Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, Tallin University of Technology, EE

I refute Bringsjord’s attempted refutation of Searle, who has argued against two recent visions: Bostrom’s super-intelligence (post-humanism) and Floridi’s info-spheres (information revolution). My refutation derives from the impossibility of Turing machines to compute consequential information not linked with observations of its output. Placing post-humanism and information revolution under a philosophical perspective leads to an identification of an unspoken presupposition in both: universalism of meaning. A philosophical theory of information needs a semiotic theory of signs and representations that take information to be a property of signs that are linked with their interpreting minds.