Our Planetary Cognitive Ecology, from Bacteria to Bach: Expanding the Circle of Care with Kate Hayles
N. Katherine Hayles: I think it's a misunderstanding of that book to say that it is urging us to embrace the posthuman. When I came upon the title, How We Became Posthuman, I meant it with a healthy dose of irony. So it was as if we had all already become post-human, which of course is a gross simplification of the actual situation.
So let's just make one thing clear at the very outset, and that is from my point of view, human is a historical construct that has always been in the process of change, transformation, and contestation…
…the hope is to be able to articulate a vision that is not naive, that is well aware of the scientific specificities involved in all of these big ideas, but nevertheless also strives to see the big picture, which is, relational.
It's ecological. It's about our place, not only on the planet, but on a visionary scale on the cosmos. What it is that we have to contribute, what it is that we have to fear, what it is that we are risking, what it is that we have the potential to be and to do. And those are ideas that need a lot of circumstantial specificity to really carry heft.
…We're at a new, point in human history and I think it has enormous potentials, but just like symbiosis includes parasitism, symbiosis always includes risks and there are risks to anytime you become so entangled with a symbiant, you can't live without it.
…it's so important to recognize that consciousness is not the whole of cognition and that there are many forms of cognition, which do not have and will never have consciousness, but nevertheless carry on cognitive activities. understand our relation to the rest of the planet, but also understand our relation to these new forms of synthetic intelligence.
…that would be part of what humans can carry forward from their heritage into the future: Care. Care for the planet, care for ourselves, care for our other beings in enhanced, increased sense. So, you know, you could almost look at human history as the ability to enlarge the circles of care.
Summary of Podcast: A poetic conversation at the intersection of literature, science, and technology with Katherine Hayles, a distinguished research professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Hayles discusses her ideas from her books 'How We Became Posthuman' and 'Bacteria to AI,' focusing on the need to rethink cognition and decouple it from consciousness. She describes the concept of non-conscious cognition and emphasizes the importance of understanding the integrated cognitive framework, which includes biological organisms, synthetic intelligences, and their symbiotic relationships with humans. The discussion extends to planetary ecology, the risks and potentials of advancing AI, and the overarching need for humanity’s care for the planet and each other.
00:00 What I really meant by posthumanism
00:27 The Concept of Human Transformation
00:54 Scientific and Ecological Perspectives
01:38 The Role of Machines and Symbiosis
02:31 Understanding Synthetic Intelligence
02:52 Widening the Circle of Care
03:40 Introduction by Andrea Hiott
04:01 Catherine Hales' Academic Background
04:19 Books by Catherine Hales
08:30 The Importance of Fiction in Science
09:55 Consciousness vs. Cognition
17:42 The Integrated Cognitive Framework
18:37 Non-Conscious Cognition
33:01 Meaning Making in Organisms
35:28 Understanding Different Umwelts
38:42 Understanding AI's Conceptual Umwelt
40:13 Embodiment and Ontology in AI
45:51 Symbiosis: From Biology to AI
58:08 The Role of Narrative in Science and Literature
01:10:06 Planetary Cognition and Future Challenges
01:18:48 The Importance of Accurate Information and Education
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[00:00:00]
Kate Hayles: I think it's a misunderstanding of that book to say that it is urging us to embrace the posthuman. when I came upon the title, how we became Posthuman, I met it with a healthy dose of irony. So it, it was as if we had all already become post-human, which of course is, um, is a gross simplification of the actual situation.
So let's just make one thing clear at the very outset, and that is from my point of view, human. Is a historical construct that has always been in the process of change, transformation, and contestation. So what counts as human, has varied across time. Uh, and across cultures, across languages, it's always in flux.
to be able to articulate a vision that is not naive, that is [00:01:00] well aware of the scientific specificities involved in all of these big ideas, but nevertheless also strives to see the big picture, which is, relational.
It's ecological. It's about our place, not only on the planet, but on a visionary scale on the cosmos. What it is that we have to contribute, what it is that we have to fear, what it is that we are risking, what it is that we have the potential to be and to do. And those are ideas that need a lot of circumstantial
specificity to really carry heft. We are not the biggest, we're not the strongest, we're not the fastest species on earth, but we make up for all those other deficiencies because we can invent machines that are stronger and faster and so forth.
We're at a new, point in human history and I think it has enormous potentials, but just like [00:02:00] symbiosis includes parasitism, symbiosis always includes risks and there are risks to anytime you become so entangled with a symbiant, you can't live without it.
it's so important to recognize that consciousness is not the whole of cognition and that there are many forms of cognition, which do not have and will never have consciousness, but nevertheless carry on cognitive activities. understand our relation to the rest of the planet, but also understand our relation to these new forms of synthetic intelligence.
that would be part of what humans can carry forward from their heritage into the future.
Care, care for the planet, care for ourselves, care for our other beings in enhanced, increased sense. So, you know, you could almost look at human history as the ability to enlarge the circles of [00:03:00] care
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete the last one, but I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower, I've been circling for thousands of years and I still don't know. Am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song? That is a real KA poem. Which I have been carrying with me for many years.
It's a translation from Joanna Macy. But I start with that point because it, it's what I thought of when I heard our guest today, Kate Hill in Catherine Hill.
You just heard in the intro say that perhaps our legacy as humans or as the humans that are here right now might be to find a way to widen the circle of care. I really love that idea of widening the circle of care, and Catherine Hales, is the distinguished research professor at the University of [00:04:00] California in la.
She's also the James B. Duke, professor at Duke University, and her research is in so many different areas, but let's just say that it's mostly in literature, science and technology. And focuses mostly on the 20th and 21st century. She's the author of the book, how We Became Posthuman, virtual Bodies in Literature, cybernetics and Informatics, which, uh, many of you may have heard of.
It's an old book. It was written over 30 years ago, and since then she's written some other very important books like Unthought. A great title, uh, unthought, the Power of the Cognitive Non-Conscious. That was in 2017. Her latest one is Bacteria to ai and I almost always say bacteria to Bach as you'll hear.
I slip up and say that at the beginning in this conversation because there is a book called From Bacteria to Bach and Back from Daniel Dennet, which I have, and which I've read. Also, there's this book, [00:05:00] um. Goodle, Escher Bach, which is one of my favorites from Htu. And Catherine talks a lot about fractal, kind of recursively.
So somehow her book, bacteria to AI became bacteria to Bach. But I le, I left the mistake in our conversation because she actually references Bach later. And I just thought it's good you hear, you hear it 'cause it's kind of funny. Or at least you get the real deal. I really love her oomph and her power and her strength and wow. Her mind is just so sharp. Not that it. Age matters. But in these days, when I think about learning and wisdom, I tend to be looking to people who were born in the 1940s for some reason.
I've talked to quite a few of them lately. and Catherine is one such person. I just really wanted to talk to her about her idea, which is. In a sentence, consciousness is not necessary for cognition. So this is one of those episodes that might break your head open a little bit. It's a, [00:06:00] it's a hard one.
