649. Bacteria to AI: Technics, Nonconscious Cognition, and Meaning in LLMs with N. Katherine Hayles

Episode notes

N. Katherine Hayles is a professor of English at UCLA and Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University. She is also the author of a number of books on consciousness and AI. Her latest book is titled Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts . Greg and Katherine discuss technics - recursive feedback loops in which humans and tools co-evolve. Katherine argues that cognitive technologies and AI intensify this process, so we design them while they also design us. She distinguishes cognition from consciousness, emphasizing fast nonconscious neuronal processing and defining cognition as interpreting information in context with meaning, operationalized by SIRAL (sensing, interpreting, responding flexibly, anticipating, learning). Katherine claims plants and bacteria meet these criteria, while physical processes are agents without choices; cognitive systems are actors that select and adapt. She applies this to computation, treating deterministic mechanisms as noncognitive but viewing modern systems and LLMs as cognitive, discussing aboutness via biosemiotics and LLMs’ “conceptual environment.” *unSILOed Podcast is