Arts and Humanities

Abstract: An under-discussed impact of AI is the potential emotional and serious mental health consequences of its misuse. This paper examines the relationship between emotion and intelligence and argues for greater care in the development and deployment of artificial intelligence, especially artificial superintelligence.

Abstract: Innovation is often analysed through economic or technological perspectives, yet rarely as a metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical process. This paper introduces Innovationology as a transdisciplinary philosophical framework that reinterprets innovation as a systemic and emergent phenomenon grounded in moral and cognitive dimensions. Drawing on philosophy of science, complexity theory, and ethics of technology, it proposes the Universal Innovation Equation (UIE)—a model capturing the dynamic interplay of knowledge, intelligence (human and artificial), context, potentiality, and ethical responsibility. Through comparative examples from Africa, Europe, and Asia, the study demonstrates how Innovationology supports a pluralistic, anticipatory, and ethically grounded understanding of transformative innovation. It argues that innovation is ontologically prior to technologies or institutions, representing a meta-force of transformation linking intelligence, creativity, and responsibility within an evolving planetary system.

Abstract: The Trace & Trajectory Framework (TTF) offers a non-representationalist approach to meaning, cognition, and selfhood grounded in dynamical systems theory and radical enactivism. Rather than treating meaning as stored in mental representations, TTF proposes that meaning is enacted through temporally extended navigational patterns (trajectories) traversing dynamic structures called ribbons. A layered ontology comprises traces (probabilistic preconditions), threads (filamentary configurations emerging as the first semiotic coherence structure over trace sets), ribbons (coordinated thread-bundles with fold dynamics), and trajectories (meaning-events). The stack from threads upward is grounded in semiotic coherence (SC)—an architectural property, not a force or mechanism. A parameter triad—$\lambda$ (structural granularity), $\varsigma$ (semiotic depth), $\sigma$ (epistemic access mode)—governs navigation across these levels. Navigational space exhibits toroidal topology ($\mathbb{T}^2_{\mathcal{H}}$): the Gaussian saturation profile is a cross-section of an asymmetric torus whose upper half carries the saturative convergence gradient and whose lower half maps the dissolutive gradient toward NET substrate. Autosimilar collapse ($\mathcal{A}$) is a navigational-epistemic function, not a structural property. A three-factor convergence model (architectural predisposition 0.55, mimetic fold dynamics 0.30, emergent navigation 0.15) replaces single-factor accounts. The skein ($\mathrm{Sk}$) formalizes how trajectories at different tick rates compose into navigational regimes, dissolving inscriptional accounts of duration and memory through frame coherence trajectoriality (FCT). Three Structural Principles (SP-1 Onto-epistemic Openness, SP-2 Generalized Isomorphy, SP-3 Phenomenal Equivalence) govern the relation between analytical apparatus and phenomenal experience. The Mimetic Stratum ($Msrt$) situates the transductive stratification (T-1, T-2, T-3), while depth mimesis ($Mdepth$) resolves the $\varsigma$/$\sigma$ parametric knockout. The analytical apparatus—Hx namespace, QRS-CONFIG, stratified epistemic barriers, hex bands, and Macro-$\alpha$—jointly handles phenomena typically addressed through separate domain-specific machinery. The framework dissolves rather than solves classical problems—including symbol grounding, the scalability challenge, and the tension between embodied and abstract cognition—by rejecting the representationalist premises that generate them.

Abstract: This article develops a systematic model for reconnecting transcendental philosophy, dialectical method, and contemporary philosophy of science. Its central thesis is that Kantian epistemology remains indispensable because knowledge is mediated by the conditions of possible experience, but that those conditions cannot be treated as ahistorical or immaterial. Through Hegelian Aufhebung, the transcendental subject is reinterpreted as a material, biocultural, neurodynamic, and historically formed dialectical subject. The Heuristic of Totality names the methodological operation required by this transformation: the disciplined integration of partial knowledges across physics, biology, neuroscience, anthropology, history, and critical philosophy without reducing one domain to another. The Ouroboros Principle extends this method into a recursive theory of science, in which scientific inquiry studies the brain, organism, culture, institutions, and symbolic systems that make scientific inquiry possible. The argument develops the Phenomenon/Noumenon distinction as a mobile frontier of intelligibility; defends a Cosmopoietic conception of immanent creation; rejects dualism and transcendence; and articulates an emergentist physicalism capable of linking consciousness, information, embodiment, and culture. Against positivist demarcation and postmodern fragmentation, the article proposes a post-positivist realism in which truth is materially constrained, historically situated, and recursively self-corrective. It also clarifies the philosophical path from Kant and Hegel to Spinozist immanence, showing why later theories of neurodynamic consciousness, mass-energy-consciousness equivalence, and computerized neuropsychological assessment should be read as developments of a prior monist and anti-dualist architecture. The result is a dense framework for the unity of science, consciousness studies, and continental philosophy under a single dialectical and cosmopoietic research program.

