Legal Semiotics

It is a legal impossibility that an object/symbolic entity that police departments create actually exist. Law enforcement creates an entity that tests the boundaries of semiotics. Since semiotics is easier to define by what is not rather than what is. Semiotics links linguistic and non-linguistic information to offer plausible conclusions that place the interpretation of language in a social context also known as semiosphere or for this purpose – a chat room. The recursive nature of computers allows for interesting questions regarding the believability of law enforcement’s created entity.

A referential fallacy exists – the fact that simply because an object exists, doesn’t necessarily follow that the object/symbol really exists. The entity created by law enforcement is an effort by them to deceive another party through a computational medium i.e., a chat room. The hyper-real diorama law enforcement and the second party (suspect) create only exists in a hyper-real world, therefore, a legal impossibility to show that criminal solicitation, online solicitation or that any crime occurred, It is impossible to determine the thoughts of an individual across a computational medium. Proving intent and preparation is difficult to do unless the second party (suspect) removes himself from that hyper-real medium, leaves the computer, the house and travels to a predetermined location in which case intent and preparation could be said to occur. Even so, leaving many questions unanswered.

Typically, intent and preparation is difficult to prove yet law enforcement agencies continue to push the envelope when it comes to prosecution. Law enforcement agencies go to some effort to create the elements of intent and preparation. Often times law enforcement finds itself continuing with investigations even though the elements are not present, by each party creating their own symbolic entities – already a communication problem exits confusing messages can be exchanged. For example a series of commercials create hidden messages which will either be recognized by the viewing public or not. As an example, talking infants, talking dogs, cows during commercials, do animals really speak? What are the messages conveyed?

Returning to Intent and Preparation Law enforcement is forced to create intent and preparation by suggesting to the suspect at other side of the computational medium that he is seeking the company of an underage female. The suggestion to meet with the female is a non-real event. Through mere conversation law enforcement, prosecutors, grand juries, cannot and should not true bill or prosecute such cases regardless of the dialog. Law enforcement is unable to determine the true thoughts of the suspect’s mind. The preparation is determined by getting the suspect to 1. Drive to a location, 2. Purchase items to use along with intent. So, if Joe Public (suspect) does not show up to the predetermined location then preparation is completely non-existent. Both the entity of law enforcement and Joe Public remain at the computational medium. This is to say that the umwelt created by law enforcement only existed in hyper-reality. Hence, the diorama is in fact not real! Intent and Preparation components are non-existent. What is not real, cannot become real because law enforcement makes it so. Both Grand Jury and Jury can error because of the lacking of legal sufficiency to indict and or decide on a trial.

Because the juries fail to understand the complexities of computational semiotics, Juries are unable to discern the facts of such cases – they lack the ability to understand the semiosis cycle within a digitalized environment. Juries fail to understand computational semiotics therefore, unable to make clear, true and correct determinations thus putting to question 1. How can a true bill be concluded 2. How a sentence can be handed down. Hence, legal-sufficiency is in question! The question that must be fully understood by juries is where exactly does law enforcement’s object/entity exist, in the mind of law enforcement, the chat room, The servers, across the cyber medium? Where exactly do these entities exist?

Legal Impossibility:

A  hypothetical; forty-five year old Hispanic male is arrested on August 8, 2004, charged with Aggravated Sexual Assault. He is accused of attempting to solicit a 17 year old female over the internet. In actuality it is a fifty-plus year old detective Bruce Steven Marshall who passes himself off as a sixteen year old Molly Shaw, who is deaf and home alone for the summer, seeking an older male to befriend her. A typical online sting operation!

Detective B.S. Marshall in an effort to go covert onto the inter-net he creates a symbolic entity an object called Molly Shaw, his object/entity is created for the sole purpose of deceiving older males into believing he (Marshall) is an underage female. The Detective/law enforcement creates such entities to deceive another through a computational medium. (i.e., chat room).

At the time, unknown to Detective B.S. Marshall, the 45 year old Hispanic male, in actuality is a technologist working for a school district. Investigating a porn pop up issue, when the technologist commences to investigate the source of the porn he realizes that a principal who owned and operated the P.C. with the porn had actually made contact with the Detective posing as Molly Shaw. When the technologist uses the unit on his home network, his computers are infected by a Trojan which Marshall launches. At which point the technologist wants to find out the I.P. information of the person controlling his network. At this point the technologist also creates an entity known as Mr. Texas, 33 years old body builder attached to U.S. Army’s 160th SOCOM, employed by Black Water Security and State Department. The hyper-real diorama both Marshall and the technologist create is nothing more than an umwelt. Yet our criminal justice system chooses to prosecute?