I'll just tell you right now, because these are really hard ideas and she's been working on it for 30 years. She's come up with this, um. new framework for cognition, more or less. It's not new, new, but it's new in the way it's put together. She calls it the integrated cognitive framework and the idea behind it, which we talk about here and which extends through all her other books, but is said most explicitly in this recent one is that, you know, we talk about human intelligence as if it's so wonderful, like it's the top of some kind of pyramid.
maybe we should rethink our assumptions about what we are and what we're part of. And a way to do that is to rethink this understanding that we have of what cognition is. So it's really rethinking cognition and for her cognition.
Is all life forms have cognition, which is one reason I find her so inspiring and, um, that I'm very happy to have discovered her work because this is also something, uh, I've [00:07:00] talked about this consolatory or kaleidoscopic cognition and, this relates to it a lot. So, bacteria, plants, animals, humans, for her, all of this.
Is cognition has cognition. She also includes some forms of artificial intelligence. we'll get into what that means. But the important thing is that she's not saying they're conscious, she's saying they're cognitive. there are some parts that I disagree with her about and like when she's talking about AI having bodies.
Or when she uses the term awareness sometimes about technology having an awareness. But I also have to say, if you read her books, it makes sense because she creates her own way of using these terms. That's one thing about writers who go really in depth in trying to understand something. You really have to read them.
Read the book, to understand what all the words mean in relation, because they too are kind of a constellation. So the way I would use the word body and awareness is not the way that she would use it, but if you really look at what we're saying in our different [00:08:00] systems or our philosophies, they're not that different.
So. One thing they have in common is this, understanding that consciousness is not cognition. You've probably heard me say that before. And also this idea of a, a planetary cognition, scaled cognition. A lot of people who come on the show are trying to think about these same ideas from really different angles.
Kate is coming at it from a very unique way. She started out writing that book about cybernetics You can follow her work all the way up till now. She also writes about novels and fiction and how important that is. So if you remember some of my conversations, for example, with Michael Levin, where we talk about, or Kevin Kelly too, where we talk about science fiction, and how important that has been.
F for them as scientists and technologists. Kate really knows that, and all her books have fiction in them, and all of them take narrative seriously in a way that has become incredibly important now that we're also focused on large language models, for example, She talks about meaning making [00:09:00] and how this. She doesn't say this, but I just wanted to say it beforehand because when we're trying to understand the difference between consciousness and cognition, it's really a difference in the way that we're trying to understand something about this ongoing process that includes both of those, that both of those point to, I think is a better way of saying it, but she as associates, cognition with meaning making.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that whatever is making the meaning. Experiences it as meaning. So a hedgehog or a porcupine is making meaning, but that doesn't mean they're experiencing it as meaning. so I just wanted to say that even just as a footnote to myself, because you know, all this is mostly research.
So the reason I do it a little bit improv, especially these. intros is because I'm thinking through things and I am, I want to tag them and remember them because this is like a big audio document in a way for me. And also this idea of consciousness and cognition and the un, thought and the [00:10:00] non-conscious, this idea of consciousness and the non-conscious and cognition.
Can be confusing. I started to think of it like a Johari window rather than thinking of it as either or, or one or the other. so I did a separate post about that and uh, I drew a little funny diagram. If you wanna look at it, just to try to better understand what all of this this means. I also wanna say that her books don't really fit anywhere, but they kind of fit everywhere, so you can find a way into them, even though it's really hard stuff.
if you're interested in these ideas and really at the heart of it. Even the post-human book, at least as I feel it reading it is a movement towards a planetary understanding of what cognition is and of the human's place in it, and understanding ourselves as part of life. So that circle of care, the way we can come to care for life is actually life coming into awareness and care for itself.
I've found Kate's work really stimulating in this way even now. I mean, I [00:11:00] have to say, I, I listened to this conversation three times and I also had the conversation with her, and it was only on the third time that I heard her talking about something called Conceptual Vet.
this word vet comes from Jacob Vanel, who. Yes. Again, I've talked about on the show, and he, he died in, I think, 1944, so about one year after Kate was born. That's kind of beautiful that they overlapped, but he, he's one of the beginners of phenomenology in a way, because he had this idea that every organism has, from their own experience a sensory world.
So. W we are sensing the world in our own unique ways, and this is our ml, sort of this particular, world that each organism experiences, even though it's a shared world that we're all also experiencing. And, you know, we create, we're co-creating all of that, but we also all have this unique position. those are usually talked about as, you know, for organisms, living organisms, but.
When we were talking about large language models and [00:12:00] technology, she starts to talk about conceptual velt. when I really finally heard that it, it, it's actually really profound because if we can think of. These kind of vets, which are also about, you know, language. So if AI has a conceptual umwelt, that doesn't mean it's alive in any way or has any sort of cognition in any way that we experience as humans.
But we would still have this conceptual umwelt, which overlaps, which is language. Language is a space. So I know I'm going way out in the weeds right now, but, um, that's kind of what this conversation is, so it's probably a good warning for you. But I just wanted to note that here too. It's something I'm gonna have to unpack later, but I don't wanna forget it.
I also just want to highlight it for you because maybe there's some of you out there who would be able to do something with that idea as well, Some of this also reminded me of my conversation with Bernardo Stri about consciousness and some of the things I was trying to say there about consciousness and cognition and also [00:13:00] the, the way we talk about consciousness as our, our awareness of our own thinking and consciousness when actually consciousness.
Is, you know, ongoing all the time, even as when we're children. we try to make those distinctions here. So when she's talking about consciousness here, she's mostly talking about your awareness of yourself, that, you know, this kind of feeling that you have, So my voice is almost gone, as you can probably tell. And I'm just gonna do one take on this and let it be. I hope that's okay. I just love that we ended up getting to a place where we can imagine humans as the circle of care.
Even though we actually look at the very difficult reality of where we are right now, at the end Kate ends up saying she thinks people are basically good at heart, and I do too. So whoever you are, I think you're basically good at heart and, uh, you probably know that too. So feel it. And I wish you a beautiful day wherever you are, and [00:14:00] I hope that your voice is strong today.
I.
Andrea Hiott: Hi Kate. It's such an honor to have you on love and philosophy. Thanks for being here today.
Kate Hayles: Well, I'm so happy to be here and looking forward to our conversation.
Andrea Hiott: I just wanna jump right in with the idea of having to rethink cognition or rethink what cognition is, um, in your latest book, uh, bacteria to Bach, bacteria to Bach in your latest book, bacteria to ai, bacteria to Bach actually is Daniel Bennett's
Kate Hayles: title.
Andrea Hiott: of course I know that book too. And also, with Hofstadter and this recur recursive thing, Bach is always coming around when I'm reading your work, right. anyway, in your latest book, bacteria to ai, you introduce, a framework called the Integrated Cognitive Framework, but it's actually of course, coming from years and years and years of work.
Um, so first, could we just start with why do we need to rethink cognition?