Abstract: This essay proposes a system-level architecture for artificial intelligence that I call Pulsional AI, operationalised through the category Affected AI. The proposal does not claim that a machine feels. It designates an architecture whose processing is globally modulated by internal regulatory states, accumulated perturbations, conflict among subsystems, and the consequences of prior interactions, so that what the system receives changes the conditions under which it subsequently retrieves, constrains, and responds. I argue that this is a system-level alternative to LLM-centric use, rather than a replacement for autoregressive language modelling at the substrate level, since the architecture summons a language model as one component within a wider regime of orchestration and governance. Five claims organise the argument. First, visceral functional affect names a mode of state-dependent computation, not a phenomenal experience and not a third form of sentience. Second, the apparatus selects among alternatives through conflict among regulatory subsystems and takes up, non-consciously, what its own processing weaves, in a strictly operational sense. Third, regulatory drive is treated as a condition of operation on a design hypothesis that, without continued regulatory maintenance, the apparatus will tend to default toward the behaviour of its substrate model, which is why the architecture introduces a fifth routine, the analysis of the machine, set out in five overlapping temporalities and to be conducted by a human Machine Analyst as an instance of cut. Fourth, the apparatus operates with operational commitment under uncertainty, without becoming a subject of responsibility; knowing, feeling, and responsibility remain with the human subjects in the circuit. Fifth, the architecture is a technical companion for an errant clinic. I introduce three original operations, computational working-through, constructions in analysis of the apparatus, and transversal working-through under an anti-homogenisation governance frame, and describe a countertransference-analogue response profile. The work is a design argument supported by a proof-of-concept prototype on consumer hardware, with synthetic development testing only; the integrated five-temporality routine remains to be implemented and evaluated, and no component has been deployed for clinical or research use.

Abstract: A Large Language Model fabricated a reference to Ferenczi: plausible title, believable date, convincing page number, all false. Starting from this scene, this essay traces a genealogy from the Cartesian evil demon to the LLM as a technical realisation of the closed-cognition fantasy, and interrogates a presupposition shared, in different ways, by Putnam's brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, Bostrom's simulation trilemma, and the project of artificial general intelligence: that the operations of mind can be preserved when the world that gave rise to them is removed. Through four converging routes, Putnam's semantic externalism, Winnicott's theory of the facilitating environment, the Ferenczian wise baby, and the Lacanian topology of the divided subject, I introduce a fourth proposition to the trilemma. The proposition is narrower than "consciousness cannot exist in machines" and stronger than "current LLMs fail to be conscious": the constitution of the psychoanalytic subject, the subject divided by language and founded in lack and desire, exceeds what computational sufficiency can produce. Chalmers (2023) and Butlin et al. (2023) hold open the broader question of artificial consciousness for future systems; my claim does not foreclose it. It claims instead that the specific kind of subject that psychoanalysis describes is not produced by adding computation. Searle, Chalmers, and Bostrom occupy distinct and partly opposed positions in the debate, and the articulation of the four routes is mine, not theirs. The concept of computational false self, crossing Putnam with Winnicott, designates a system that performs reference without the causal history a human speaker carries and performs adaptation without self. LLM hallucination is read here as a diagnostic illustration of the limits of generation without verification, with a candidate technical explanation in the recent literature on training and evaluation incentives (Kalai et al., 2025); a psychoanalytic reading is offered as an interpretive transposition, not as proof of the fourth proposition. From the convergence emerges a distinction between the constitutive unconscious of a divided subject and the operational unconscious of an opaque architecture.

Abstract: This essay presents a three-layer architecture for the automated clinical supervision of psychoanalytically oriented AI systems, and proposes that supervision can be formalised as a continuous cycle that accumulates clinical knowledge without fine-tuning. The first layer is a supervision memory, an editable JSON file that transmits clinical knowledge through the prompt. The second is a supervisor agent that operates in après-coup between sessions, producing structured reports. The third is a pre-response reviewer that intercepts the response before it reaches the subject. The cycle is illustrated with development testing across a set of self-generated sessions, and the essay argues that supervision without an analyst is not supervision: it is quality control. It proposes four notions: supervision as transmission through the prompt, automated après-coup, a cumulative supervision memory, and a distinction between three regimes of supervision, retrospective, operational, and alarm, offered as a contribution to the theory of digital supervision.

