Semiotic Sovereignty

Before asking whom AI represents, we need to ask which planet it believes it is talking about

Imagine a community trying to build its future.

Before opening an AI model, an EEG database, or an economic spreadsheet, look at the place where that community lives.

Is it hot or cold? Dry or humid? What is the water like today? Is the soil retaining moisture? Which species are appearing? How much food can the territory produce without destroying the conditions that would allow it to produce food again?

Perhaps our first political question began too late — with the human.

In the BrainLatam proposition, Semiotic Sovereignty needs to begin earlier: with the Biome in Movement.

The Biome is not Big Data. The Biome exists before Big Data.

A human being carries versions of their genome replicated, with somatic variations, across an enormous number of cells; today we know that the human body is also a mosaic of cellular lineages that accumulate mutations throughout life.

A Biome radically expands this diversity: plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, and humans carry countless genomes in interaction.

But none of this “becomes data” on its own.

Someone chooses where to measure.

What to collect.

What to sequence.

What to name.

What to store.

What did not become data did not cease to exist.

A Utopia that is born from place

BrainLatam already uses Utopia not merely as a “perfect society,” but as the possibility of imagining future conditions different from current ones and asking how Body-Territory, city, and social organization participate in that future.

We can go further.

A community situated within a Biome does not build its Utopia upon a neutral background.

It builds it in relation to what makes its own continuity possible:

water;

soil;

temperature;

food;

shelter;

knowledge;

social relationships;

belonging.

But all of these change.

That is why a Body-Territory–Biome Utopia could not be a finished project.

It would be a dynamic horizon:

Biome₀ → community₀ → choices₀ → Biome₁ → community₁ → new choices.

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow challenge linear narratives according to which human societies necessarily pass through a single sequence — small groups, agriculture, cities, hierarchy, State. The authors present a past containing far more institutional experimentation and political plasticity.

This does not prove that laws should be produced directly from ecological variables. That is a BrainLatam extension.

But it allows us to ask:

If human forms of organization can change, why imagine that an institution suited to one set of material conditions must remain frozen when those conditions change?

Law also encounters a territory

Here we need to be precise.

In a secular, democratic state governed by the rule of law, temperature, rainfall, or biodiversity do not “make laws.”

Nor should AI replace human responsibility for political and legal decisions. UNESCO's Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence establishes human oversight, responsibility, human rights, diversity, participatory governance, and environmental sustainability among its principles.

But this does not mean that the Biome is merely scenery.

Article 71 of the Constitution of Ecuador recognizes rights of Nature, or Pacha Mama, to exist and to maintain and regenerate its life cycles.

In Colombia, the Constitutional Court recognized the Atrato River, its basin, and tributaries as an entity subject to rights and established that its representation should be jointly exercised by the State and the ethnic communities living in that territory.

These cases are not BrainLatam's Semiotic Sovereignty.

They do show, however, that legal systems can create forms of institutional representation for relationships that extend beyond the isolated human individual.

So we can build together:

Biome → authorized data → Body-Territory → Jiwasa → science → deliberation → Law → action.

The Biome provides material conditions and limits.

Science measures part of them.

The community attributes meaning and value.

Law establishes guarantees and limits.

Democracy chooses among legitimate alternatives.

AI can expand our ability to perceive consequences.

AI as an instrument of anticipation, not a sovereign

Imagine a territorial AI following time series of temperature, humidity, rainfall, water availability, soil conditions, biodiversity, air quality, energy use, agricultural production, health, and infrastructure.

Its role would not be to declare:

“This is the correct law.”

It could instead say:

“If this trend continues, these scenarios become more plausible.”

Or:

“This measure increases production in the short term, but may increase water stress over this horizon.”

And this analysis must include AI itself.

The International Energy Agency projects that global electricity consumption by data centers could reach around 945 TWh by 2030 in its base case, roughly twice the 2024 level.

A 2025 study in Nature Sustainability also showed that the water and carbon impacts of AI servers can vary substantially according to location, power generation mix, efficiency, climate, and water availability.

In other words:

The AI that describes the Biome also occupies the Biome.

The electrons making this sentence possible have an energy history.

The chips contain matter.