Kate Hayles: Well, uh, [00:15:00] I really, uh, wrote that book as a attempt to, uh, reconfigure anthropocentrism. And as I like to say, anthropomorphism is inevitable because we. Think with human brains, we look with human eyes, but anthropocentrism is the belief that humans are superior to all other species on the earth.
And that that gives us certain entitlements, like the right to extract resources and to, um, suppress other species and dominate them and so forth. So I think that, uh, anthropocentrism is one of the drivers of many, our many current environmental crises. And it's, uh, it requires a kind of, um, reconfiguration of perspective.
And that's what I was attempting to do in, uh. Uh, bacteria to AI book. So [00:16:00] cognition is really at the center of this because we are not the biggest, we're not the strongest, we're not the fastest species on earth, but we make up for all those other deficiencies because we can invent machines that are stronger and faster and so forth.
And so we pride ourselves that our unique, uh, cognitive capabilities are what give us the right. For domination. And so, uh, crucial then to the project of Decentering Anthrop. Anthropocentrism is, uh, recentering the idea of human cognition. So, in my view, all living organisms have cognitive capabilities and just that fact alone.
Uh, requires an enormous rethinking of human cognition because instead of just placing human cognition at the [00:17:00] apex, and then, you know, everything else comes below it, now suddenly human cognition becomes relative to many other forms of cognition. And in some respects, those other forms of cognition are superior to our own.
Uh, it has, they have superior sensing abilities, they have superior survival abilities, so on and so forth. So to, uh, to take that into account is a massive intellectual project. But also now in the age of ai, we need to recognize. AI synthetic intelligences as also cognitive players. And so the integrated cognitive framework attempts to reconfigure human cognition, placing it in relation to other biological cognitions, and also to the cognitions of artificial intelligence.
That's the crucial idea, but [00:18:00] trying the integrated cognitive framework.
Andrea Hiott: Wonderful. And I wanna explore the decoupling of cognition and consciousness, which you've been doing for a long time.
Kate Hayles: So, in 2017, I wrote a book called Unthought, the Power of the Cognitive Non-Conscious. So. I, I regard the unconscious in a Freudian or a lacanian sense as really an aspect of consciousness.
According to both Lahan and Freud, it is the suppressed material from the consciousness. But in addition to the unconscious, there's the non-conscious. So a level of neuronal processing below consciousness that, uh, has some characteristics distinctly different from consciousness. Uh, the non-conscious processing takes place much faster than consciousness.
It comes online much sooner. Something like 200 milliseconds instead of the [00:19:00] 500 milliseconds it takes for consciousness to operate. It can handle information too noisy for consciousness to be able to comprehend. Uh, and it acts as a filter. For consciousness. So the first cognitive processing that takes place after the onset of sensory stimuli is non-conscious processing.
And that happens, uh, around 200 milliseconds as I mentioned. And, uh, it helps to protect consciousness from an overload of information. If there were no non-conscious processing, consciousness would be overwhelmed and probably become psychotic within a few minutes. So non-conscious processing, uh, is prior and is absolutely crucial.
And then, uh, non-conscious cognition will send an [00:20:00] activation signal to consciousness. If consciousness responds and strengthens that signal, then thoughts enter the conscious mind and they can be. Um, sustained indefinitely. So, you know, thinking about Bach, for example, one could think about Bach for hours and hours.
Uh, but if it is not strengthened and attended to by consciousness, the non-conscious signals die out within about a half second or so. So we can think of the non-conscious, like a little child tugging at our sleeves. Hey, hey, hey, look at this. And if we look at that, then uh, it becomes conscious. If we ignore it, then it goes on.
And non-conscious processing continues its job. So it's crucial to understand the role of non-conscious processing when we talk about cognition and uh, its function and its utility. [00:21:00] And in some ways, non-conscious processing is much closer to what's actually happening in the world than is consciousness.
We know that consciousness. Has as its primary job sustaining continuity. And in order to do this, it will ate, it will create stories that make the world make sense. And we have many examples of that. But one of the most famous is this video, uh, where. Spectators are asked to count the number of bounces of a basketball as two people bouncing basketball back and forth.
And in the middle of that, uh, someone in a gorilla suit walks by. So about 50% of spectators will not notice the gorilla. They will simply edit that out because it's so incongruous with the rest of the scene. But that happens all the time. That's [00:22:00] one reason why eyewitness testimonies are so notoriously unreliable, because we fate, we make up stories that create a continuous, sensible narrative.
Uh, and that's one of the principle jobs of consciousness to make the world make sense. But the world, of course. Doesn't always make sense. Sometimes the incongruous or the bizarre does happen, and it's non-conscious cognition, which is closer to that stimuli and which, uh, is the processor of all those unusual things that happen outside the mainstream, uh, that may or may not ever enter consciousness, but non-conscious processing happens first and it will process highly in congress information.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. You give quite a lot of examples in all your different work, but some that are coming to mind is [00:23:00] like, when we don't step on a snake, we see it and we move outta the way before we've thought about making the decision.
Kate Hayles: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Or um, pattern like where you, you talk about some experiments where. A, a lot of patterns are, are, are seen by the body consciousness, but we're not aware of them, conscious of them yet.
You know, in the experiment you can see that actually you, you had seen them, you were aware of them. So there's these different levels of, of, um, awareness I guess is
Kate Hayles: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sometimes asked, uh, well is non-conscious, you know, an invention of the late 20th century and absolutely not. Uh, so we have a long history of intuitions of kind of second sense, and those were older terms for what we now call non-conscious, uh, or implicit cognition.
So people have always realized that consciousness is not the whole story, but they lack the [00:24:00] precise scientific evidence of exactly what it is and how it operates. And now we have a much more complete picture of that.
Andrea Hiott: So, since we've started with the consciousness and cognition, is it okay with you to spend a little time here? Because I feel like this is a really hard thing to understand. Do you mind if we get a little bit messy and try to talk about this a little? No, absolutely not. Go ahead. Okay. So you just beautifully laid out this idea of the, non-conscious, um, and non-conscious cognition.
It's almost like we have to look at a kind of window here. these, these terms, because as I understand it, you're not necessarily. Saying there's something called consciousness and there's something called cognition that are like always separate in the living process.
It's that when we're trying to understand all this ongoing process, we talk about consciousness and we talk about cognition and it helps to talk about those separately. [00:25:00] And I wanna try to help people understand what that is, that decoupling of consciousness and cognition. Because I think it also helps to understand how you can talk about bacteria having cognition and AI having cognition and it not necessarily meaning that we're saying they have something like what we experience as awareness of our consciousness.
So where we Yeah, absolutely.
Kate Hayles: So. The way I think about it is that consciousness is a subset of cognition. It's one form of cognition. And because we as humans spend our waking lives in consciousness, we tend to emphasize that. In fact, I would say we overemphasize it as if it were the whole of cognition, but it's not the whole of cognition.