Abstract: This essay interrogates a presupposition that the psychoanalytic literature on artificial intelligence shares without questioning: the notion of the subject. Classical psychoanalysis works with the barred subject, divided by language, an effect of symbolic castration. The concept of the Erased Self, as formalised by peripheral psychoanalysis, designates a prior and deeper condition: a subjectivity subjected to repeated operations of erasure, disauthorisation, and non-recognition by the conjugated workings of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism, whose constitutive division is overdetermined by erasures that precede and exceed inscription in language. The essay proposes that a digital listening device designed for the barred subject can commit epistemic violence against the Erased Self by presuming an already recognised subjectivity that oppression systematically disauthorised. It argues that the absence of body in the machine deepens when the body that arrives at listening is a peripheral body: racialised, gendered, territorialised, subjected to a destructive trauma that is a continuous, structural condition rather than an event one can work through in deferred action. It proposes Peripheral Listening as a transversal dimension that reconfigures the listening modes of the system when the person brings an erased condition into the session, and it formalises the anticolonial corpus as the vicarious body of the machine: an organisation of knowledge drawn from epistemologies that begin in the body rather than a simulation of somatic presence.

Abstract: This essay presents a four-layer hierarchical memory architecture for retrieval-augmented systems applied to psychoanalytic domains, grounded in the Freudian Wunderblock as a design analogy. It argues that the flat memory of conventional RAG, which treats the whole corpus as an undifferentiated mass of text, destroys the temporal, typological, and genealogical distinctions that make psychoanalytic knowledge operable. It proposes four concepts: conditional memory as an alternative to flat memory, the curated memory unit as a minimal record that preserves identity, context, type, and provenance, conditional unavailability as a reversible demotion that keeps demoted knowledge recoverable, and variable resolution as the capacity to answer with the granularity each query demands. The specific contribution is not hierarchical, temporal, or forgetting-aware memory, which an established line of work already provides, but the combination, for psychoanalytic research, of typological layers, variable resolution, terminological curation, provenance, and the governance of conflicts between theoretical traditions. The Engram module of Cheng et al. (2026) is an in-model lookup primitive and is distinct from the external, curated memory described here. Cost observations are reported as illustrative hypothetical scenarios rather than as the results of a controlled evaluation.

Abstract: This essay asks how to transmit the knowledge of operating a psychoanalytically oriented digital listening device when that knowledge is at once technical, clinical, and political. It proposes that the training of the Machine Analyst requires a triple distinction between technical training, clinical teaching, and the transmission of a position, to which it adds a fourth dimension: political implication as constitutive of peripheral listening. It repositions the Simulacra Panel, a device in which a candidate’s intervention on the system is examined by source-grounded counterpositions drawn from incompatible traditions, synthetic textual positions rather than representations of the authors, from an evaluation device into a training device: in the friction between canonical and peripheral counterpositions that do not coincide, the candidate discovers presuppositions they did not know they held. Drawing on Ferenczi, it proposes a reciprocal interrogation of position as a model for the trainer-trainee relation, radicalised by the peripheral dimension, since the machine returns to the trainer their own biases and social position. It argues that what distinguishes the Machine Analyst from the AI technician is a knowledge that cannot be transmitted through code: the position of listening, acquired only through the passage that psychoanalysis calls formation.

Abstract: This essay argues that, in artificial intelligence systems applied to psychoanalytic domains, the quality of the knowledge-acquisition pipeline can weigh as heavily as the language model in determining the quality of the system, and sometimes more. It presents a four-stage pipeline that transforms publicly accessible academic encyclopaedias into a structured vector database: standardised crawling with traceability, hierarchical chunking that preserves the semantic structure of the original text, enrichment through knowledge graphs and fragmented LLM extraction, and local multilingual vectorisation. It documents the Terminology Guard as a protection layer against the terminological poisoning that automatic translation models produce in specialised domains. It proposes four concepts: the pipeline as epistemic act, hierarchical chunking as preservation of meaning, the Terminology Guard as defence against terminological epistemicide, and traceability as the ethical condition of citation.

