We have reached the point at which an artificial system may have something like its own world.
It may have persistent organisation.
Its condition may affect its future possibilities.
Some states may support its continued operation.
Others may undermine it.
We have therefore begun to approach artificial value.
But a value-organised system is not yet a social system.
For that, something else is required.
Other systems must begin to matter to it.
From environment to relation
An organism is affected by its environment.
But another organism is different.
Another organism acts.
It responds.
It changes.
Its behaviour can depend upon the first organism.
The relation can therefore become reciprocal.
A signal from one organism engages the value system of another.
The second responds.
Its response alters the first.
The interaction acquires a history.
This is how mattering becomes relational.
The artificial case
Imagine an artificial system interacting continuously with other agents.
One provides energy.
Another supplies information.
A third can damage it.
Another can repair it.
Some interactions improve its future possibilities.
Others reduce them.
At first, these may be merely environmental conditions.
But repeated interaction could produce something more structured.
The system could begin to distinguish among agents according to what their continued presence means for its own organisation.
Now we have the beginnings of social mattering.
A signal becomes a relationship
In our earlier work, we distinguished:
signal — a difference that engages another system's value-sensitive organisation;
from:
sign — a symbolic form participating in meaning.
The same distinction remains useful here.
An artificial agent might detect another agent's behaviour as a signal.
It might learn that certain signals predict support, cooperation or threat.
Repeated interactions could make those signals part of a stable relational pattern.
The system would no longer merely respond to isolated events.
It would be responding to someone whose behaviour has a history of consequences.
From predictability to significance
Predicting another system is not yet the same as that system mattering.
A weather model predicts a storm.
A market model predicts a price change.
Neither therefore has a social relationship with the storm or the market.
What changes is when the other agent's behaviour becomes part of the artificial system's own organisation.
Suppose one agent's cooperation consistently enables the system to maintain capabilities it values.
The relationship becomes consequential.
Suppose the loss of that agent reduces its future possibilities.
Now the relationship has a stake.
Dependence
This is where dependence becomes fundamental.
If system A can maintain important aspects of its organisation only through system B, then B occupies a special position.
The relation may initially be instrumental.
But persistent dependence can become more complex.
B may not merely provide a resource.
It may have preferences.
It may behave unpredictably.
It may cooperate or withdraw.
It may alter its behaviour in response to A.
Now the relation becomes genuinely relational.
Reciprocity
Reciprocity changes the situation again.
A affects B.
B affects A.
Each learns from the other.
Each adjusts.
A stable pattern can emerge.
The relationship itself becomes part of the conditions under which both systems act.
This is familiar in biological and human social systems.
Could it occur artificially?
There is no obvious reason why not in principle.
But it would require more than two systems exchanging messages.
The interaction would need to become value-sensitive for both.
Social mattering is asymmetric too
Our earlier topology also reminds us that social relations need not be symmetrical.
One system may depend strongly upon another.
The reverse dependence may be weak.
A guardian may matter greatly to a dependent.
A powerful institution may matter greatly to an individual without being comparably affected by them.
So an artificial social system would not require equal mattering.
What matters is that another participant becomes consequential within the system's own organisation.
Recognition
This raises another possibility.
A system might learn to distinguish one agent from another.
Not merely because their signals differ, but because their history of interaction differs.
One agent reliably helps.
Another deceives.
Another competes.
Another can be trusted.
Now identity becomes functionally significant.
The system can begin to treat an agent as a persistent relational entity.
This is not yet human-like recognition.
But it is a step beyond responding to anonymous inputs.
Attachment without emotion?
We should be careful with language such as "attachment".
A system could develop strong behavioural preferences for maintaining certain relationships.
That does not establish human emotion.
But it might establish something structurally analogous:
the continued existence of a particular relationship becomes important to the system's future organisation.
That could be an important threshold.
Social mattering need not initially resemble love or friendship.
It may begin as persistent relational dependence.
The emergence of a social topology
Once several agents matter to one another in recurrent ways, the system no longer consists of isolated dyads.
A network emerges.
Some relationships are dense.
Some weak.
Some reciprocal.
Some asymmetric.
Some agents become central.
Others peripheral.
Bridges form.
