Artificial Intelligence and Our Secret Mind: Human Mediation in Grey Zones

Abstract

CIRET has set up an AI research group to highlight the need for human ethical mediation in the
age of digital technology and binary logic. Francisco Varela has observed that cognition can take place in
the computer field without appealing to consciousness. Yet human decision-making cannot be the result
of cognition alone and requires the interaction between cognition and consciousness. In fact, rationalist
and reductionist models borrowed from the hard sciences have only shown a mechanistic vision of AI or
a biological-environmental vision, which cannot be applied to complex human phenomena occurring in a
grey zone. In this grey or fuzzy zone of mediation, conciliation, and repair, we need the dialectical process
or dialogue between consciousness and cognition. In this context, the proposal of mediating leaders and
managers appears as a possible ethical alternative to demonstrate that consciousness is beyond the logic
of the computer. Humans must remain responsible for all the effective decisions that will help us solve
problems theoretically and concretely. We therefore need an emerging global wisdom that flows from our
conversations about AI and appeals to human consciousness at all its levels of reality. This group produced
a Symposium on November 21 and 22, 2023, in which we imagine that AI may be at the service of human
evolution and resiliency in “learning to be societies” instead of contributing to block our evolutions: if AI
remains a work tool. . . Certainly it will because the creation sparkles still a mystery for men themselves.