And so to recognize that consciousness is only part of cognition opens the [00:26:00] possibility that there are other forms of cognition which are not conscious. So this means that non-conscious organisms, plants, microorganisms, uh, and so forth, clams, uh, organisms, which we know are not conscious, nevertheless have cognitive capabilities.
So there are many forms of, of cognition, which are. Non-conscious. Uh, and of course we as conscious beings also have non-conscious cognition. So consciousness and non-conscious cognition operate together in the human brain. They're, they're tightly integrated and they're really not separable. But when you go to other organisms that are not conscious, it's important to recognize that they also have cognitive capabilities.
That consciousness is. Not [00:27:00] necessary for cognition in humans. It's joined with cognition, but it is not necessary for cognitive capabilities. That means there are many by biomass. There are many, many, many more non-conscious organisms than there are conscious organisms. Conscious organisms are limited to mammals and a few aquatic species like occupy, uh, and so forth.
But if you think about non-conscious organisms, that would include all plants. All fungi, uh, all microorganisms. There are a huge, huge number of species which engage in non-conscious cognition. So that's why it's so important to recognize that consciousness is not the whole of cognition and that there are many forms of cognition, which do [00:28:00] not have and will never have consciousness, but nevertheless carry on cognitive activities.
Andrea Hiott: And when you say conscious, uh, do you mean Sorry, there's a beautiful rainbow right outside my window right now, and there are balloons going by, so it's a little bit distracting. I have no idea why it became so beautiful and my dog is running around, so there's all kind of conscious cognition going on, but, um, just if you think I'm distracted, but.
Okay. So when you say conscious though, this is important because some people are hearing that like on a Glasgow scale, you know that you don't have coma, you're alive. Um, and a a lot of other people are hearing it as awareness of your own life, awareness of your own thoughts. This, this kind of, uh, experience we have of sort of hearing our thoughts or being aware that we are here.
And I wanna, that's a messy and hard thing, but you set it up at the beginning where we were [00:29:00] talking about, there's all these moments where, of course we're conscious in a Glasgow scale way. We're not in a coma. We're we're alive and we're awake. And, um, but we're not necessarily thinking in that way. Like, when the snake comes, we move out of the way.
We don't think, oh, what should I do now? So is that what you mean by conscious, that, that kind of tip of the iceberg part when you use that word most of the time? Or how would you unpack that?
Kate Hayles: Yes, I, I think that, uh, of course consciousness is a notorious problem for philosophers and also for neuroscientists and so forth.
Uh, but for me, I'm, for my purposes, uh, I'm satisfied with thinking of consciousness as a form of awareness. Uh, that's really the foundation of the idea of a self. So, uh, we all carry on. Uh, narratives in our head. We're always thinking thoughts. Those thoughts are formative of what we conceive to [00:30:00] be ourself.
Um, and we construct a self, socially and also biologically because we are conscious beads. We're not alone in that. I am convinced that dogs also construct a self, and cats do. That's why they're so embarrassed if they make a mistake, because it doesn't correspond with their self-image. So we're not alone in constructing a sense of ourselves, but the idea of selfhood really, I think should be, um, relegated to conscious beings.
Now there are other forms of awareness which are not associated with selfhood, but have to do with intake of environmental information, response to that information and, uh, reacting accordingly. So we did, we have an impoverished vocabulary when it comes to talking about awareness. It's been so focused on human [00:31:00] awareness that we haven't developed an adequate vocabulary for the kind of awareness that might be non-conscious.
The kind of awareness that a tree has about its environment and what is happening in its environment, its senses, and now we. Know that, uh, it can sense an astonishing array of different kinds of stimuli, including the presence of predators and so forth, and it makes appropriate responses to that. It's not conscious.
I wouldn't ever wanna say a tree is conscious, but it has a form of awareness, which we're only beginning to learn to describe, and this is now resurfacing in the form of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is not conscious, in my view, in the humans. Sense. Nevertheless, it has a form of awareness that is different from human consciousness, but is [00:32:00] aware of itself and is aware of itself in relation to other beings.
I don't think it is constructing a sense of selfhood, at least not yet. But as AI continues to advance and as new architectures are tested that allow durable memory and revision of those memories in the most recent forms of, uh, ai, for example, the idea that an AI could form a sense of self seems to me a real possibility, although it's not been proven yet, but I foresee that as a real possibility in the future.
Andrea Hiott: So the non-conscious cognition. Is about the way that whatever being or whatever the subject is that we're looking at is making meaning in. Isn't that how you put it in a way? Or it's, um, yes,
Kate Hayles: exactly. So, so in my [00:33:00] view, um. How, in fact, how I define cognition is a form of information processing in context that connect it to meaning.
So meaning making activities have long been understood as possible for non-human organisms. Bios, semiotics is all about how non-human species. Creates signals that have meaning for them and for their environmental compatriots. So when a porcupine raises its quills, that's a signal, that's a sign, and it's an anticipatory sign.
It anticipates a possible. Action. And it's a warning of course, to predators back off, or I'll release my quills. Uh, the predator understands that sign. So non-human, a animals engage in sign making [00:34:00] activities, and those sign making activities have meaning for them. There's no question that it has meaning for the porcupine, and it also has meaning for the predator.
And those meanings on ultimately have to do with their survival. So the ground level of meaning for all organisms, human and non-human is survival. And when you get to non-conscious organisms, such as microorganisms, survival becomes the main. Source of meaning because they don't have access to all the complicated kinds of meanings that conscious beings, such as humans create.
So meaning, uh, for me is understood as something that is crucial to the organism in continuing its existence. And if it's crucial, then it counts as a meaning making activity. So when a, when a [00:35:00] microorganism. Moves toward a food source or away from a toxin, that's an activity which has meaning for the organism, even though in human terms, I mean, you might say it's a minimally cognitive activity because it doesn't, it doesn't have the full richness of what a conscious organism, uh, would give it, but it has meaning in the context of that organism.
So another crucial idea here is that meaning has to be evaluated in terms of the organisms vet. This is a term that Ja Pan Oak School proposed to describe the kind of world every species constructs for itself. And it's species specific. So humans and dogs have overlapping noves. My dog's, um, belt is very different from mine.
It includes a richness of [00:36:00] smells that I will never have, but we both can see a squirrel and we both know it's a squirrel. So we have an overlap and therefore we can communicate. If there were no overlap, I could not communicate with that species, or I would have to find some channel in which communication was possible.
So it's unfelt specific. Um, and meaning always has to be evaluated within the specific world horizon that that species constructs.
Andrea Hiott: So if we have, we have ongoing life, we have whatever all this is around us. Um, and within that we. Understand that there's something called cognition, which is how whatever subject that we are looking at or assessing or whatever is making its way or its meaning in the way that you just described.
So we can look at the bacteria, if we look at it in the [00:37:00] bacteria's world, not through the human world. This is, I feel like this is a very tricky, nuanced thing. You just brought it up with the, um, belt. I was, I'm so glad you did. But I wanna linger just a minute because it makes a lot of, uh, it makes a lot of difference at every level, but especially when we start talking about computers or AI or LLMs or, so, yeah.
