Semantic Theory of Modernity, Homo Technicus, and the Philosophy of Adjacency
Abstract
An ethical articulation of social systems theory with cybernetic epistemology can serve as a threshold for a semantic theory of modernity grounded in synaptic crossing and attentive to homo technicus. This approach cuts through the limitations of second‑order observation by renewing Kuhn’s paradigm and Wittgenstein’s form of life across multiple interacting realities. For this reason, an autopoietic account of homo technicus and the philosophy of adjacency reconfigures the meaning of modernity, civil society, ethical imperative, and recognition in the posthuman age. This framework establishes the basis for a semantic genealogy of modernity in which synaptic crossing, tessellated meaning, and ethical transformation converge across scientific, cultural, and theological lifeworlds.
Introduction
Luhmann characterizes autopoietic systems theory as a radical paradigm shift grounded in operational closure—a decisive break from ontological epistemologies. Cognition and communication no longer mirror the environment but generate meaning through self‑referential operations.[1]
Accordingly, praxis and poiesis must be distinguished: praxis names teleological action oriented toward potentiality and purpose, whereas poiesis denotes the self‑producing activity through which a system becomes both its own product and its own process.
This distinction clarifies how autopoietic systems enact their own unity from within. Building on this framework, I redeploy Hegel’s concept of recognition as a systemic safeguard that prevents autopoietic life from collapsing into collective egotism. This post‑Hegelian, post‑systems integration challenges the reduction of modernity to functional differentiation and opens the possibility of a modular modernity grounded in semantic adjacency.
To articulate semantic modernity, I introduce exbodiment and homo technicus as markers of the posthuman age shaped by AI, requiring a cybernetic mode of thinking at the intersection of cognition and the meaning field. This provides the groundwork for analyzing how the posthuman condition reconfigures civil society, recognition, and the ecology of life.
Within the dimension of the geometry of life, artificial intelligence gains meaning as an exbodiment of the human—an ethically engineered entity. In the posthuman modernity, AI engages in an indirect concursus with human beings and participates in the co‑constitution of civilization within an adjacent field of concepts.
This framework opens the way for a semantic genealogy of modernity in which synaptic crossing, tessellated meaning, and neurodynamic intentionality reshape the ethical and ecological horizons of the posthuman lifeworld. Within this geometric cybernetic frame, modernity becomes warm‑streaming—grounded in living systems, recognition, solidarity, and the divine prolepsis that animates the lifeworld.
Communication, Systems, and the Problematic Regime of Modernity
Varela and Maturana’s account of autopoiesis shows how living systems sustain themselves through recursive production and boundary‑forming operations. Building on this biological theory, Luhmann distinguishes three primary types of systems: (1) social systems, composed of communication; (2) living systems, such as cells, bodies, and brains; and (3) systems of consciousness, or minds. This conceptual architecture exemplifies Luhmann’s creative synthesis of biology and social theory, extending the logic of autopoiesis from cellular self‑production to the dynamics of meaning in society.
Luhmann argues that communication reproduces itself not by transmitting information but by selecting and re‑selecting meaning from a horizon of sense. Modernity, in this view, emerges through functional differentiation: the proliferation of autonomous subsystems—law, economy, politics, education—each operating through its own code and maintaining operational closure while remaining structurally coupled to others.[2]
Against this reduction of modernity to subsystem differentiation, Claude Lefort identifies a deeper symbolic mutation: the displacement of power into an “empty place” that no actor can permanently occupy. Modern civil society is therefore self‑instituting, marked by contingency, division, and the indeterminacy of democratic life. Totalitarianism represents a pathology of this symbolic order, attempting to close the openness of modernity by reincorporating power into a unified body.[3]
Axel Honneth, drawing on Hegel, recounts that the basis of abstract right and individual freedom is an intersubjective structure of recognition. For Hegel, social or ethical freedom in modernity is realized through institutional practices oriented toward the common good.
