Overcoming the limits of rationality in humans and in rational machines through ubuntu’s relational personhood

I was told that half of all Brazilians consider themselves to be of African descent. And if that’s true, it means I’m home. But, show of hands, how many in this room would consider themselves of being of African descent? Three out of fifty. . . four, five, six. I think that shows that there is a problem with this picture. It’s not fairly distributed who even gets to be in this room, to have these conversations and these discussions.

The theme is relanguaging. What does it mean to relanguage? Most of us in this room speak a colonial language, right? Portuguese, English, Spanish. . . This demonstrates the lingering effects of colonization. That even as we speak about decolonization, we have to use colonial languages to do so. How do we escape this? Are we stuck with this? Are we stuck with the colonial structures and will we ever break free from that? Is it possible to break free from white supremacy? Is this a thing that we can do in this lifetime or in a century? Are we stuck with these power structures that exist?

As an example of relanguaging, I think of patois from Jamaica. What they’ve done with language is they’ve used different terminology to replace certain words. If you’re speaking about another person, if you’re speaking about community, you say “I & I” because that represents the oneness and the connection of the community. Here’s another way, and I don’t know if it’s possible: Can we return to Indigenous languages? I’ve been thinking a lot about this for myself. In the future, I hope to get to a point where I can present in my own language, in Zulu, and publish in my own language. So if people want to have access to my work, they’ll have to learn Zulu or find other ways.

I always battle with this question: How much are we contributing to power structures by participating? And can we not participate, and still make progress and still make change? How many of us are familiar with the famous Afro-musician from Nigeria called Fela Kuti? He said something like this: “In the case of Africa, music cannot simply be for enjoyment. Music must be for revolution.” We don’t have the luxury to just enjoy it—we have to use that to fight our own struggles. I’d like to take the same concept and apply it to technology. It also can’t simply be for efficiency, for optimization; technology must be for revolution. What is revolution? What does it mean to revolt? And how do we actually successfully revolt? If we need a revolution then we must be in some type of struggle, in some type of war. As we’re talking about decolonizing language, decolonizing technology, decolonizing AI: do we truly sense that we’re in a struggle, do we sense that we’re in a war?

In the last few years, you might have heard the phrase “data colonization,” referring to how tech companies are “colonizing” poor populations in the Global South. Some people have worried that speakers are using the term without understanding what it means. When it comes to colonization, I think of my own personal history. I’m from the southern part of the African continent. For us, colonization happened about thirty years ago. Everyone I know grew up during colonization. My parents did, my uncles, my cousins. Zimbabwe was freed from the British in 1980. South Africa was freed in 1994. I carry the struggles and the feeling of what it means to be colonized, because my grandparents took up arms, and they went to Russia to train to fight against the colonizers in Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, and so forth. For me, decolonization means something totally different. It means taking back. It means revolution. It means fighting for what’s right, fighting for your freedom, fighting for your liberty. So if we’re talking about tech and colonization: are we truly willing to fight for our liberty? Are we truly willing to go all the way? Not necessarily taking up physical arms, but can we take up other types of arms to take back our land and our sovereignty?

When I’m asking questions, I also encourage feedback and participation because that’s how we communicate in the African context. It’s communal. It’s collaborative. If you have something you want to shout, then you shout it back. I’m not here because I’m an expert to push information down to you. You don’t have to just receive it, we come to a consensus. It’s informal but also cultural.

I want to continue with the theme of revolution and the theme of struggle. If we’re looking at colonization, or coloniality, what is our struggle? I’d like to suggest that our struggle is a struggle to be human. Why? Because if we trace the essence of colonization, the essence of one’s ways of thinking, feeling, and sensing the world, it all traces back to the fundamental question of what it means to be human. When it comes to the African continent, and also in the Americas, the Indigenous people were not seen as human. Their ways of doing, of living, and worshipping were not considered to be human. Europe had to come and teach these people essentially how to be human. What does it mean to be human in the Western conception? What would the average Euro-American philosopher claim is the fundamental difference between humanity and animals?

[Participant from audience] Thinking.
[Mhlambi] Yes, thinking. Anyone else?
[Another participant from audience] Having a soul.
[Mhlambi] Having a soul, yes, that sounds like Descartes. The mind and the soul. What else?
[Another participant from audience] Conscience.
[Mhlambi] Yes. If we return to the ancient Greeks, we find that one of the earliest philosophers, Aristotle, says that man is a rational animal. Again, when it comes to thinking, it seems that the ability to reason is what distinguishes humans from animals. Centuries later, Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, famously says: “I think, therefore I am.” Again, the theme of rationality recurs. Our ability to think is what makes us distinctly human, right? Other Western philosophers, like Kant, speak about what it means to be modern. Kant places the highest emphasis on reason when he talks about moral autonomy. He says that universal laws exist, and that we can use our reason to understand these universal laws; therefore, we can arrive at moral conclusions that don’t contradict. This is Kant’s categorical imperative. Again, this idea of reason and rationality is so essential to being human.

