Disintegrator LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 1 (w/ N. Katherine Hayles)
N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor in English at UCLA and a founder of Anglophone posthumanist thought, talks about language, cognition, and computation. She frames LLMs as simulations with distinct umwelten. Hayles proposes the SIEPAL model that stretches cognition from bacteria to AI. She also argues for analog computation and a computational humanities that reunites biological and technological thought.
58:49
LLMs Have Their Own Conceptual Umwelt
- Hayles borrows Jakob von Uexküll's Umwelt to compare species-specific world-horizons and applies it to LLMs.
- LLMs form a conceptual umwelt lacking bodily location but overlapping enough with humans for communication.
SIEPAL Redefines Cognition Across Scales
- Hayles defines cognition with the acronym SIEPAL: sensing, interpreting, responding adaptively, anticipating, and learning.
- Under SIEPAL, bacteria and LLMs both meet cognitive criteria despite lacking human consciousness.
Consciousness Is A Slow Narrative Overlay
- Consciousness is a narrow, slow window that constructs coherent narratives while most interpretation happens in a faster cognitive nonconscious.
- Hayles maps this to dual-process ideas: non-conscious cognition filters and forwards results to consciousness for narration.
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Intro
00:00 • 5min
LLMs as Simulations of Natural Language
05:03 • 1min
What Makes LLM Language Simulative
06:04 • 2min
Umwelt: Comparing Human and LLM World-Horizons
08:04 • 3min
Language Without Human Cognition
10:44 • 3min
Defining Cognition: The SIEPAL Framework
14:06 • 3min
Nonconscious Cognition vs Consciousness
17:12 • 15sec
Algorithms Operating Beyond Human Timescales
17:27 • 2min
Distributed Agency and Cognitive Assemblages
19:26 • 6min
Scale, Mediating Mechanisms, and Broken Feedback
25:12 • 4min
EEG Waves and Mesoscopic Mediation
29:24 • 3min
Political Dysfunction, Feedback, and Reform
32:02 • 7min
Integrated Cognitive Framework and Difference
38:45 • 2min
Analog Computation Versus Digital Abstraction
41:04 • 5min
Analog Humanities and Computational Humanities
45:36 • 1min
The Digital Moment as a Historical Blip
46:56 • 6min
Defining Analog and Digital Distinctions
52:28 • 14sec
Hybrid Examples: Abacus to McCulloch-Pitts
52:42 • 1min
Natural Computing and Biological Cognition
54:05 • 32sec
From Media Theory to Planetary Governance
54:37 • 4min
Outro
58:32 • 9sec
#55379
Writing machines
Anne Burdick
Katherine Hayles
In 'Writing Machines,' N. Katherine Hayles investigates how textual materiality and computational technologies interact to transform reading, writing, and textual production.
She examines historical and contemporary artifacts to show how mechanical and electronic media shape literary form and interpretive practices.
Hayles blends literary criticism with media theory to argue that the material operations of texts—machines, typesetting, code—are inseparable from their meanings.
The book foregrounds the interplay between human authorship and machine processes, anticipating later debates about digital texts and computational authorship.
It is widely cited in media studies for highlighting how technological substrates influence cultural production.
#43561
How Brains Make Up Their Minds
Walter Freeman
Walter Freeman's 'How Brains Make Up Their Minds' presents research on brain dynamics, emphasizing the role of collective neural activity and oscillatory patterns in perception and decision-making.
Using experiments such as olfactory processing in rabbits, Freeman shows how populations of neurons coordinate to generate meaningful brain states.
He argues that these mesoscopic dynamics mediate between individual neuron activity and whole-brain behavior, challenging reductionist approaches.
The book contributes to understanding how brains construct perceptual worlds through nonlinear, self-organizing processes.
It has influenced neuroscience debates about how to link cellular mechanisms with cognitive functions.
#84496
The Technosphere
Peter Haff
#24984
• Mentioned in 2 episodes
How We Became Human
Tim Dean
#97311
Bacteria to AI
Katherine Hayles
In 'Bacteria to AI: Cognition Across Scales,' N. Katherine Hayles proposes an integrated cognitive framework—Sensing, Interpreting, Responding adaptively, Anticipating, Learning—that extends cognitive status across biological and artificial systems.
She argues cognition is not dependent on consciousness and shows how nonconscious processes often outperform conscious ones in speed and proximity to environmental inputs.
The book examines how distributed cognitive assemblages function and explores implications for agency, politics, and computation.
Hayles also turns to analog computation, suggesting biological computation is fundamentally analog and that emerging hybrid technologies reconnect with life’s computational history.
The work aims to bridge humanities and computational sciences to rethink cognition at planetary scales.
#83609
Postprint
Books and Becoming Computational
Katherine Hayles
In 'Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational,' Katherine Hayles analyzes how the materiality and function of books change as they interact with computational systems and digital infrastructures.
She traces historical continuities and transformations from print to algorithm-driven textual practices, showing how computation reconfigures authorship, reading, and preservation.
Hayles argues that understanding these shifts requires attention to both technological affordances and cultural practices surrounding texts.