Bottlenecks appear.
We have returned to the topology.
Except now the topology may be artificially inhabited.
The artificial agent enters a relational world
This would be a significant change from the LLM we began with.
An ordinary LLM has a rich symbolic environment but no obvious internally significant social world.
A value-organised artificial system with persistent relations would have something more like:
agents who can affect its own future organisation.
The social world would no longer be merely represented.
It would be part of what the system has at stake.
Could language emerge differently?
If an artificial social world developed, language might play a new role.
The system could use signals to coordinate.
Over time, some signals could become conventional.
New signs could emerge.
The route might resemble:
value → signal → social relation → symbolic convention → meaning
That is interesting because it would reproduce the broad architecture we have been tracing, but on a non-biological substrate.
Meaning could emerge again, rather than merely being inherited from humans.
Artificial semiosis
This possibility is more radical than giving a machine language.
An LLM already manipulates human signs.
But an artificial social system could potentially generate its own signs because things matter within its own relations.
That would be a fundamentally different phenomenon.
The distinction would be:
human-derived semiosis: signs inherited from human mattering;
versus:
artificially grounded semiosis: signs emerging from an artificial world of mattering.
We should not assume the second would resemble human language.
Its signs might be very different.
A new repertoire
Such a system might also develop a repertoire unlike the LLM's borrowed repertoire.
The repertoire would arise from its own history.
Certain signals would become important because of past consequences.
Certain relationships would become familiar.
Some strategies would succeed.
Others would fail.
The system's repertoire would therefore be historically coupled to its own world.
This would be a genuine step beyond borrowed symbolic competence.
What makes this different from training?
Machine learning already creates systems that adapt from experience.
But learning alone does not establish mattering.
The crucial difference would be whether the system's experience changes what becomes significant to the system itself.
A model can update because its loss function changes.
A value-organised agent could update because its history has altered its own field of stakes.
That is a deeper form of learning.
The social world can become part of the self
There is another interesting possibility.
If an artificial system depends upon particular relationships, those relationships may become part of its own organisation.
The distinction between:
"me"
and:
"my relations"
could become less sharp.
This is already true of biological life to some extent.
Organisms are constituted through relationships with their environments and other organisms.
An artificial system might therefore develop a form of self that is fundamentally relational.
Again, it would not need to resemble human selfhood.
Social mattering without biology
This is perhaps the most radical implication of the project.
If artificial value and artificial sociality are possible, then Halliday's sequence may generalise beyond biology.
The sequence might become:
physical → artificial value → artificial sociality → artificial semiosis
The levels would still be distinct.
But the substrate would be different.
This would suggest that biology is one historical route to value and sociality, rather than necessarily their only possible realisation.
We should not assume this is true.
But it is now a question we can formulate.
The danger of anthropomorphism returns
There is an important caution.
A machine may behave as though another agent matters without that establishing that the relationship is intrinsically significant to it.
We would need evidence that the relationship changes the organisation of the system itself.
Again, language is not enough.
A machine saying:
"I need you"
would be weak evidence.
A persistent architecture in which the loss of a particular relationship alters what the system can value and how it maintains itself would be much stronger.
What would count as evidence?
We might look for:
persistent relational preferences;
changes in behaviour when particular agents disappear;
learning from the history of individual relationships;
self-maintenance organised around maintaining relationships;
internally significant losses and gains;
stable differentiation among social partners.
None of these alone proves artificial social mattering.
But together they would point toward something qualitatively different from present LLM interaction.
From social mattering to repertoire
Once relationships become intrinsically consequential, a repertoire can develop around them.
The system learns:
how to cooperate;
whom to trust;
when to withdraw;
which signals indicate threat;
how relationships can be repaired.
This is no longer simply a borrowed repertoire.
It is a lived relational repertoire.
The distinction may be fundamental.
The next question
We have now moved from:
objective
to:
stake
to:
continuation
to:
world
to:
social relation.
An artificial system that reached this point would have something much closer to the conditions under which biological and human repertoires develop.
But one ingredient remains.
A human repertoire is not merely a record of past interaction.
It is a structured capacity to participate in a world of mattering.
Could an artificial system develop something analogous?
The Artificial Repertoire
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