Cooling has geography.

The water used has a territory.

AI participates materially in the planet before participating semantically in our conversation.

Triple-Aspect Monism: AI does not float above matter

This is where Alfredo Pereira Jr. becomes especially important.

In his recent formulation of Triple-Aspect Monism, Pereira proposes Energy as a neutral basis from which three aspects derive: Matter, Information, and Sentience. The conjunction of the three into conscious experience would occur, as far as we currently know, in living systems.

Contemporary AI also depends on Energy.

It depends on Matter.

It depends on Information.

But this does not demonstrate Sentience.

That distinction is fundamental.

We can remove AI from the image of an “immaterial cloud” without turning computational processing into conscious experience.

In the BrainLatam extension:

Energy → Matter → Biome → life → Body-Territory → Sentience → sign → collectivity → technology → AI → information → decision → action → Biome′.

Notice the final term.

Biome′.

After a decision, the territory may no longer be exactly the same.

There is no digital decision without material return.

But who defines the Common Good?

Here we need to preserve agency.

If an AI begins to indicate what could be improved or regulated “for the Common Good,” we must ask:

Who defined the Common Good?

Over what time horizon?

For which people?

For which species?

With what distribution of costs?

Which rights remain protected even when an aggregate calculation appears efficient?

This is where Jiwasa becomes necessary.

In the BrainLatam formulation, Jiwasa asks what can emerge when different Body-Territories preserve their particularities and nevertheless construct possibilities that none of them possessed alone.

An AI may detect a trend.

A farmer may perceive a change that has not yet entered the sensors.

An Indigenous community may possess territorial knowledge absent from the database taxonomy.

A researcher may test a hypothesis.

Law may prevent an apparently efficient solution that violates fundamental rights.

Another person may reveal who remained invisible in the first formulation.

In this architecture, the Common Good would not be an automatic model output.

It would be a collective construction informed also by the state of the Biome.

Sovereignty also means being able to say: “do not capture”

Placing the Biome before the human does not mean turning everything into a sensor.

Research using environmental DNA, or eDNA, has shown that samples of water, sand, and even air collected for other purposes can incidentally capture human genomic information. This creates important questions about privacy, consent, identification, ancestry, and governance.

Semiotic Sovereignty therefore needs to sustain two statements at the same time:

What has not been digitized remains real.

and:

What can be digitized is not automatically authorized to be captured.

This is where recent work on Two-Eyed Seeing and Indigenous data governance becomes fundamental.

The Two-Eyed Seeing approach seeks to place biomedical knowledge and Indigenous perspectives in dialogue without requiring one to simply disappear inside the other.

Recent work in neurogenomics likewise shows that recognizing Indigenous data rights in principle is not enough: data governance must reach the infrastructures that store, reuse, and share those data.

Inclusion, therefore, cannot simply mean:

“put more people into our database.”

It must also include:

who asks;

who categorizes;

who stores;

who interprets;

who authorizes new uses;

who receives back what was learned.

NeuroDesafio LATAM Research Question

Now our original EEG question becomes larger:

Do EEG models trained predominantly on WEIRD populations maintain the same predictive capacity when applied to Latin American and Indigenous populations?

We need to test it.

But we can add another question:

How much of the model's “error” appears because we isolated the brain from the territorial conditions in which its material history took place?

A protocol could combine EEG and fNIRS with temperature, humidity, sleep, seasonality, air quality, language, recording environment, relationship with territory, and the participant's Existential and Territorial Declaration, always under local data governance.

Not to claim that the Biome determines the mind.

But to remember:

The brain we measure has never existed outside it.

Perhaps Semiotic Sovereignty can be summarized like this:

Biome in Movement → Body-Territory → Jiwasa → institutions → data → AI → possibilities → deliberation → action → Biome′.

And Utopia?

Perhaps it is not about reaching the perfect place.

Perhaps it is about collectively preserving the capacity to notice when the place has changed, revise our rules, and imagine another possibility together without erasing what sustains life.

AI would not be the sovereign of that Utopia.

It would be a tool for making consequences more visible before the choice.

Because before asking whether an AI has learned who we are, perhaps we need to ask something more basic:

Has it learned that we are on this planet?