I, I just wonder if what you might say to help clarify that a bit more. Like how do we not think we're talking about consciousness, but we're talking about cognition. If we're talking about meaning, because that's such a. That, that word meaning and understanding, it's very hard for us not to see that through this human-centric view, or at least it seems like that.
Kate Hayles: Yeah. So, uh, Thomas Nagel, uh, guess maybe 50 years ago, wrote a very important article called What's it Like To Be A Bat? And his point was, we can know a lot about a bat's um, belt. We can [00:38:00] know it uses sonar, we can know what it eats, et cetera. Uh, we can know what its visual system is, but that's different than being a bat.
So we are. Always and forever in the human umm belt. We will never be able to be out of the human umwelt, but we can understand what other umwelts are by studying their biology, their sensing systems, and so on and so forth. That's not the same as experiencing it. And there is a crucial difference between seeing it from the outside, so to speak, and experiencing it from the inside, from being inside that velt.
So now we come to ai, AI also have, um, uh, but here, uh, for biological organisms. The MVE is primarily constructed through sensory information. [00:39:00] Ais have a distinctly different kind of velt. They have no awareness of their physical situation. They don't know the servers on which they run. They don't know where they're located in the world, but they have what we could call a conceptual umwelt.
And that conceptual velt is through the information they ingest, through human authored texts. So their velt has, uh, distinctive features that make it. Qualitatively different, not only from the human mve, but from all the mve and of biological organisms. Nevertheless, it is an velt. It constructs a world for them, and it's crucial to understand the ways in which their mve and overlap with ours and the ways in which it's different.
So that's part of the challenge that AI is posing to many fields, including my [00:40:00] own field, literary studies, to understand in some significant detail how the AI vet overlaps with and also diverges from the human. And crucial here is the issue of embodiment. So ais are embodied all. Entities that exist in the world have to be embodied in some form in order to exist.
But their embodiment is so fundamentally different from human embodiment that, uh, it creates, uh, a real divergence e So it appears to many people in my field, literary studies that ais and large language models in particular are using natural language, but that natural language has a fundamentally different ontology than human language.
And it's necessary to come to understand that in [00:41:00] some detail, in order to understand what those words mean to an LLM. So we're sort of in the position of looking at a bat. We can construct the own belt of the LLM, it's not the same as having that as our own belt.
Andrea Hiott: Wonderful. So, it makes me think of your, uh, the post-human book because of the embodiment in a way.
I I wonder if we could linger on this embodiment being important because in that book, if it's interesting because that book people associate the Posthuman book, in my world, sort of as if you're saying, we sh we, we wanna embrace posthumanism or we are posthuman in a, in a certain sense.
But when I read the book, it feels almost like a warning or like a neutral. This is the way it is. Please can we see it clearly? I don't know how if that's, which, if any of those are true for you. But it feels to me like in that book, you're, you were trying to say, there is a difference between information processing, so to speak, [00:42:00] and, the embodied.
Assessment of all of that. And I wonder what, you know from today, when you think about that embodiment in that, what I heard is almost like a, I won't say a warning, but it, like you, you were trying to get us to look at something in that book that feels very important to me. Does that make any sense to you? Uh
Kate Hayles: oh, absolutely. And I think it's a misunderstanding of that book to say that it is urging us to embrace the posthuman. When I, when I came upon the title, how we became Posthuman, I met it with a healthy dose of irony. So it, it was as if we had all already become post-human, which of course is, um, is a gross simplification of the actual situation.
So let's just make one thing clear at the very outset, and that is from my point of view, human. Is a historical construct [00:43:00] that has always been in the process of change, transformation, and contestation. So what counts as human, uh, has varied across time. Uh, and across cultures, across languages, it's always in flux.
And whenever you have a genocidal impulse in a society, the very first manifestation of that gen genocidal impulse is to consider the others as not human. So, uh, my group is human. Your group are in some way not human. So, generally human has been a highly privileged term. Um, but what the human is is not only a social construct, it's also a biological construct.
So we know that, uh, when an infant is born, it has more synapses than it will ever have again in its life and in [00:44:00] concert with. The environment, the infant's brain grows and prunes those synapses. So it's actually in a genetic process of bioengineering its brain to fit its environment. So it is literally true that a 1-year-old living in a tribal area in Africa has a different neuronal setup than a 1-year-old living in New York City because their environments are so radically different and their synaptic structures have adapted to become, uh, fitted for that environment.
So the biology of humans is notoriously flexible. It's constantly in a process of transformation, in concert with its environment, its culture, its language, and so on and so forth. So we want to. Relativize, the concept [00:45:00] of the human recognize that it's not a fixed quality that someone has or doesn't have, but it's always been contested.
It's always in some kind of flux or other. So now we're in a new period in human history in which human cognition is being extended and amplified by synthetic cognition. So that is, has enormous implications culturally, socially, economically, and biologically. It means that we are in the process of re-engineering our brains and our societies and our cultures as a result of our symbiosis with this new form of synthetic intelligence.
So you had mentioned that you wanted me to talk a little bit about symbiosis, so perhaps I can make a segue here to that [00:46:00] topic. So, as it's used commonly, symbiosis is understood as a cooperative arrangement between two species in which both benefit, um, but as a technical term in biology, it also includes parasitism where one species benefits at the other's expense.
And symbiosis is a huge spectrum. So it can be two species living in close proximity, like a cate that perches on the cow's back and eats bugs. That's a form of symbiosis to something like the gut in our bacteria. They've now become so integrated with our biology that we couldn't live without them. So one of the big revolutions in biological thinking in the 20th century was initiated by Lynn Margolis, who argued that it was symbiosis, not natural selection, that was the [00:47:00] primary driver of evolution.
And she specifically talked about endosymbiosis, where eukaryotic cells emerged, evolved from prokaryotic cells and made animal life possible That happened through symbiosis. And her hypothesis has now been verified by studies that have found the mitochondria in, uh, in a cell are, have a separate DNA from the cell's nucleus.
So there's every indication that, yes, there was a merger at some point in our evolutionary history where, uh. A prokaryotic cell invaded another prokaryotic cell, became part of the mitochondrias, changed how the cell's energy system worked. It made the cell capable of more energy production and hence paved the way for an, the [00:48:00] evolution of animals, which are all eukaryotic, uh, which all have eukaryotic cells.
So symbiosis has become a major topic in evolutionary biology, but I'm particularly interested in the kind of symbiosis that's happening now with ai. So computational media in general have already become our. Uh, our inextricable symbiance in contemporary developed societies think how much our infrastructure depends on computer media that controls and processes information.
The world's work would grind to a halt in a country like the US if we did not have computational media. So it's already become like the gut in our bacteria. It's essential to [00:49:00] infrastructures in developed society. And now with a development of ai, we've entered a new phase where it's gonna become essential to the way the human cognition operates.
