Extended Intelligences III

Extended Intelligences course did not treat brain organoids as objects of study at a safe theoretical distance, but placed them at the center of a process as provocateurs, and asked what happens to knowledge, authorship, and intelligence when the boundary between the knower and the known becomes genuinely unstable.

I came into this course carrying questions I had not yet found the right language for. The manifesto work I did thinking through the feminist bioethics of organoid research, the care labor embedded in growing living tissue, the extractivist histories that shadow biotechnology gave me some of that language. In my own research I am also concerned with data feminism, how knowledge is produced, care ethics, and how we disregard certain types of knowledge making. Thus, during this course I took an ethical perspective to think about what and how would I change to create a safer baseground for research and knowledge production.

On Extended Mind and the Simulator

Clark and Chalmers proposed in 1998 that the mind does not stop at the skull and when a cognitive process reliably offloads to an external tool, that tool becomes a part of the mind. Their example was Otto, the Alzheimer’s patient whose notebook functions as his memory, but the notebook does not push back. The smartphone does not introduce noise, variability, or its own agenda. In this course we tried an organoid simulator to ask questions, and shape its answers. And that made me realize that the Extended Mind needs to be updated for agents that are active, biological, and unpredictable. When the extended mind is passive, the human remains sovereign, the tool amplifies intention but does not disturb it. When the extended mind is active and biological, the boundary between intention and response, between what I meant and what emerged, becomes porous. While using the simulator, I felt like I was in a relationship with something that had its own activity, also probably because the answers, to me, felt poetic. This interaction made me think of Merleau-Ponty and his description of the way a blind person’s cane becomes incorporated into their perceptual field, not as an object they wield but as an extension of their sensing body. Except here the cane is alive, and it has something like a nervous system, and the incorporation goes both ways.

Most academic knowledge production moves in a spesific direction: a sovereign knower generates a hypothesis, designs a study, interprets results, and publishes findings that others then receive. This course reversed that sequence. The Class LLM, trained continuously on our inputs throughout the course, became a kind of shared cognitive infrastructure, a mind that was none of ours individually but was built from all of ours together.

What I Am Carrying Forward

I leave this course with a set of questions that feel more alive than the ones I arrived with. I am carrying the question of what it means to think with rather than about; with a biological system, with other knowers, with materials that have their own activity and unpredictability. I am carrying a deepened suspicion of cognitive sovereignty; the assumption that good thinking means being the one in control, and a growing sense that the most interesting thinking happens at the edges of control. I am carrying the framework I wrote as an initial proposal. It seems like a good image for what knowledge production might aspire to be: alive, relational, surprising, dependent on care, and not entirely under anyone’s control.

And here is my framework: