I. Concepts developed in Augere

Act of Signifying

The constitutive event that grounds understanding in our relation to the inner and outer worlds, including the clash with reality, even before the constitution of a particular language, of language as such, or of any external materialization; even before an intention or a thought. In the realm of human practice and experience, for a meaning to be constituted or even for an intention to arise, something must first have acquired relevance for a situated human. This is not a succession of events linked in chronological order, but a constitutive event. That relevance occurs in the relation of a corporeal being marked by need, history, and sociality to its world.

Constitutive Present

The relational event in which the conditions of possibility are actualized so that something acquires intelligibility or relevance and can materialize. Any materialization—past, present, or future—required or requires that constitutive present; every reinscription required, requires, or will require its own constitutive present. No materialization arises ex nihilo.

Operational Present

The computational actuality in which transformations are performed on data and internal states are modified, without anything acquiring relevance for the system in a relation of its own with the world. The iteration and transformation of materializations within the model, as well as the statistical correlations established among them, take place in this regime rather than in a constitutive present.

Signification Resource

The relational set of conditions of possibility and materiality that, in the Human Domain and within its constitutive present, allows the act of signifying to materialize and allows those materializations to be reinscribed again and again and even transduced into data. The concept makes it possible to see that, if the relevant conditions of possibility are absent, if the constitutive present does not exist, and if the language model does not maintain a relation of its own with Secondness in which something can acquire relevance or intelligibility, there is no act of signifying.

Expropriation of the Act of Signifying

This expropriation does not deprive the human of the act of signifying, does not represent the physical destruction of the original document, and does not amount to a literal copy extracted and stored by the language model. What is expropriated are the relations of continuity: a fracture occurs in the relation between the act, its conditions of possibility, and the materialization resulting from transduction. Expropriation leads to the production of the quasi-sign.

The Four Tempus of Expropriation

In Augere, tempus is used as an invariant conceptual term to designate each of the regimes of expropriation. Their order is expository, not necessarily chronological.

First Tempus: The Transduced Heritage. It occurs when libraries, repositories of knowledge, the Internet, newspaper articles, books, and other sources are “mined” to train the language model. The system receives the transduced materialization and adjusts its parameters on the basis of the regularities it finds in it; it does not receive the contingent encounter, the empirical subjectivity for which something acquired relevance, or the unit of meaning constituted in that relation.

Second Tempus: The Activated Operation. It begins when the model is set in motion and encompasses its internal operation, activated by the user’s prompt. The prevailing regime is one of efficient operation—matrix operations and pattern tracking in a geometric space—not the formation of meaning understood as an act of signifying. The closure that leads to the DFZ is mathematical, a matter of technical probability, not of meaning.

Third Tempus: The Double Expropriation. It occurs when, in its relation with a human, the DFZ completes its constitution as a sign through the actualization of an Interpretant and enters the human network of meanings. When the human externalizes the result of that interpretation and reintroduces it into the context window, a semiotic expropriation—the functional use of the human act of signifying so that the DFZ can operate as a sign—and an operational expropriation—the capture of the new inscription by the algorithmic regime—are articulated.

Fourth Tempus: Human Reinforcement. It occurs when human evaluation and preferences are used to adjust or improve the language model. Human choices, comparisons, corrections, and preferences arise from acts of signifying and from their constitutive presents, but are transformed into operational signals of reward, classification, or adjustment. The system incorporates the formal effects of those acts without incorporating the lived and intentional conditions of those who produced them.

Inflationary Illusion

The phenomenon underlying the human perception of seeing a mind in the machine and attributing the act of signifying to the language model. It is the cognitive mechanism that conceals from the receiver the true nature of the output and, correspondingly, of the language model. It is not an intellectual error or a lack of human capacity, but a cognitive category error: the brain reads thought where there is structure—in this case, algorithmic syntax. When the completeness achieved in the encounter between the quasi-sign and a situated human is retrospectively attributed to the output or to the language model, the inflationary illusion occurs.

II. Concepts from the preceding framework reused in Augere

Quasi-Sign

An incomplete sign returned by the language model that requires an Interpretant. This requirement does not attribute consciousness or agency to the output; it marks its conceptual incompleteness. The output is a quasi-sign because, in its production within the black box, a relation of the language model’s own to the Dynamic Object and to Secondness is absent.

Demanding False Zero (DFZ)

An algorithmic sign of dual nature produced by Abductive Vectorial Poetics (AVP). It is “Zero” because of its lack of intention and experience; “False” because it contains patterns, design, and statistical efficiency; and “Demanding” because it requires a human Interpretant to complete its semiotic cycle.

Criticality Factor (CF)

A variable representing the degree of critical awareness applied in interpreting the DFZ. Its values define the attitude of the Interpretant: CF = 1, maximum criticality; CF = 3, total passivity. In Augere, the factor exercised by the user may exacerbate or contain their dependence on the Semiotic Network of Necessity.

Semiotic Network of Necessity (SNN)

A sociotechnical network that sustains the relation of dependence between the human and algorithmic intelligence. In Augere, the third tempus is also the moment when semiotic closure inscribes the human and their act of signifying into this Network.

Capitalism of Exacerbated Necessity (CEN)

A regime that systematically exploits the dependence sustained by the Semiotic Network of Necessity, transforming it into a continuous source of capital. In Augere, the reiteration and accumulation of human closure actualize this regime on a systemic scale, and the human need to close the DFZ becomes a resource for the reproduction and expansion of the Network itself.

Source Works

Ávila Fernández, Lázara. Augere: la muerte del autor [English translation: Augere: The Death of the Author]. S.E. Pinar Publisher LLC, 2026.

Ávila Fernández, Lázara. Inteligencia algorítmica abductiva: emulación semiótica. Un viaje a la «verdadera conciencia» de la IA. S.E. Pinar Publisher, 2025.