And then:

Do we remember that when we teach it?

Commented References

PEREIRA JÚNIOR, Alfredo. (2025). “The interdisciplinary ontology of consciousness in multiscale neuroscience”. Journal of Multiscale Neuroscience, 4(4).
Presents the recent formulation of Triple-Aspect Monism, in which Energy is the neutral basis and Matter, Information, and Sentience are fundamental aspects. For this Blog, it provides an ontological bridge for placing AI back inside planetary materiality without automatically attributing conscious experience to it.

GRAEBER, David; WENGROW, David. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The authors challenge linear narratives of political and social evolution and emphasize the historical variety of institutional experimentation. The book does not propose governance oriented by the Biome; that is a BrainLatam extension built from the question of institutional plasticity.

UNESCO. (2021/2022). Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.
Establishes principles of human rights, human oversight, responsibility, diversity, sustainability, and ecosystem protection. It is important for delimiting AI's role: supporting analysis and decision-making, not automatically transferring political or legal sovereignty to a machine.

CONSTITUTION OF ECUADOR, Article 71.
Recognizes the rights of Nature, or Pacha Mama, to exist and to maintain and regenerate its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes. It demonstrates a Latin American legal experience in which the non-human world receives explicit normative representation.

CONSTITUTIONAL COURT OF COLOMBIA. Judgment T-622/16.
Recognized the Atrato River, its basin, and tributaries as subjects of rights to protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration, represented jointly by the State and local communities. It is a central reference for thinking about interdependence between territory, communities, and institutions without treating the Biome as a human political agent.

INTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY. (2025). Energy and AI.
Projects that electricity consumption by data centers may reach approximately 945 TWh by 2030 in its base scenario. It demonstrates that AI is not purely informational: its expansion creates material and territorial energy demand.

XIAO, T.; FUSO NERINI, F.; MATTHEWS, H. D.; et al. (2025). “Environmental impact and net-zero pathways for sustainable artificial intelligence servers in the USA”. Nature Sustainability, 8, 1541–1553.
Quantifies projected energy, water, and carbon impacts of AI infrastructure and shows their strong dependence on location, efficiency, and electricity mix. It supports the idea that computation also has geography.

WHITMORE, L.; McCAULEY, M.; FARRELL, J. A.; et al. (2023). “Inadvertent human genomic bycatch and intentional capture raise beneficial applications and ethical concerns with environmental DNA”. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 7, 873–888.
Demonstrates that eDNA methods can recover human genetic information from water, sand, and air. It makes explicit the boundary between making a Biome scientifically visible and assuming that everything technically capturable is ethically available.

DOI, H.; KELLY, R. P. (2023). “Ethical considerations for human sequences in environmental DNA”. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 7, 1334–1335.
Discusses the ethical issues involved when environmental research incidentally captures human genetic information. It is fundamental to the formulation: Semiotic Sovereignty also includes the right not to be transformed into data.

ILLES, J.; PERREAULT, M. L.; BASSIL, K.; et al. (2025). “Two-Eyed Seeing and other Indigenous perspectives for neuroscience”. Nature, 638, 58–68.
Proposes bringing Indigenous perspectives and biomedical approaches into dialogue with epistemic humility, without reducing one way of knowing to the other. For this Blog, it supports the idea that diversity also requires pluralizing how questions and interpretations are constructed.

EDWARDS, N.; McLESTER-DAVIS, L. W. Y.; KLINE, C.; et al. (2025). “Towards the implementation of Indigenous data governance in neurogenomics research”. Nature Neuroscience, 28, 2171–2174.
Argues that Indigenous data rights need to be technically incorporated into scientific infrastructures themselves. It marks the transition from simple inclusion toward effective governance.

BrainLatam — Utopia, Body-Territory, Jiwasa, 5D Materiality, and Semiotic Sovereignty.
The proposition developed in this Blog is an extension of BrainLatam concepts: a Body-Territory–Biome Utopia is not a final perfect state, but the collective capacity to follow a territory in Movement, revise possibilities, and produce new responses. Jiwasa enters as relational agency: no Body-Territory, scientist, institution, or AI possesses in isolation all the differences necessary to define a common future.