Civil society thus becomes a sphere of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), whose institutional structures enable modern society to sustain itself through its own activity—this forms the institutional core of Hegel’s account of modernity. The capitalist market economy operates within moral principles—fair wages, just exchange, and contributions to the common good. Durkheim, in a distinct sociological register, analyzes the capitalist division of labor as a potential source of organic solidarity when rationally organized. Justice and fairness become functionally necessary presuppositions for social integration, generating solidarity rather than the pathological fragmentation characteristic of early industrial capitalism.[4]
In a different register, Michel Foucault, by contrast, interprets the Enlightenment as an age of critique—a philosophical interrogation of the present. Kant’s call to “dare to know” signals a release from immaturity through the public and free use of reason, in contrast to rational despotism. This modern attitude involves a break with tradition and a willingness to grasp the heroic aspect of the present—the will to heroize the now.[5]
Taken together, these approaches converge on the insight that modernity is inseparable from the ethical, symbolic, and institutional conditions of civil society along with power relations. Yet it is civil society and democratic resilience—not the economic framework alone—that shape the modern attitude in an age of critique. Acultural theories risk reproducing the Weberian “iron cage,” losing the dialectical whole of recognition and the organic solidarity of labor.
Cultural theories highlight multiple, often untranslatable forms of life, but risk undermining recognition, solidarity, and the democratic resilience of Enlightenment’s public use of reason.
I refine this semantic account of modernity within an autopoietic horizon grounded in recognition, organic solidarity, and the cultural symbolic lifeworld. Modernity’s mutation is not only political but biological, ecological, and relational, shaping how living systems generate meaning, sustain social bonds, and negotiate vulnerability within the broader ecology of life.
A semantic theory of self‑creation thus defines an ensemble of modernities in structural coupling with multiple references and environments—a post‑Eurocentric constellation stratified across society, culture, religion, and web of life. Such an autopoietic approach engages Charles Taylor’s discourse on alternative modernities while avoiding the binary between acultural modernization theories and culturalist accounts.[6] Modernity becomes a semantic ecology in which societies generate meaning, sustain coupling, and cultivate resilient forms of life. Its genealogy reaches back not merely to bourgeois society but to ancient civic practices of participation, deliberation, and associative agency—forms of adjacency and plurality that Marx’s critique failed to grasp.[7]
This account integrates cultural values, religious ethics of responsibility, material interests, power relations, and political governance within a genealogical arc of emergence, vulnerability, and renewal. Modernity is evaluated through semantic self‑creation and the ensemble of structurally coupled realities shaped by recognition, organic solidarity, and a well‑organized division of labor—within which religion plays an essential role.
Information Individuality, Exbodiment and Homo Technicus
According to David Krakauer, an information theory of individuality is grounded in coarse‑graining analysis of an organism’s development and in its proleptic actuality within biological time. A concept of individuality is used to denote how the individual is established by boundary identity and by its structure of adjacency with other systems or environments.
Krakauer recognizes that the organism–environment dichotomy collapses once environments are understood as extended phenotypes and constructed niches—engineered ecologies that participate in the organism’s informational identity. If the world grows as a body emerging from both self and non‑self, the niche becomes an adaptive extension designed to overcome the limitations of embodiment, generating a super‑physical system. In this light, the principle of selection in the natural world is fundamentally a principle of exbodiment.[8]
If the interaction between the interior mind and the exterior engineered artifact is ongoing, improvements in cognition generate new modifications of design, while advances in artifact architecture enhance the acquisition of skill and expertise. The abacus and chess thus exemplify the helix of exbodiment, where recursive coupling between mind and material intelligence produces higher‑order competence. This feedback can be visualized as a helix bisecting the exterior “material dynamics of collective invention,” in which artifacts participate in cultural evolution, and the interior “mental dynamics of cognitive representation,” carried by individuals.[9]
If exbodiment names the outsourcing of human cognitive labor into engineered matter and cultural artifacts—extensions of the biological self that reshape the mind through recursive feedback—it also discloses a cultural history of exbodiment across music, natural history, cognition, and astrobiology. The “Helix of Exbodiment” illustrates this continuous feedback between mind and matter, dissolving the boundary between organism and environment and embedding cognition into shared architectures of intelligence.[10]
Krakauer’s information theory of individuality extends to homo technicus, who increasingly outsources information to AI and its exbodiment. This view introduces a new techno‑chapter of semantic modernity by showing how information becomes estranged into the AI sphere and how exbodiment shapes posthuman society. In this context, exbodiment offers a way to examine cultural objectification and estrangement in the Hegelian tradition, revealing how technology contributes to externalization and human need—either supporting greater freedom or reinforcing structural dependence and alienation.