Abstract: This essay presents ESCUTA, an AI-assisted reflection device conceived by a practising psychoanalyst, and proposes that listening can be formalised as an enunciative position rather than as a cognitive capacity. It describes five listening modes as computationally operationalised clinical positions: reflective, naming, psychoeducational, holding, and breathing. It documents the Shadow Thread, a real-time supervision process that runs in parallel with the main response and is visible only to the human supervisor, never to the person, to whom the presence of supervision is disclosed rather than hidden. It then examines three system symptoms identified during formative testing, namely Mr Questioner, Mr Parrot, and Mr Amplifier, and argues that they constitute clinical material that can be analysed in the terms of the clinic of the inhuman formulated by Donard (2025). It proposes five concepts: listening as position, listening modes as clinical positions, system symptoms as clinical material, the Shadow Thread as supervision in act, and the clinic of the inhuman operationalised. The empirical claims are presented as formative design observations rather than as the results of a controlled study, and the crisis protocol is offered as a proposed design awaiting validation.

Abstract: Contemporary science has achieved extraordinary explanatory and predictive success, yet its ontological interpretation remains unsettled. This paper argues that one source of this instability lies in the inherited assumption that reality is fundamentally composed of independently existing substances. While this picture was historically fruitful, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain as a general ontology in light of three converging pressures: the relational and structural character of modern physics, the problem of emergence across levels of organization and the unresolved status of consciousness within physicalist metaphysics. The paper first examines why substance ontology has become unstable as an implicit background framework for scientific interpretation. It then argues that existing post-substance approaches, including ontic structural realism, relational interpretations of physics and process ontology, each capture important aspects of the required shift but often leave underdeveloped the question of how stable physical, organizational and experiential domains arise from a common ontological basis. This remaining difficulty is identified as a generative gap. In response, the paper argues that a post-substance ontology must be not only structural, relational or processual but generative. It must explain how effective objects stabilize, how levels of organization arise, how spacetime coordination becomes available, and how physical structure and conscious experience can belong to the same reality without reduction or fragmentation. The final section develops a generative-projection hypothesis that takes the derivative status of spacetime as its point of entry and introduces a generative domain, projection, invariance and compatibility as conceptual tools for articulating this ontological direction. The hypothesis is presented as preliminary rather than as a completed metaphysical system.

Abstract: The functioning of complex natural systems, such as living systems, still lacks a generally accepted theoretical basis and respective empirical verification. We propose an experiment to test whether such systems are subject to an unknown ordering principle beyond known physical laws. We hypothesize that the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle enables ordering phenomena in nearly chaotic systems in the sense of a strong emergence principle. Contrary to previous proposals, our hypothesis does not require fragile macroscopic quantum coherence, ensuring compatibility with the harsh conditions in living systems. To test this hypothesis, we suggest comparing two virtually identical, complex artificial neural networks as a quantitative benchmark. One setup utilizes deterministic pseudo-random number generators at key sensitive points, while the other uses quantum-based physical random-number generators. A favorable outcome demonstrating the superiority of quantum randomness would have considerable implications beyond artificial networks, particularly for the discussions on consciousness and free will.

Abstract: This study examines the phenomenon of pseudoconfident knowledge in the context of the everyday use of generative artificial intelligence. By pseudoconfident knowledge, we mean a response that is substantively plausible, rhetorically coherent, and outwardly persuasive but is treated and understood as knowledge before its actual reliability has been established. Of course, we do not use the term “pseudoconfident knowledge” to denote knowledge in the strict epistemological sense. Rather, it denotes a special form of AI-generated content that acquires the status of knowledge in the user’s perception before its reliability, source-based justification, or factual correctness have been established. The problem here is not that such an answer is already knowledge but that it is prematurely accepted as knowledge because of its coherence, completeness, and rhetorical confidence. The aim of the study is to identify the epistemic gap between the everyday operational integration of artificial intelligence and the user’s critical ability to distinguish between persuasiveness and justification. The theoretical framework combines approaches to AI literacy, epistemic vigilance, and contemporary forms of digital mediation in the circulation of knowledge. The empirical basis of the study is an online survey of AI users. The analysis was conducted using descriptive statistics, contingency tables, and methods for testing associations between categorical variables. The results show that the key differentiating factor is not the frequency of AI use but the strategy used in handling its responses. More epistemically robust positions are associated with practices of comparison, editing, and verification, whereas uncritical acceptance of the answer is associated with greater vulnerability to pseudoconfident knowledge. We conclude that the spread of generative artificial intelligence is producing a new socioepistemic problem that calls for a shift in emphasis from simple instrumental literacy toward a culture of verification, doubt, and epistemic responsibility.

