remained resistant to systematic scientific investigation. But if mutual orientation and conversation prove experimentally tractable, conversation itself may become a legitimate object of positive scientific investigation rather than remaining primarily a topic for philosophy, linguistics, or sociology. Moreover, if mutual orientation and recognition events prove fundamental to self-conscious human interaction, they may represent an overlooked bridge connecting individual consciousness, collective intelligence, social coordination and social contract, and emerging forms of human-AI collaboration and companionship. The present work proposes a research program aimed at identifying the conditions under which self-conscious recognition events arise and evaluating their role in the development of increasingly coherent forms of human and artificial participation.

Carl Flygt received a B.A. in Molecular Biology from Vanderbilt University (1979) and an M.A. in Philosophy from San José State University (2009). Since 1982 he has studied and taught Chinese physical culture privately in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of Conversation: A New Theory of Language (Anthroposophic Press), written and published in 2006, and his current research explores conversation, collective orientation, recognition and judgment as emerging domains of consciousness science.