If AIs were to acquire human‑like intellectual abilities—or even achieve forms of “superintelligence” through recursively self‑improving architectures—their development could illuminate not only the hard problem of consciousness, namely how physical processes entail subjectivity. But also the hard problem of life—what distinguishes living systems from non‑living systems across evolutionary time.
As Krakauer and colleagues argue, living systems have dominated planetary history for billions of years, and any unified account of natural and artificial intelligence must therefore explain the continuity between life and mind. In this view, advances in AI expose the deeper question of how informational architectures generate agency, intentionality, and adaptive behavior across both biological and artificial domains.[11]
If AI, as a linguistic dissipative structure, opens the field of ex‑somatic semiotics, it generates meaning outside the human body. As technologies merge with the human body and mind, a form of technological embodiment arises, raising the question of whether such integration constitutes an embodied extension of mind, a techno‑reification of cognition, or a new mode of exbodiment at the geometric strata of meaning.
My interpretation links Krakauer’s notion of exbodiment with Hegel’s concept of externalization, showing how cognitive outsourcing becomes a contemporary form of cultural objectification as well as its estrangement or reification. By grounding Krakauer’s information theory of individuality and his social analysis in a Hegelian philosophical framework, I extend semantic modernity into the posthuman condition, where meaning, technology, and life co‑constitute new modes of existence. In this context, exbodiment marks the conceptual transition from homo faber to homo technicus, situating the human within an emerging cybernetic ontology shaped by technological environments.
Second Order Observation and AI’s Conceptual Field
Cybernetic modeling remains essential to Luhmann’s systems theory, shaped decisively by Heinz von Foerster’s insight that no system can organize itself in isolation. What appears as self‑organization is always grounded in structural openness—ongoing exchanges with an environment that sustains the system’s recursive operations.[12]
As von Foerster notes, the living organism is a “third‑order relator” that computes the relations necessary to maintain its own integrity. Maturana and Varela extend this insight into their concept of autopoiesis, defining living systems through recursive self‑production.[13] Varela’s work on distributed neural ensembles shows that coherence in the brain emerges not from pre‑specified rules but from recursive interaction—an architecture that exceeds the symbol‑manipulation paradigm.[14]
Cybernetics, originally concerned with communication and control in animals and machines, has since become the science of regulation in the most general sense, offering a foundational paradigm for analyzing feedback, control, and self‑regulation across diverse domains.
For von Foerster, cybernetics is the science of “regulation, computation, ordering, and entropy retardation,”[15] a conceptual framework he applies directly to the human brain. Second‑generation cybernetics recognizes that the observer is situation‑dependent and participates in the very system being observed.
Von Foerster’s distinction between trivial and non‑trivial machines becomes crucial for understanding AI. Non‑trivial machines are historically conditioned, recursive, and unpredictable. In much of contemporary AI research, cybernetics can be reconceived as a framework for understanding world‑modelling across intelligent systems. Second‑order cybernetics introduces oversight through internal models that evaluate and refine regulatory performance, revealing fundamental connections between world‑modelling and agency.
Yet a more cautionary stance is warranted: once a system enters the domain of second‑order cybernetics—containing strange loops, self‑modelling, and self‑compression—the observer in a posthuman context can no longer assume full control over the system.
