Philosophical essay on cybernetics, consciousness, and AI with references to Bateson and artists

does.” Parreno’s piece is an intuitive assembly of our experience of “life” through embodied, perspectival engagement. Our consciousness is electrically (cybernetically) enmeshed, yet we don’t respond as if this human-generated set of elegant simulations had its own intelligence. The artistic use of cybernetic beings also reminds us that consciousness itself is not just “in here.” It is streaming in and out, harmonizing those sensory, scintillating signals. Mind happens well outside the limits of the cranium (and its simulacrum, the “motherboard”). In Mary Catherine Bateson’s paraphrase of her father Gregory’s second-order cybernetics, mind is material “not necessarily defined by a boundary such as an envelope of skin.”°! Parreno pairs the simulations of art with the simulations of mathematics to force the Wiener-like point that any such model is not, by itself, just like life. Models are just that—parts of signaling systems constituting “intelligence” only when their creaturely counterparts engage them in lively meaning making. Contemporary AI has talked itself into a corner by instrumentalizing and particularizing tasks and subroutines, confusing these drills with actual wisdom. The brief cultural history offered here reminds us that views of data as intelligence, digital nets as “neural,” or isolated individuals as units of life, were alien even to Conway’s brute simulation. We can stigmatize the stubborn arrogance of current AI as “right cybernetics,” the path that led to current automated weapons systems, Uber’s ill-disguised hostility to human workers, and the capitalist dreams of Google. Now we must turn back to left cybernetics—theoretical biologists and anthropologists engaged with a trans-species understanding of intelligent systems. Gregory Bateson’s observation that corporations merely simulate “aggregates of parts of persons,” with profit-maximizing decisions cut off from “wider and wiser parts of the mind,” has never been more timely.*” The cybernetic epistemology offered here suggests a new approach. The individual mind is immanent, not only in the body but also in pathways outside the body, and there is a larger Mind, of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind, Bateson holds, is comparable to God, and is perhaps what some people mean by “God,” but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology. This is not the collective delusion of an exterior “God” who speaks from outside human consciousness (this long-seated monotheistic conceit, Bateson suggests, leads to views of nature and environment as also outside the “individual” human, rendering them as “gifts to exploit”). Rather, Bateson’s “God” is a placeholder for our evanescent experience of interacting consciousness-in-the-world: larger Mind as a result of inputs and actions that then become inputs for other actions in concert with other entities—webs of symbiotic relationships that form patterns we need urgently to sense and harmonize with.°? From Tsai in the 1970s to Hershman Leeson in the 1990s to Parreno in 2014, artists have been critiquing right cybernetics and plying alternative, embodied, environmental experiences of “artificial” intelligence. Their artistic use of cybernetic beings offers the wisdom of symbionts experienced in the kinds of poeisis that can be achieved in this world: rhythms of signals and intuitive actions that produce the 5! Mary Catherine Bateson, 1999 foreword to Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972): xi. %? Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 452. 3 Tbid., pp. 467-8. 179 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016399