Semiotics is a broad cross disciplinary work that spans the fields of philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology to name a few. Semiotics is best understood as an understanding of signs, symbols, how meaning is created, understood and conveyed to others. It can be said that semiotics is easier defined by what is not than what is! Semiotics links linguistic and non-linguistic information to offer plausible conclusions that place the interpretation of language in a social context i.e., semiosphere or for this argument a chat room environment.

Charles Sanders Peirce the American philosopher had proposed a triadic formulation of the sign. The sign or the representamen is the form the sign takes. The interpretant is the sense made out of the sign the object is that which the sign refers. There exists multiple types of interpretants which are dynamic immediate, and final. There are infinitum possible matrixes. It was Umberto Eco who had introduced a perspective on semiotics – “The referential fallacy” – “The fact that simply because a sign exists, doesn’t necessarily follow that an object exists”. Messages are not always decodable. Logic would follow that, simply because the Detective claims to have an entity – 16 year old Molly Shaw - Molly Shaw, doesn’t really exist. Neither does Mr. Texas. Thus, a “legal impossibility” to commit a crime.

The internet is a gigantic semiotic system a massive collection of signs, icons which show the form of something. A question exists, “Can Juries, Judges, Prosecutors and law enforcement, develop the capability of extracting logic from language on the web, and will they have the ability to understand meaning and intentionality? As our society, our culture, and our daily lives become more integrated with semiotical environments, will the courts also integrate? As humans we are in a constant state of trying to understand our place in society and our universe, with the advent of computers and technology we move to a new state of constant re-evaluation. Will our legal system also reevaluate it’s understanding of semiotics, and how it integrates law with semiotics as the law applies to crimes against property, exclusively, computer crime: more specifically online solicitation.

Reality in an umwelt also known as our sensible environment it is our best understanding of reality. However, it is important to stress that the umwelt is not reality. It is only our best understanding of reality! In this sense, our sensors are the primary source of information that flows into our mind. These sensors do provide a continuous and partial information about phenomena occurring in the umwelt. From this continuous and partial information we can extract what is known as singularities, i.e., clusters of information that can be aggregated under a single concept.

These singularities are discrete Entities that model in a specific level of resolutions or phenomena occurring in the world. A question to place here is in the case of the 45 year old male technologist- “Was the unwelt, the object/sign/entity Molly Shaw created by law enforcement real or not”? Is there a way to separate the real world from the umwelt? Is there an intentional definition of singularities which could or would/did alter the knowledge units? My contention is once the granules of information also known as singularities are identified in the umwelt they need to be encoded to become knowledge units. This codification requires a representation space and an embodiment vehicle (structures) that is placed within the representation space. Can accurate communication be said to exist? This is of course a generic example of my argument I realize that there exists factors such as structural and interpretational problems along with additional problems with semantic identification within the structures, i.e., Icons, indexes, symbols. Are knowledge units passive or active? Do these structures exist as data or real form? Here again, my contention a legal impossibility exists - no crime committed. Important point to ponder – knowledge information can be used to establish and implement plans through actuators. However, prescriptive knowledge will not necessarily end up with an action. We can use prescriptive knowledge along with their umwelt, while they can make predictions they rarely generate actions. The manipulation of knowledge never leads to the understanding of manipulated knowledge. Allow me to explicate, In a cognitive system real world objects can be identified and represented by an internal structure. Also a cognitive system may detect changes in the object attributes, create new objects and destroy existing objects. In addition, the cognitive system may plan a modification in the world configuration from its internal model (e.g., changes in object attributes, creation of new objects destruction of the object.) Finally, the cognitive system can act effectively in the world (real, hyper-real) to implement planned modifications through its output interface.