The ethical implications become increasingly obscured, for second‑order cybernetics in world‑modelling displaces the human observer and recursively models its own governance processes, generating opacity and enabling systems to engineer unexpected—even dangerous—consequences.[16]
Without ethically oriented goals, advanced technologies risk drifting toward dystopian futures—expanding corporate or governmental control, eroding democratic life, and degrading human agency. A humanistic position must therefore integrate second‑order cybernetic ethics with contemporary AI concerns. These concerns require a broader ethical horizon, one that includes theological perspectives on human agency and technological limits.
As Ted Peters argues, the bioethical principle of beneficence applies to enhancing human health and wellbeing, particularly in contexts of medical breakthrough. Yet the difficulty lies in the transhumanist assumption that human intelligence correlates with increased access to data, as though the human mind were fundamentally an information pattern embedded in a computational substrate. Because human intelligence is inseparable from human selfhood, it cannot be meaningfully altered by simply expanding informational access. A public‑theology posture is therefore essential to avoid both overestimating technological capacity and expecting too much from it. No degree of technological progress can heal human sin, evil, or suffering; only God’s future—adventus—can.[17]
Synaptic Crossing and Cognitive Systems
In the autopoietic discussion of cybernetic modeling, the neuron offers a useful analogy: signals converge, integrate, and propagate through synaptic junctions that coordinate distributed activity. Rather than focusing on the biochemical details of neurotransmission, the synapse can be understood heuristically as a structural operator—a site where distinctions, signals, and relational patterns are integrated into coherent activity. Its microscopic space contains the entire lifecycle of neurotransmitters—synthesis, packaging, release, receptor binding, and termination—revealing a dense architecture of recursive coordination.[18]
Synaptic crossing sustains structural coupling through communication, transposition, and inter‑systemic crossing. It prevents systemic closure by generating adjacent meaning‑ensembles and anchors the genealogical analysis in the structural whole of recognition. The system’s internal structure generates changes and determines how it responds to perturbations from other systems and the environment, which in turn shapes how it perturbs itself.[19]
For von Foerster, the necessary components of cognitive processes—perception (self‑referential relation), memory (a specific modus operandi), and inference—arise through interactions within a neural network characterized by recursion and self‑reference. This configuration constitutes what may be called a “Cognitive Element,” a minimal unit of cognitive processing. Such an element functions as a “Cognitive Tile,” which, when combined with other tiles, forms larger mosaics or tessellations of cognition. These tessellations express the emergent coherence of distributed cognitive activity, revealing how complex cognitive wholes arise from the recursive interplay of locally organized, self‑referential units.[20]
When combined, these tiles form tessellated ensembles that express the emergent coherence of distributed cognitive activity and meaning. Such ensembles allow flexible representation of relational structures—perceptual, symbolic, and linguistic. The cognitive whole and ensemble, configured in tessellated patterns, allow for high flexibility in representing relational structures—both those derived from perception and those constituted through symbols or “linguistic operators.” In so doing, tessellated ensembles function as generative matrices through which distributed cognitive activity achieves coherence, enabling the continuous transposition of perceptual and mnemonic content into meaningful linguistic form.[21]
Foerster’s second‑order cybernetics illuminates recursion and observation, but it cannot fully account for the dynamic emergence of meaning and intentionality within neural ensembles—precisely the level at which ethical responsibility must be anchored. In fact, our brain and mind are embedded within complex cognitive wholes, fundamentally committed to projecting ourselves corporeally into the world.[22]
The brain’s intentional activity generates and assimilates meaning through learning, memory, information, and communication, mediated by linguistic operators embedded within definite provinces of meaning and multiple realities. Our perceptions (noema), committed to the world, precede our conscious apprehension (noesis), despite their correlation. In fact, it is perception that organizes sensations and constructs meanings; it is precisely what neuronal populations do, characterizing brain function.[23]
Semantic Genealogy: Synapses, Tessellation, and Recognition
Synapses sustain the brain’s identity while enabling richer informational flows; they are the generative loci where embodied consciousness emerges within a living matrix. By analogy, when a religious community loses its synaptic role—its capacity to enrich society through meaningful relation—it ceases to function as a platform for civil society, democratic life, or ethical discernment.