The book integrates media theory, literary studies, and computation to argue for new frameworks to study textuality in the digital age.
It contributes to conversations about how cultural artifacts become computationally mediated and the implications for humanities scholarship.
#7488
• Mentioned in 7 episodes
Language Machines
Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism
Leaf Weatherby
#18164
• Mentioned in 3 episodes
Unthought
The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious
Katherine Hayles
#7471
• Mentioned in 7 episodes
Steps to an ecology of mind
Gregory Bateson
In 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind', Gregory Bateson presents a comprehensive collection of essays that delve into anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology.
The book emphasizes the importance of understanding the world as an interconnected system, where perception plays a crucial role in shaping reality.
Bateson discusses concepts such as metacommunication, the double bind, and the role of play in learning, offering insights into how these ideas can help address societal problems.
We're joined by N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor in English at UCLA, to think through cognition in the broadest and most scaled sense.
Hayles is among the foundational thinkers of posthumanism in its Anglophone register, and this conversation tracks her intellectual trajectory from the question of how we became posthuman to her most recent project: an integrated cognitive framework that extends from bacteria to AI. The opening provocation is one she has been developing since large language models appeared as a genuinely literary phenomenon, the claim that LLMs do not speak natural language but produce a computational simulation of it.
The umwelt of an LLM (its 'operative world-horizon,' in Uexküll's sense) overlaps with the human umwelt enough for communication to occur, but the divergences are large and consequential. This leads to the question of cognition itself. Against definitions that make consciousness the threshold of cognitive status, Hayles proposes the SIEPAL framework: Sensing, Interpreting, Responding, Anticipating, Learning, under which bacteria, algorithms, and ecosystems all qualify as cognitive. The non-conscious, on this account, isn't pre-cognitive but is in many ways more cognitively capable: faster, closer to environmental noise, less committed to the narratives of coherence that consciousness requires.
The final section breaks genuinely new ground with Hayles's turn to analog computation: the argument that digital computation is a historical blip, that biological life has always operated on analog principles, and that the future of computation (neuromorphic chips, organoid computers, hybrid analog-digital architectures) represents not a departure from but a return to what life has always done. She proposes the analog humanities as a corrective to digital humanities, and the computational humanities as the synthesis that might finally close the gap between biological and technological cognition. This one is very much worth enjoying in dialogue with our previous epsiode on the digital.
Some references:
N. Katherine Hayles
Walter Freeman
Peter Haff — the technosphere
Stuart Kauffman & Giuseppe Longo, for arguing that biological organisms cannot be mapped into phase space and always follow the adjacent possible
Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts — the McCulloch-Pitts neuron as a binary model with analog processes underlying the firing threshold
Bernd Ulmann — here referenced as an expert on analog computing who argues that continuity vs. discreteness is a secondary rather than primary distinction between analog and digital
Hayles is among the foundational thinkers of posthumanism in its Anglophone register, and this conversation tracks her intellectual trajectory from the question of how we became posthuman to her most recent project: an integrated cognitive framework that extends from bacteria to AI. The opening provocation is one she has been developing since large language models appeared as a genuinely literary phenomenon, the claim that LLMs do not speak natural language but produce a computational simulation of it.
The umwelt of an LLM (its 'operative world-horizon,' in Uexküll's sense) overlaps with the human umwelt enough for communication to occur, but the divergences are large and consequential. This leads to the question of cognition itself. Against definitions that make consciousness the threshold of cognitive status, Hayles proposes the SIEPAL framework: Sensing, Interpreting, Responding, Anticipating, Learning, under which bacteria, algorithms, and ecosystems all qualify as cognitive. The non-conscious, on this account, isn't pre-cognitive but is in many ways more cognitively capable: faster, closer to environmental noise, less committed to the narratives of coherence that consciousness requires.
The final section breaks genuinely new ground with Hayles's turn to analog computation: the argument that digital computation is a historical blip, that biological life has always operated on analog principles, and that the future of computation (neuromorphic chips, organoid computers, hybrid analog-digital architectures) represents not a departure from but a return to what life has always done. She proposes the analog humanities as a corrective to digital humanities, and the computational humanities as the synthesis that might finally close the gap between biological and technological cognition. This one is very much worth enjoying in dialogue with our previous epsiode on the digital.
Some references:
N. Katherine Hayles
- How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, 1999
- Writing Machines, MIT Press, 2002
- Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, University of Chicago Press, 2017
- Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Columbia University Press, 2021
- Bacteria to AI: Cognition Across Scales (referenced as new/recent book)
- Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, University of Minnesota Press, 2025
Walter Freeman
- How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Columbia University Press, 1999 — on EEG waves as the mediating mechanism between individual neurons and global hemispheric activation; the rabbit olfactory system experiments
Peter Haff — the technosphere
Stuart Kauffman & Giuseppe Longo, for arguing that biological organisms cannot be mapped into phase space and always follow the adjacent possible
Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts — the McCulloch-Pitts neuron as a binary model with analog processes underlying the firing threshold
Bernd Ulmann — here referenced as an expert on analog computing who argues that continuity vs. discreteness is a secondary rather than primary distinction between analog and digital