The input interface provides a way for a cognitive system to perceive world objects. In general the input interface gives only partial view of the world. This is because the world perception may be restricted by a range of sensors. Also the complexity of the model used to represent the objects may vary and only an approximate model is realistic. A cognitive system attempts to identify objects from its input interface data, but in principle there is no guarantee that the objects really do exist as such in the real world. In other words although it’s naturally prepared to identify objects, there is no explicit guarantee that the objects represented internally are actual world objects. A basic element of a cognitive system responsible for judging when a world object is recognized is called an interpretation. When the forty five year old technologist informed Detective Marshall that the “Game was Over”, his statement. “Hey Asshole, the game is over!  Do you really think I’m that stupid, to believe you’re a 16 year old female – fu—You”! The technologist had detected Marshals I. P. address and had triangulated his position with a GPS device. The technologist had already judged the model to be neither, unique or exact. He plays along with the Detective only to toy with him. On the other hand Detective Marshall literally believes Mr. Texas. In the process of deceiving the technologist the Detective ends up deceiving himself. He believes Mr. Texas is a 230 pounds body builder, 160th SOCOM, etc, etc. Again, I reiterate, a legal impossibility. Allow me a few more words, Performing semiosis means extracting meaning, for instance, the object in the Signic process is not necessarily a physical object of the real world, but a presumable object of the real world. Usually the cognitive system does not have complete knowledge about the objects of the real world. Thus, the object it recognizes can only be presumable. Each of which is represented by it's interpretant. A common cognitive phenomenon which helps grasp this idea, is when a person is looking at the outline of a mountain and identifies objects that do not really exist. The human cognitive system presumes that there is an object in the contour of the mountains and creates an interpret ant for it. Therefore, the real existence of an object is not a necessary condition for interpretation. Another significant issue about cognitive system is where a world model is assumed to exist within the system. Then information coming from the input interface is compared to the existing model to generate actions that interact with the world. The existing model remains unchanged. In contrast a dynamic cognitive system modifies its models whenever the input data cannot be identified with any object already known by the system. We may then say that dynamic C.S. are characterized by adaptation and learning. Also important to note that in semiotics the interpretant is an intellectualization of the object where as a phenomenon is interpreted as knowledge. Knowledge is associated with a representational model which in semiotics corresponds to a sign. In semiotics, the concept of object is not necessarily tied to physical objects. Abstractions of physical objects are the main kind of object. But the concept of objects in semiotics also encapsulates actions, changes, truth, and reasoning. Molly Shaw, the detective’s entity only existed in Hyper-reality. In fact only Detective Marshall believed his hyper-real contour. His knowledge base was insufficient to make true determinations.

Sensorial knowledge, object knowledge and occurrence knowledge are three types of knowledge sets – symbolic indexical and iconic. The symbolic knowledge corresponds to a name by using a name references an environmental phenomenon. The indexical knowledge is also used to refer to an environmental phenomenon – but in an absolute way as in the symbolic case. Reference to a phenomenon is relative and starts from a previously identified phenomenon. The iconic knowledge corresponds to a direct model of the phenomenon it represents. They are split into three basic categories, sensorial, objects, and occurrence knowledge.

Sensorial knowledge is information that is mapped directly to environment through special devices i.e. sensors and actuators. Sensors contain information that is collected by devices and translated to a sensorial knowledge. Actuators use sensorial knowledge to change environment through the device. Sensorial knowledge concerns the information relative to a particular temporal instance, i.e. a specific state of actuators and sensors. Finally, generic sensorial knowledge refers to a set of specific knowledge, usually sharing common characteristics.

These are a few of the important dynamics that are in play during an online exchange. It’s clear to see how the diorama Detective Marshall created lacked semiotical components as well as criminal components (Intent, Prep.) to prosecute. Further a legal impossibility.

As an aside to the above, I must add another element. Dicent knowledge is defined by truth values linking sensorial, object, or occurrence knowledge with world entities. The terms forming an expression can be either primitive propositions or logic connectives. There are two types of primitive propositions 1. Iconic and 2. Symbolic. The iconic is a composition of terms forming a sentence. The symbolic are names associated with other propositions these truth values should agree with the proposition.

As a final thought synthetic arguments produce conclusions from its premise. Conclusions derived from synthetic arguments will be contradictory with existing knowledge.

Online solicitors engage adult detectives who represent symbolic/objects victims – none real victims. The crime itself (Online Solicitation) is considered a crime against property not a crime against persons. Hyper-reall object-entities/persons cannot be made real just because law enforcement says so. Why? Because it’s a legal impossibility to make a symbolic character a victim. A victim that didn’t exist before or after the so called suspect engaged the detective.

There exists a tessellatum that is present and does in fact differentiate the victim – real, intended, symbolical, there are several levels of granularity between the above mentioned victim types. The symbolic victim is in all actuality- non-existent. Why? Because the adult detective poses as a semiotical character (the under age victim). The hyper-real diorama the detective creates only exists in a somewhat possible foreseeable future! Hyper-reality is not real, Marshall’s identity like the technologist became material symbols. Symbols as conventional signs have the ability to become phony to deceive! In the process of deceiving the technologist he deceived himself.

Umberto Eco has been quoted as saying…”The battle for survival as a responsible human in the communication era is not to be won where communication begins, but where it ends.

When Law enforcement takes it upon itself to ensnare an individual and fails to define full intent and preparation within the semiosis cycle it becomes a legal impossibility.

By A.P. Diaz,

“All references are in bold”