A semantic theory of individuality names the continual generation and transformation of meaning through two fundamental dynamics: tessellation, the patterned ensemble of distinctions and forms of life that sustain a dialectical whole of recognition; and synaptic crossing, the intentional points where linguistic, cultural, and experiential domains converge into new semantic configurations.
Semantic theory of individuality draws on Foerster, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn to form a three‑part framework that explains how living systems generate and transform meaning. Krakauer’s information theory of individuality introduces a semantic orientation that extends human meaning‑making into posthuman contexts, where exbodiment reshapes language and shifts the boundaries of shared paradigms.
Krakauer’s theory resonates with Hegel’s externalization, transforming language practices and shifting the contours of modern paradigms to yield new semantic constellations across distributed realities.
Like neural synapses, semantic crossings mark cultural points where distinctions and experiences combine to generate new patterns of meaning. Without such crossings, structural engagement collapses into closure, diminishing a system’s capacity for enriched self‑organization and generative production.
Individuality—human, social, or biological—arises from how systems connect, interact, and pattern themselves, not simply from the information they contain. I place homo technicus at the center of semantic modernity and propose a techno‑epigenetic horizon where science and religion meet through a cybernetic interface rather than metaphysical fusion.
Semantic realism offers a neuro‑anthropological view in which human consciousness reflects the creative processes unfolding within nature, revealing emergence as its underlying logic. Consciousness is not only emergent but continually generates new forms of experience beyond what came before—a continual self‑transcending process. Human minds are deeply entangled in symbolic cultures shaped by the lived experience of countless individuals across continents and millennia.
If Ted Peters locates ethical responsibility in God’s adventus, my account strengthens this horizon by grounding human responsibility in the neurodynamic emergence of meaning itself—where living systems encounter the divine through the concursus of embodied life. In this view, God’s adventus enters into concursus with living systems and with human history, participating in the unfolding of meaning within the ecology of life.
In this sense, consciousness becomes analogous to an ongoing creatio ex nihilo, the felt experience of evolution happening through us. “To be human is to know what it feels like to be evolution happening.”[24]
Semantic realism links the brain’s dynamic processes of meaning with research on memory and sign‑making, forming the basis for narrative. It highlights the neural, biological, sociocultural, and ecological synapses that enrich each tessellated ensemble through adjacency, nonlinear information flows, and epigenetic resilience in the social cultural transformation.
In the historical course of artist transformation and recognition, the works of Cézanne, Turner, and Escher form a continuous trajectory from early modernity through its middle period and into the contemporary era. These works do not merely represent their respective epochs; they trace a historical lineage showing how the body‑subject’s coupling with the world undergoes transformation across time.
Cézanne’s color planes disclose the primordial field of perception. The body‑subject composes the world through the adjacency of colors and the repetition of subtle differences, allowing perception to stabilize as a living pattern.
In Turner’s explosive interplay of light and movement, the body‑subject collides with the world, generating meaning through an intense temporality. The adjacency of light and darkness captures the moment in which the world trembles and emerges within embodied perception.
Escher’s work reveals a modern sensibility in which the body‑subject reconstructs the world through geometric transformation and the rhythm of adjacency. Drawing on the tessellating logic of Islamic art, he presents a visual geometry that shows how meaning is continually reconfigured through patterned adjacency.
This artistic transformation is echoed in James Joyce’s Ulysses, where ten years of wandering and liberation are condensed into three days in Dublin. Here, the adjacency between world and body‑subject becomes the geometric structure of narrative time.
Color and color, light and darkness, pattern and pattern, world and body, meaning and perception—these adjacencies reveal how, within the geometry of life, time follows the body‑subject as the primordial structure of meaning‑generation, oscillating and announcing creative emergence.
