Cognitive Code by Unknown

Cognitive Code by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2019-06-14T16:00:00+00:00


6

Coding Cognition

In “Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments,” Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita (2015) envision infrastructures as a form of “practical ontology” (82), which involves “negotiations about standards” (82, citing Bowker and Star 1999, 44–5), a multiplication of “practical metaphysics” (82, quoting Latour 1999, 287), and “novel configurations of the world and its elements” (84). Infrastructures are experimental, the authors argue, since they open up a space of negotiation where concrete practices give rise to “objects that create the ground on which other objects operate” (82, quoting Larkin 2013, 329). The infrastructuralization of the brain is such an ontological experiment in that it scaffolds a novel cerebral alley where investigations of information processing independent of a substrate can take place. In this final chapter of the book, I focus on the effects of this ontological experiment, which conceives of the brain and the Cloud as analog, cognitive infrastructures on different scales.

The infrastructuralization of the brain is geared to rethinking human cognitive capacities in systematic, processual, and operational terms, yet instead of defining and stabilizing the brain, infrastructuralization introduces a productive uncertainty that defies mapping and multiplies ontologies. In her book Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth (2018), Valerie Olson observes that the concept of the complex system “is less useful when it is deployed only as a relational technology of enclosure; it is more powerful when it is worked with as a provisionally open-ended and aspirational form” (218). Form does in this case appear in its most abstract mode: not as shape or stable substrate but as formal organization and evolutionary trajectory.

At the heart of this reformulation sits a turn toward calculative and managerial techniques, such as simulation and prediction, that emphasize the generative dimensions of data analysis. Where experimentation on the lab bench is substituted with the simulation of algorithmic models, general purpose tools, such as graph theory, turn into hypothetical machines that bring forth new instances of how the brain and the Cloud might be related and reconceived. Yet, as this process proceeds, new programming practices and thus new stakeholders are homing in on the brain and helping to reimagine, by means of their very own epistemologies and techniques, cognition in the human brain and beyond. The Bayesian brain provides a specific example, where statistical techniques are translated into generative models that hover in between the life sciences and artificial intelligence research.

ARTIFICIAL REALITIES

John struck some keys, and a semi-transparent rendering of what looked like a grey rock filled the screen. Inside, a network of orange nodes and edges of varying thickness appeared and gradually started to dominate the enclosed space. Leaning back in his chair, John turned to me with a cheeky smile. Of course, I knew that I was looking at an experimental visualization of a brain “at rest” between two visual tasks, as we had discussed the experiment before. But I also knew John well enough to see that he was impatiently waiting for a surprised look on my face, and I definitely



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