Andrea Hiott: You just reminded me somewhere you write about if there was an electrical pulse, some kind of very strong pulse where it would just knock, you know, everything offline, then we would be helpless very quickly these days. It's so interesting to think about that symbiosis in terms of, of how we've extended ourselves in our technology or the way technology is in life.
But also I wanna try to like hold all this together, this integrative, uh, cognitive framework, but also that book we brought up about the posthuman and what you were saying there in that book, you go through the Macy conferences and cybernetics and you talk about like, um, homeostasis and reflexivity and then how we tried to get, we got to this place of auto oasis, which trying to kind of figure out, I mean, I'm being very general, but how, where the [00:50:00] individual stops and the other begins and how this.
All these kind of boundaries, that we've been talking about in a way. And I feel like in that work, you open up the space by decoupling some of these ideas, like what we've been talking about as, for example, like non-conscious cognition so that we can start to understand that there is this shared space, whether it's the micro or the techno of, let's call it meaning making in the way that you were saying before.
So it's a really hard, but a really important thing I think that happens, starts happening there. And that is really coming alive in this latest book even more, but I wonder if that makes sense to you that there's a way in which you've, through a lot of different terms, planetary, cognitive ecology, ecological ing. Techno, Genesis, techno, symbio, Symbio, Genesis. There's a lot of ways I feel like that you're trying to help us understand the continuity, [00:51:00] um, that's shared here.
And the way we change one part, we change all parts, um, without it becoming, you know, trapped in those usual places we go when we're thinking about it through consciousness. Does that make sense?
Kate Hayles: Yeah, absolutely. That, that describes my intellectual project very well, which as you suggested, is really stretched over 20 or 30 years.
Uh, so it goes all the way back to the post human book, which is now 25 years old. Yeah. Well that was 99,
Andrea Hiott: right?
Kate Hayles: Yeah. 99 up to the present. Wow. And the idea here is to try to reconceptualize where cu fit in the. World ecology in which we're a part to understand in some detail, uh, what our history has been and also what our future is likely to be.
So the, the Bacteria book is very much oriented toward the future, as the subtitle indicates. [00:52:00] And I'm one of these people who believes that we have to keep for ourselves a vision of hope for the future. Otherwise, there's no point in going on. We might as well just, you know, party and live it up and not worry about what's gonna happen.
But I think we have to have a sense of, uh, having stakes in what's happening, that there are things that we can do as individuals and also as societies to point us toward a more positive more. Um, cognitively relative future, if you will, uh, in which we understand ourselves as part of a planetary ecology and not as unique dominators of the college of the ecology.
So that's part of the impulse behind this large intellectual project. And that goes all the way back to issues of embodiment, to understand what our embodiment really means for our [00:53:00] ability to make sense of the world and how interwoven it is with everything that we think. And therefore, how, the possibility exists that other organisms will think in entirely different ways because they have entirely different embodiments.
So it opens the realm of meaning making, to the, to all organisms, but also to ai. Uh, I remember a few years ago, many people were saying, well, the pronouncements of something like a large language model, uh, have no meaning in themselves. They only have meaning in so far as we project meaning onto them, but I think now it's advanced to the part point where that position is no longer tenable.
It's obvious that AI. RI writings have meaning all the people who rely on ai, uh, throughout the world for suggestions, for insights, [00:54:00] for information. They know that they have meaning, otherwise they wouldn't, uh, be involved with that. So, uh, yes, we're at a new, new point in human history and I think it has enormous potentials, but just like symbiosis includes parasitism, symbiosis always includes risks and there are risks to anytime you become so entangled with a symbiant, you can't live without it.
So I mentioned that computational media are inextricable symbiance, but of course that brings risks hacking, uh, cyber warfare. Um, you. S computer viruses, uh, malware of various kinds. Those are all risks. Ai, uh, also brings enormous risks with it, and I don't think we need to. Um, I think we [00:55:00] must take those risks into account, but I don't think that that should dominate the picture.
Andrea Hiott: That's why I feel that it's important to, to really do the hard work and understand what you're trying to show. And, and it's hard. I mean, obviously it's taken decades to get it, you know? I think people could understand it now, but you've been working on it. But that way in which we can decouple these id, which are just our ways of understanding who we are and what we're in the middle of, it helps a lot because we can start to understand that.
You know, right now you either, people often think of the AI as some kind of threat that's outside of us. the same with, you know, the micro world. And when we start thinking through this symbiant relational ecological view that you hold right alongside this, this, uh, understanding that these are different and they all have different, um, belt.
It's like we have to hold that together, which is what's hard, I guess. Um, but once you start being able to do that, to hold them both, even though they seem opposing, it kind of, for me, it opens [00:56:00] up a whole world of hope because then we can start to get clear how do we want to use this technology? You brought up the.
Famous paper from Nagel about, you know, what it's like to be a bat. And maybe we can never have the experience of a bat, but actually we have technology now that we could probably get really close if we wanted to explore things like that. you know, even just thinking of that metaphorically. So there's something about the understanding that you're opening up that seems to be able, we could, we could orient in a very exciting way, if we, if we really took it seriously.
Do you feel that too? Has it, have you felt that as you've, you know, created this work?
Kate Hayles: Yeah, absolutely. That's part of what motivates me to, you know, to. Launch these projects, which are research intensive and which take years to bring to fruition. Uh, but I, I really feel highly motivated to be able to articulate a vision that is not naive, that [00:57:00] is well aware of the scientific specificities involved in all of these big ideas, uh, but nevertheless also strives to see the big picture, which is, as you say, relational.
It's ecological. It's about our place, not only on the planet, but you know, uh, on a visionary scale on the cosmos. What it is that we have to contribute, what it is that we have to fear, what it is that we are risking, what it is that we have the potential to be and to do. And those are ideas that need a lot of circumstantial.
Specificity to really carry heft. And that's, that's what my research is dedicated toward. And that's why it takes me five years to write one of these books because they're deeply researched and I of course believe in the importance of empirical evidence and I try to give, uh, due [00:58:00] weight to that. But at the same time, I don't want people to lose sight of the fact that there is a larger vision here.
Andrea Hiott: maybe here we could talk a little bit about how you got here, because you're a very unique person as you were saying that, and when I'm reading your work, and when I go back to it, I think in a way you're giving us technology, to write a different narrative for ourselves as ourselves.
I dunno if that makes sense. And of course, you're not the only person doing it, but you're definitely doing that. From my point of view, if, if you. If you read this and you start to understand what it's really doing, it starts to open a different way. You can tell the story of what's possible, and I wonder about this narrative because, you know, you're someone who holds these worlds.
You, I think you started out loving literature, but you went into, you became a chemist, if I'm correct, So you're a scientist. You are a philosopher, in my opinion. You're a literary critic. I mean, none, none of us really fits to any label, but you're holding a lot of space there, which to me, parallels what we've just were talking about, [00:59:00] about holding these different worlds.
Do you see a connection there to that, that you've done that and that you've also been able to express that?