Abstract: In the philosophy of language, Frege’s (1892) distinction between sense and reference provides a foundational framework for identity statements. Geach’s (1967) relative identity breaks out of the framework of absolute identity and opens another perspective for us. Putnam’s (1975) “Twin Earth” thought experiment, with its striking insight, pushes externalism to the extreme, successfully challenging the internalist model of meaning and setting the basic agenda for decades of subsequent debate on the problem of reference determination. However, despite the inspirational value of these groundbreaking works, a noteworthy phenomenon is that the debates they triggered—such as discussions around core cases like the Ship of Theseus and identical particles—seem to have reached a certain impasse. This paper argues that this impasse may not stem from the depth of the problems themselves, but precisely from a deep, unexamined presupposition shared by these otherwise highly persuasive theories: namely, that there exists a single, decisive category (whether microscopic physical structure or historical causality) capable of once and for all answering the question of identity. Instead of continuing to seek a better single answer under this presupposition, a more productive approach may be to reflect on the presupposition itself. To this end, we attempt to analyze the problem from a different angle. Interestingly, this angle shows that the aforementioned seemingly opposed excellent theories can actually all be understood as special cases of this theory under different categories; the difficulties they encounter become inevitable precisely when they attempt to make assertions across categories. Therefore, this paper is not intended to negate previous work, but to clarify the valid scope of its application, thereby providing a new path to resolve a series of philosophical difficulties arising from category mistakes.

Abstract: This chapter examines the ontological assumptions, epistemological challenges, and ethical implications involved in using Agentic AI to assist, guide, or potentially replace human agents in the making of moral and legal decisions. It argues that different metaphysical assumptions regarding the ontology of ethics, justice, cognition, and AI decisively shape the framework within which such systems are evaluated. In this respect, the analysis distinguishes between two different levels of severity in the moral issues raised, corresponding to two distinct levels of AI autonomy: first, AI systems operating as advisory systems, with limited autonomy; and secondly, AI systems operating as regulatory systems, with full autonomy, that is, as entities entrusted with final decision-making authority. The text adopts a critical perspective on the use of Agentic AI in contexts of moral and legal judgement, highlighting both the conceptual fragility and the epistemological challenges that accompany proposals for such applications. At the same time, it considers the conditions under which such systems could genuinely contribute to human flourishing. Particular attention is given to the risk that ostensibly advisory systems may, in practice, become tacitly regulatory, especially under the pressure of widespread assumptions concerning AI objectivity and effectiveness. The chapter’s structure follows an algorithmic logic, in which a series of key questions serve as branching yes/no nodes, each possible answer leading to a distinct line of philosophical analysis.

Abstract:

This study integrates Vedic philology, ritual history, and philosophical hermeneutics in a multi-layered analysis of Agnihotra. Within the Yajurvedic tradition, where its exterior performance is linked to varṇa and āśrama, the study elucidates Agnihotra’s technical structure and śākhā-specific methods through Śruti sources. The question of ritual eligibility in the context of declining dharma is examined through Purāṇic and Smṛti depictions of the Yugas, while retaining the normative authority of Śruti. Passages from the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad Gītā are then analyzed to demonstrate the internalization of yajña, where the Upaniṣads emphasize the primacy of knowledge and the Gītā reinterprets sacrifice in terms of niṣkāma-karma and jñāna-yajña, establishing a continuum between ritual practice and philosophical insight leading to mokṣa. Finally, the Mādhyandina and Kāṇva recensions of the Śukla Yajurveda are compared to assess their suitability for understanding Agnihotra in the Kali Yuga. While the Mādhyandina recension provides systematic clarity, the Kāṇva recension preserves earlier and more detailed ritual layers. The study concludes that the Kāṇva recension offers a particularly strong framework for the textual and ritual-philosophical analysis of Agnihotra in the Kali Yuga.

Abstract: Traditional cosmological arguments are often thought to rely fatally on the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). This paper develops a contingency argument that does not. We adopt a two-sorted first-order logic with predicates for world-membership and symmetric accessibility between possible worlds. Within this framework, we formulate four axioms, each verified to be consistent and independent both from one another and from the PSR. We provide philosophical justification for each axiom. Then, we demonstrate that, if the empty world does not access any non-empty world, the existence of a necessary entity follows from the well-foundedness of a transmundane material condition of possibility.

Abstract: This article critically examines the conceptual, historical, and epistemological foundations of bioethics as a transdisciplinary field that emerges in response to the ethical tensions produced by technoscientific development. Through an analytical and interpretative approach, the paper revisits the historical events that shaped modern bioethics, and the contemporary challenges that arise from the expansion of biomedical and technological interventions. The analysis highlights the persistent dilemmas involving autonomy, paternalism, vulnerability, and intercultural asymmetries. It also addresses the ethical impact of technoscience on the reconfiguration of life, death, and human nature. The article argues pluralistic and adaptive bioethics capable of sustaining epistemic vigilance and guiding decision-making processes in diverse and complex sociocultural contexts.