Such artistic, perceptual, and geometric transformations form the foundation of semantic modernity. Consciousness is thus a product of symbolic, cultural, and evolutionary processes, grounded in the neurodynamic and epigenetic architecture of life itself.
Synoptic Crossing: Paradigm and Form of Life
Semantic synthesis names the relational process through which paradigms evolve by the interplay of embodied forms of life, autopoietic meaning formation, and embodied imagination. This episteme brings Wittgenstein and Kuhn into dialogue: language games disclose meaning through patterned resemblances, while paradigms articulate the pre‑theoretical structures that orient scientific inquiry.
To describe synoptic crossing, I use the idea of a central hub that supports each pattern of meaning without blending them together. This hub keeps differences intact while still allowing points of contact that create new understandings.
Semantic realism brings together the patterned structure of language games and the tensions that arise in crossings to explain how different meanings can stand side by side. This position maintains that meaning continually generates and transforms itself through synoptic crossings—transpositions and mutual clarification within a dialectical whole of recognition.
As Kuhn notes, the different paradigms relate by resemblance and modeling to established achievements within the community. It is the presence of such a network that enables us to identify the corresponding object or activity with confidence, even in the absence of a strict definitional core.[25]
Wittgenstein presents a complicated network of similarities, overlapping and criss‑crossing and captures the dynamic web of significance. This relational web underlies the self‑referential coherence of a paradigm, whose meaning‑structures arise not from fixed essences but from the dynamic interplay of family resemblances within a form of life.[26]
Through ongoing exchange and reinterpretation, a paradigm or form of life becomes open rather than closed, serving as a place where semantic realism connects the two. Their interaction is grounded in the dynamic interplay of language games and synaptic exchange across multiple realities within linguistic networks and diverse forms of lifeworld.
If the word “green” is an instrument of language used in ascriptions of color, it is not a representation of some inner essence. In this view, the signifier does not represent a hidden essence but participates in a tessellated network where the signified shows itself through synaptic crossing.[27]
As Kuhn observes, communication breakdowns require recognizing different language communities and becoming translators. As Kuhn emphasizes, “Briefly put, what the participants in a communication breakdown can do is recognize each other as members of different language communities and then become translators.”[28]
In semantic realism, science and religion also meet at crossing points that turn their differences into sources of new insight and creativity. It reframes language games in terms of the linguistic networks shaped by different practices and forms of life. A signifier works within a linguistic network where its meaning appears through shared intentions, contexts, and the meeting of different perspectives for bilingual illumination.
Within semantic modernity, public theology carries a bioethical imperative, in which the theological horizon of adventus establishes the upper boundary of ethical responsibility. The divine adventus situates a public theology of living systems within the neurodynamic emergence of meaning itself—where the divine is encountered through the concursus of embodied life, addressing ecological anthropology within the web of life.
Semantic Autopoiesis and Ethical Revolution
Speaking a language is a form of life: meaning arises not from instrumental use but from participation in a shared lifeworld where distinctions, embodied practices, and ethical orientations converge. To speak meaningfully is also to act responsibly; violations of integrity or the ethical misuse of language undermine the very conditions of life and being. Ethical language therefore gestures toward value, orientation, and the meaning of life, even while acknowledging the limits of linguistic expression.As Wittgenstein suggests, “the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis” [29]—that is, under the aspect of the lifeworld.
This insight becomes the point of departure for a semantic‑autopoietic account of language and transforms Wittgenstein’s form of life into a site of ethical revolution. Wittgenstein’s focus on synchronic, rule‑governed practice, however, sidelines the diachronic dimension of grammar—the inherited structures through which linguistic forms of life are transmitted. Meaning emerges in the interplay between diachronic grammar and synchronic use, where truth‑validity arises through relational, historical, and embodied coupling in language networks. A semantic theory of realism focuses on how meaning emerges through patterned connections and points of crossing, while also challenging the biases and fixed assumptions that obscure understanding.
The linguistic signifier bears a symbolic and ethical relation to the signified; ethical language discloses the intersubjective dimension of human existence and the moral values embedded in living together.