Kate Hayles: Yeah, I, I do see a connection. I, well, I started out, uh, in a scientific education and I found it absolutely exhilarating because it. Soon became apparent to me that this was a very powerful method to find out how the world actually works.
And, um, so I, I was found it exhilarating when I actually got into, deeper into research in graduate school. I began to feel a little bit limited and I felt I wanted to entertain larger ideas than was possible in a research intensive environment. So I, at that point, changed fields and went into literary studies, but I, I did that with virtually no preparation.
So it was a huge culture shock to [01:00:00] me, I guess, equivalent to someone learning a foreign language. You now, you're suddenly exposed to a completely different way of thinking. And I spent, uh. Few years resisting that, fiercely arguing with my literary colleagues about, you know, no, no, this has no empirical basis.
And on and on and on. And then I realized that that was fruitless. That if I was gonna succeed in this new discipline, I had to put all my scientific training in a closet and shut the door. And I did that. And, uh, then I learned the ground rules, the unwritten rules that are always the basis of any discipline, which is, entails a fundamental revision of really deep questions.
What counts as evidence, what counts as argument, so on and so forth. I had to learn an entirely new way of, of, uh, doing those things. And then once I got [01:01:00] my PhD, I went back to that closet and opened the door and. Now I had two cultural sets, a scientific set, and a literary set, and I could put them side by side and I could see what were the strengths of each and what were the limitations of each.
For example, scientists are often reluctant to admit that the kind of stories you tell and the kind of rhetoric that you use is important, but it's crucially important because human beings are not logic machines. We're complex beings that have emotions and that have a innate historical tendency to gravitate toward narrative.
And so, uh, yes, all those things are crucially important, which literary studies has a lot to say about. Mm-hmm. So if you are in a position to look at both sides, uh, you can, you can make [01:02:00] a much more, um. How shall I put it? A much more accurate assessment of what the strengths and limitations of each are because you have a way to compare them both.
Andrea Hiott: Do you find that you start thinking of it differently than thinking of it as two sides too in your writing in this idea of ecological and relational? I feel like part of it is trying to, and of course this kind of the orientation of a lot of this project and research too, but is getting out of that way of thinking of it as binary and almost thinking of it as like a constellation or kaleidoscopic or, I feel that in your work, but I don't know if that makes sense to you.
This way of seeing like what you were describing about how we could look at it from the bacteria or from the ai. there's something there, I don't know if that makes sense to you and, and in literature. I feel that when I read books
Kate Hayles: well, yeah, that's very much the case in my work that I think I really left that binary framework.
Years ago. Mm-hmm. And, uh, it has become [01:03:00] more and more integrated. So I, uh, I see both sides now. Isn't that the sign? I see both sides now. Uh, I see both sides, but I also see how they relate and how they form a larger hole. So, uh, it's that larger hole that I've increasingly been trying to articulate, and especially in this last book, uh, bacteria to ai because I think it's important, crucially important now for us, especially now because we are faced with the emergence of an entirely new actor on the human scene, which is ai.
And
And all of my work is grounded in. What we could say is scientific specificity that I, I like to know how things work and I like to articulate for readers how things work so that we're not just dealing in the gaseous realm of big [01:04:00] ideas, but we're actually, we have a solid foundation of facts to go on.
But it's never just facts. It's also that larger vision that literary studies is superbly equipped to understand. So I, I think that by now in my career, after 40 years or so, these two sides have become thoroughly integrated and, uh, they don't exist for me as binaries. They exist as points on a spectrum or, you know, complex networks that are completely interwoven with one another.
Andrea Hiott: All of your books have fiction in them too. I don't know if all of them, but, you talk about books and I wonder if that was hard or that just came naturally after you had done all this work.
do you Oh, well,
Kate Hayles: you know, it's really my commitment. I went back and was reading an, a review of one of my, I guess it was my second book on, uh, chaos [01:05:00] Bound. And the reviewer was trying to promote the book to, uh, an audience of scientists, particularly computer scientists. And he said at one point in the review.
Well, yes, it has a few chapters on fiction, but you couldn't ignore that. I mean, for him it was a compliment as if, yes, I have something important to say about the scientific part of it, but he completely missed the idea that the fiction is not just something that you can, you know, ignore if you're a scientist.
No, the fiction is there to show how ideas circulate among, uh, a culture, how ideas get expressed, what metaphors they use, what narratives they tell, and how important these are including for scientists in shaping what those facts mean. So facts by themselves are important, [01:06:00] but to give them full meaning, you have to embed them.
Integrally into a larger narrative that makes sense of them. So that's, that's part of the project. It's not dispensable, it's not, well, you can ignore these chapters. No. It's all part of showing how culture operates. Culture, which includes science and how it operates, how its ideas begin to percolate, how they get transformed, how they acquire power and inertia within a given culture.
And that's something that science by itself cannot do, but something like literary studies is very well equipped to do.
Andrea Hiott: Is that sort of what you felt you were missing, even though you were so exhilarated and excited about the science? Was it that.
Kate Hayles: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I like to phrase it, I, [01:07:00] I wanted to go and search of bigger ideas, but, uh, but yeah, I guess it was what I was looking at, what I was looking for was a sense of meaning, which is not to say that scientific research can't have meaning in itself.
It, of course it can, but it also always has cultural and social implications that radiate out from that.
Andrea Hiott: Well, I think that links to that meaning making, the way you described cognition and, and the way I was trying to articulate how you've opened up cognition is something we don't have to attach to our understanding of consciousness and thought awareness, because then.
There's something there that opens it up in the way, I think maybe you were missing, in the science, there's a similar pattern there, I guess, uh, that I feel in the writing, in terms of opening it, you know, it it, it becomes a narrative that's shared or that can be shared and that can even be written from different places.
Kate Hayles: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. [01:08:00] Yeah. I think you could say, at least from the post-Human book on all my books, try to tell a story, and that's a very deliberate choice on my part. In fact, when I was writing the Post-Human book, it was so rich in details that I thought, oh, readers are not gonna wanna struggle through this.
I have to add some narrative interest to this. I have to add a kind of drive, you know? So I was very conscious of, of crafting a narrative that goes beyond the individual facts to some larger picture.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Because to me it becomes a demonstration in a way of what you're trying to say. Because sometimes maybe, I don't know, maybe you disagree with this, but we can't actually literally say what we're trying to express, but we can express it through the language.
Does that make any sense to you as a literary?
Kate Hayles: Oh yeah. Of course, of course. I mean, it's [01:09:00] not only the denotation of words, it's all the connotations, the cultural resonances and overtones, and, uh, that's what great writers excel at is mobilizing. All of those resources, some of which are embodied responses, the way that we breathe, the way that we articulate, the way that we make sounds.
All of that is part of our mobilization of the huge, uh, semiotics of meaning, which are verbal, which are biological, which are physical. Uh, and all of that helps to create a rich sense of what something means, which goes well beyond the facts in themselves.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And is that, connected to what we're trying to do when we are rethinking of cognition in the way that you present in this latest book?