But does rationality have its limits? I like to think that rationality does have its limits. There are things that it can’t fully describe. The mathematician Leibniz was inspired by another mathematician, Ramon Llull (whom I’ll speak about in a little bit). Leibniz is inspired by Aristotle, who laid the foundations of formal logic. If you’re familiar with Aristotle, he wanted to logically prove different concepts. For example, he would say: man is an animal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is an animal. This logically makes sense, and he believed that you could logically reach conclusions. Leibniz then has the idea that we can find a type of algebra, a type of mathematics, that allows you to represent every concept that’s there. Then, you can find relationships between those concepts and then use a machine to determine the truth of those concepts. Does this sound familiar? Sounds like “AI”. Leibniz spends his life trying to find an algebra, a symbolic language to reach the truth. At that time, he was famous for inventing the first “calculator,” describing a machine that lets you add, multiply, subtract, and divide. He thought he could make another machine to compute the truth.

Now let’s return to Leibniz’s inspiration: Ramon Llull, a logician from the thirteenth century. Llull was inspired by the idea of divination. How many of us are familiar with divination? It’s the ability to better predict the future while dealing with a lot of uncertainty. You speak to the gods, the deities, and you try to foretell the future. I know in Brazil there’s definitely Ifá divination because there’s a large Yoruba population that was enslaved and brought here. If you’ve spent time in Bahia, you might have seen some of that. I’d like to play a quick video to show you what I mean by divination. This is the Ifá divination system, from West Africa, from the Yoruba people in particular.

[Onaje Woodbine] We know that you’ve come for consultation for Ifá divination. And that you’re here to solve a problem. We pray to Ifá that your problem will be solved. The Yoruba religion is made up of an ethnic group that is from the southwestern region of Nigeria and has spread throughout the African diaspora. What we’re gonna be doing today, is really looking at a major part of the practice called Ifá divination. We’ve developed an iPhone app so that a person can at least simulate what it might be like to be in a ritual space in Yoruba religion. Ifá is the deity of wisdom for all Yoruba practitioners. We now want you to take the divination chain and pray silently. And the client would ask a question silently and the priest would pick up that divination chain and call on the divinity of wisdom, Ifá, to share a message of helpfulness for the client.
[Folasade Woodbine] The deity is telling us that you’re going to go far in life. There might be some tribulations on your way but you’re going to find joy on your path.
[Onaje Woodbine] When the chain actually falls on the ground, there’s four seeds on the right side of the chain and there’s four seeds on the left, and those seeds can either land up or down. There’s 256 possibilities for how the chain would fall, so once the priest is able to read the chain, there are thousands, literally thousands, of verses connected to those 256 signatures. So, the priest would then call upon his or her memory of all of the stories in that particular signature, until the client finds one of those verses helpful. Please tell us if any of the wisdom that Ifá is sharing with you relates to your problem.
[Mariama Alexis Akosua Camara] My question was if I would be successful in my future job, and it was helpful because it told me that there will be some problems, but I will be successful in the end.
[End of video.]

This was a simple video of what Ifá divination looks like. Note that before the divination starts, the client speaks to the Ifá, to the object, and they share what they want. The Ifá system is used to arrive at a conclusion, but then this conclusion, as you can see by the last few seconds, is a collaboration. It’s not “this is the answer, go live your life.” It’s not a solid prediction. Both the practitioner and the client reach this conclusion together.

I’d like to suggest that machine learning is not new. It’s simply digital divination. Both the Ifá system and computers are trying to make a decision amidst great uncertainty. But then, with the case of machine learning, the computer seems to say: “Here you go, that’s your answer.” With Ifá divination there is no certain truth. There is no rational, logical, reasonable truth. Everyone has to bring their context to arrive at a conclusion, to arrive at a truth.

In the 1300s, the mathematician Ramon Llull was introduced to this type of Ifá divination system. How? When the West and North African Moors (the mouros, as I learned in conversation yesterday) came to rule parts of Portugal and Spain for 700 years, they brought with them this divination system. They taught this divination system to the mathematicians and they practiced this as a sacred geometry or a sacred sand divination. Llull was familiar with this type of thinking. Llull, inspired by this European thinking, wanted to make something which was more direct and rational, something that didn’t have this mysticism to it, but something that you can mathematically and logically prove. So he made a logic machine: a machine that aimed to convert Muslims, whom Llull considered to be infidels, to Christianity. If you showed this machine to a Muslim person and asked them questions, which the Muslim person answered rationally, then this machine would try to convert them to Christianity using logic. Why? Because if Muslims are humans, and humans have reason, then you can use reason to convert Muslims into Christianity. Llull is simply taking the concept of divination and applying rationality to it.

If we move forward through the Enlightenment era, we see this same pattern where humans are supposed to escape from fear and superstition by using their intellect. What I conclude—and there’s much more that can be said about this—is that the way that we define personhood has its own implications. When the early computer scientists made AI using computers, they were trying to make machines that are like humans. To them, to be human was to be rational and reasonable, to use reason. However, computers don’t have a way to understand context. That’s why today machines are harming people, because they have no way to take into account racism, gender, inequality, and other types of inequalities that exist. Data does not interpret itself. Humans still have to interpret the data. Data doesn’t tell you how to be moral. It doesn’t tell you what to do. You can’t escape moral dilemmas just by looking at data; humans have to produce a moral element.

In that missing part of AI, we find a different version of personhood, which (for example) we find in the African context, where a person has relationality. This is how we’re interconnected. I cannot discover the truth simply by myself. I need everyone in this room to help me come to the truth. If I include your context, then we can reach a greater conclusion, just like in the Ifá divination system. Let us reconsider the very foundations of this technology and try to find alternative systems that challenge us to be truly human—to be truly relational.