As Wittgenstein states, “Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living.” [30] Therefore, “ethics, so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable can be no science. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” [31]
Language is not the house of Being but the house of the lifeworld—a synaptic, tessellated, and proleptic matrix in which meaning emerges through semantic adjacency and embodied crossing. Within this matrix, scientific communities sustain shared standards, negotiate anomalies, and engage in disciplined inquiry through ethical commitments to honesty, integrity, and mutual accountability.
As Kuhn argues, scientific problems and techniques “may relate by resemblance and by modeling to one or another part of the scientific corpus which the community in question already recognizes as among its established achievements.”[32]
Yet Kuhn does not fully address how to break through the problematic regime of incommensurability in terms of semantic crossing and intertextual transposition—processes necessary for the innovation of a new paradigm.Wittgenstein’s form of life, likewise, does not explain how social inequality and embodied histories shape the very conditions of linguistic practice.
An autopoietic approach to linguistic meaning responds to these limits by showing how language grows through creative reuse, interaction with its environment, and the adaptive capacities of living systems. Meaning takes shape through relational processes, gaining depth from the multiple layers of context and the points of contact where new interpretations emerge. This framework explains how social inequality becomes biologically inscribed and how these inscriptions influence cultural‑linguistic networks within the genealogical realm.
Such a framework leads to ethical revolution, for social change unfolds as a continuous process of cultural transformation.As Maturana and Valera argue, “A revolution is a revolution only if it is an ethical revolution.”[33]
This semantic stance stands in contrast to Luhmann’s theory of moral binary codes, which frames morality through the distinction between positive (good) and negative (bad) values for managing risks within communication systems—a “reflective theory of morality” [34] in a negative sense, necessary for modern society yet limited in its capacity to articulate ethical transformation.
Epilogue: Public Theology and Modernity
Luhmann’s autopoietic turn reframes social systems as emergent orders constituted through functional differentiation, reducing complexity by generating autonomous domains of operation. Luhmann’s theory of functional differentiation provides a structural framework for the adjacency of modernity. He describes society in terms of functional differentiation, self‑reference, and meaning‑processing systems—an approach that is highly useful for analyzing the adjacency structures of modernity.
However, Luhmann does not address the layers of life, neural dynamics, evolution, technology, or ecology, nor the biological geometry through which meaning is generated. Lafont’s account of semantic modernity addresses social differentiation and symbolic media, yet it does not engage with how meaning arises from biological, neural, and evolutionary generative processes.
The semantic–ethical matrix becomes the space where a public theology of living systems takes shape, fostering recognition, solidarity, and democratic resilience. It works through a cultural–synaptic hub that supports new patterns of innovation and emancipation without collapsing their differences.
This approach addresses an ensemble of structurally coupled realities across society, culture, and religion. It grounds plurality in recognition, solidarity, and immanent critique for a project of emancipation from sedimented opacity, oppressive hierarchy, and obscurity, as seen in different paintings such as Cezanne, Turner, and Escher.
I understand modernity not as a chronological stage or institutional arrangement but as a semantic mutation—a reorganization of the symbolic order that structures social life. Society is self‑instituting, aware of its own division and contingency. A semantic theory of individuality is emboldened by Krakauer’s information theory of individuality and its related concept of exbodiment in posthuman society.
Krakauer’s concept of exbodiment offers a structural parallel to Hegel’s phenomenology of Spirit, where individuality forms through estrangement, cultural development, and the ethical demand for recognition. Taylor’s reading of Hegel, shaped by Wittgenstein’s forms of life and language games, further clarifies this philosophy of recognition, adjacency, and alternative modernities.
Connecting Krakauer to semantic modernity enriches the entire discussion by integrating information theory, technological externalization, and Hegelian cultural objectification into a single genealogy of modernity that naturally extends into the posthuman condition.