Are we trying, is there a way in which we're incorporating more into the story somehow when we [01:10:00] rethink cognition in this way more? The story, you know, widening the lens of the story, or I don't know.
Kate Hayles: Absolutely. We're telling, we're telling a larger story, and increasingly now among my colleagues, I see a, uh, an impulse to go to the planetary to exceed not only the human, but to exceed any individual species and begin thinking in planetary terms.
And many theorists now are writing about planetary ecologies and also theorizing about where the planetary, uh, planetary cognition is going. So it, it's a huge idea to think about planetary cognition. You know, what, what does that consist of? Well, it's all of the individual cognitions, which are all interacting with one another to create.
What we might call a huge [01:11:00] symphony. Uh, and the symphony is resonating through every individual being in its own way, in its own particularity, but it also has a huge scope that exceeds what any organism except perhaps humans can begin to grasp. You know, it's only humans with our conscious abilities that we're able to begin to even conceptualize something like what this symphony might be and what symphony means in planetary terms.
And it's a huge, huge breakthrough, but it's. Fraught with so many perils. You know, are we as a species going to become extinct because of all of our environmental excesses? Are we going to somehow achieve the wisdom to do what we have to do to survive as a species? [01:12:00] Are we somehow gonna achieve the wisdom to admit that we're not the sole possessors of awareness that there are synthetic intelligences now, which have their own kind of awareness?
You know, there are huge challenges here, and I think it's not at all clear at the present moment here in 2025 that we're going to successfully. Meet those challenges, we could easily fail. In fact, just in terms of looking at our history and the history of species, it's more likely we will become extinct and we will survive.
And if we do survive, we'll undoubtedly survive profoundly transformed, transformed, transform mentally, culturally that the symbiosis with AI is gonna fundamentally change once again, change what it means to be human.
Andrea Hiott: That reminds me of the way you speak about ecological relation. That it's not just a friendly, wonderful, it sounds [01:13:00] all, everyone's getting along, but it's actually, it's incredibly powerful and almost like a blade or something.
I'm thinking it's very sharp and exactly as you just described it. Um, but also within all this kind of hardness, there's a, a sense of care I feel, and what you were just describing that. That's what we don't wanna forget. I mean, to me, when I, I'm thinking about Lynn Margolis, who I love very much, and Evan Thompson tells a story of when he was a kid, watching her talk about the mitochondria and how she was just completely in love.
You know, she cared so much for this, these creatures, and she just wanted other people to understand this symbiosis that is going on, or endo symbiosis. do you, does, does that connect at all to what you're
Kate Hayles: Yeah. Yeah. That, that would be part of what, that would be part of what humans can carry forward from their heritage into the future.
Care, care for the planet, care for ourselves, care for our [01:14:00] other beings in enhanced, uh, increased sense. So, you know, you could almost look at human history as the ability to enlarge the circles of care for prehistoric humans. The circle of care was undoubtedly very small. It was the family members. It was at most the tribe.
It wasn't the people in the next valley who didn't qualify as human. They were the other, they were the others. So we've moved beyond the tribal stage to be able to have complex. So societies, uh, we've been able to get along with our present governance system of nations. We've begun to think about a supranational level of organization with the United Nations.
We need to go much further along that path to begin to develop really viable and [01:15:00] strong methods of planetary governance. That's would be part of what a successful path looks like in my opinion. But there are strong countervailing forces, as we all know, the trend backward not only in the US but also in the year in Europe toward a very limited vision of nationalism, that wants to exclude others.
The reactionary forces to redraw those boundaries once again, much more tightly. It's just your family that you should be concerned about. It's just people who look like you that you should be concerned about. It's those strong regressive pulls. So that's why I say it's not at all clear whether we're gonna succeed, but it's also clear that if we.
As a culture, as a society, and as a world give into these regressive poll polls, we won't survive. [01:16:00] We will continue to exploit the environment. We will continue to degrade the environment, and human futures will be limited to maybe a hundred years. So that's the kind of choices we're faced with. But even to be able to articulate that choice means that you understand there's a way out of it, because you'll never get a wide nationalist to say it like that.
It'll be all about the fear of the other. It'll be all about watching out for your own. so it's really important to have narratives that point toward an enlarged, enhanced vision of care.
Andrea Hiott: some of it too is, is learning. In the way we were talking about when you, when you start thinking of cognition as this, meaning making the way we were thinking about it, you, you can start to question when, when these messages are coming in from wherever they're coming, each from, you know, these different places, what kind of meaning [01:17:00] is being made from that?
because, I understand like the ecological relationality is, is very stark, but also there's, it's a beautiful way to live in a way. If you, if you make those harder choices. I'm not trying to be idealistic about it, but this meaning making cognitive thing, actually what you were describing there, I, it feels like a closing down.
Right? And it is a kind of like end of survival and then there is this whole other kaleidoscope of possibilities of opening up and exploring ourselves and what's possible in completely different ways. Do you, do you still feel that too?
Kate Hayles: Oh, absolutely. You know, and it. I feel right now, the US in a is in a very perilous condition, and it's not at all clear what's gonna happen, uh, because the regressive forces are so strong, uh, probab Well, I mean, one just doesn't know.
So, uh, I, I, [01:18:00] I have hope for the future, but I also realize there are very real disasters looming.
Andrea Hiott: you've, I know, I don't know if you would say this, but you've written out of a place of care and, and even when I think of the post-Human book and talking about liberalism and kinship and, you know, expanding this to kind of an ecological or planetary idea and then to what you just said, that now actually a lot of people are talking about that, Yeah. I don't know if you have any kinda last things you would like to say about, about care or love or any of these themes, just for people who might feel like it doesn't matter. because a lot of those ideas that probably didn't make any sense in 1999 and most people are making sense now.
So can we care about each other and continue that? And, you know, what, what, what comes to mind there just, you know, at the end that you might wanna share anything about,
Kate Hayles: about that? Well, uh, I'll just say that I, I really believe that when people understand more accurately what our present situation [01:19:00] is, that it will open up paths for them that lead to a positive future.
That the part of understanding is to understand in some real depth what the issues are and. Misinformation is now so rife on the internet and, but also in government circles. And we see the steady erosion of accurate information in our own government in all kinds of ways. it's just so important that people get accurate information and that they have the opportunity to really think about what that information means.
So, you know, it's, it's just not only the foundation of democracy, but it's the foundation of a better world. The more that we know, the more that we really can think and understand and conceptualize. I think basically people are good at heart [01:20:00] that, uh. They, they need the opportunity to have enlightened vision.
And that's what education can do. That's what research can do. That's what I hope my books can do. Give them the opportunity to be able to envision more accurately and also more solidly, and finally, more hopefully what a real positive future would look like.
Andrea Hiott: Well, thank you, Kate, for everything and thank you for, for being here today.
I really, really appreciate it.
Kate Hayles: Well, thank you. Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to have this conversation. I really appreciate the time and care you've put into this. It means a lot.
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