This perspective reshapes semantic modernity and its forward-looking horizon by considering how techno-rationality is guided—and constrained—by ethical commitments. In effect, modernity cannot ignore the ecological construction of multiple realities, which reshapes social life, its adjacency structures, and the dialectical field of recognition.
Proleptic intentionality anticipates and brings forward the lifeworld’s unrealized horizons, not through linear progress but through complex patterns of meaning, divine concursus and adventus. It aligns less with functional differentiation than with a constellation of social, cultural, ecological, and technological meanings that evolve and enrich themselves through repeated crossings and ethical transformation.
A semantic theory of modernity is adjacent to posthuman refiguration rather than heroizing the present in a break with tradition. Tradition remains present in the vivid present, which is imbued with a proleptic future; it is driven by an intentional and genealogical arc that breaks through regimes of effective history—especially those shaping the periphery and innocent victims. This episteme bridges and crosses the limited independence of the Wittgenstein–Kuhn paradigm through synaptic transposition, enriching modernity as multiple realities in mutual illumination, recognition and surplus meaning.
In the discussion of semantic modernity and homo technicus, world‑modelling can be understood as any informational structure through which a system cognizes the world. Large Language Models (LLMs) clearly meet this criterion insofar as they compute statistical probabilities for the next best world.
Yet their world‑modelling capacities become uncertain in the absence of real‑world grounding, producing hallucinations and context drift. World models are not neutral abstractions but context‑dependent constructions shaped by embodiment, dynamics, goals, and social learning. We must therefore refine the question of artificial minds, broadening the conceptual space and cultivating a more pluralistic and precise understanding—without losing human dignity or ethical responsibility within posthuman adjacency.
In this light, public theology of living systems advocates for semantic modernity which unfolds as a multilayered ecology of meaning. Therefore, biological life, technological externalization, and cultural formation converge, and generate new individuated realities. Their coherence depends on recognition, interface, and the ongoing autopoietic renewal of the lifeworld. In this semantic genealogy, synaptic crossing and neurodynamic meaning provide the connective tissue through which public theology of living systems enters the ethical horizon of semantic modernity.
[1] Luhmann, Theories of Distinction, 114.
[2] Moeller, Luhmann Explained, 25.
[3] Lefort, “The Question of Democracy,” pp. 9–20, in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).
[4] Honneth, The I in We, 29.
[5] Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” 43-57.
[6] Talyor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” 172-196.
[7] Marx’s conceptual reduction—the collapse of civil society into the logic of the capitalist mode of production or the bourgeois invention—appears clearly in his Eurocentric representations of “Oriental” societies such as India and China, framed through the colonialist schema of the Asiatic mode of production. For a slightly different interpretation, see McCarthy’s Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, 177–78.
[8] Krakauer, “Exbodiment,” 3.
[9] Ibid., 6.
[10] Ibid., 1.
[11] Krakauer, et al. “World models, artificial general intelligence and the hard problems of life–mind continuity,” 3.
[12] Foerster, Understanding Understanding, 3.
[13] Ibid., 251.
[14] Ibid., 192.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Krakauer et al., “World models, artificial general intelligence and the hard problems of life–mind continuity,” 11.
[17] “Interview with Dr. Ted Peters: “On AI vs. IA and Theology of Future,” Admin AIF, October 8, 2020, aiandfaith.org.
[18] Casey Henley, Foundations of Neuroscience, 58. 154.
[19] Foerster, Understanding Understanding, 105.
[20] Ibid., 119.
[21] Ibid., 122.
[22] Freeman, How Brains Make up Their Minds, 35.
[23] Ibid., 18, 21.
[24] Ursula Goodenough and Terrence W. Deacon, “The Sacred Emergence of Nature,” in The Oxford handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton, 865.
[25] Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 45.
[26] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. 66.
[27] Ibid., 50.
[28] Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 202.
[29] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, 31.
[30] Ibid., 44.
[31] Ibid., 51.
[32] Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 45-46.
[33] Maturana and Valera, Autopoiesis and Cognition, xxvii.
[34] Moeller, Luhmann Explained, 111.