Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious by N. Katherine Hayles

Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious Reviews

• 
  Yules

  Hayles defines “cognition” as a process that interprets information. She thus extends it to cover all biological lifeforms, as well as many technical systems. I may have been engaged in wishful thinking regarding the definition of the word (as applying only to conscious thought), but it still seems to me this kind of extension renders it virtually meaningless. Not quite pan-psychism, but nearly pan-cognitivism. This book would be most useful to those working in digital humanities, as well as to those who want to include cognition in their environmental ethics.
• 
  David Dinaburg

  The modern ethical dilemma for machine cognition is self-driving technology, and the go-to ethical analogy for self-driving technology is the
  Trolley Car problem, which, at least in the bootleg Chicago School of economic theory that my law school peddled, always concludes with the Utilitarian (read: soulless) “murder fewer people even if you need to directly murder someone to do so” call-and-response.
  
  It’s an easy analogy for driverless vehicles because it literally covers the prime actors: pedestrians; a motorized contraption; the ceaseless march of technological progress; inevitable death. While I think that it is a pretty good hypothetical scenario to push a burgeoning mind into considering the implication of action versus inaction as a moral imperative, it is a shitty car-crash analogue; in reality, there are infinite variables that have been selectively reduced to focus on the moral crux. There is no “right” decision that covers all contingencies, but someone somewhere—a real, non-hypothetical person—will have to write the code that drives a car that will, at some point, have to flex against a similar scenario.
  
  Who is this coder that gets to decide whether it is the bus full of nuns or the fieldtripping kindergartners that will end up eating fender? Society’s greatest philosopher? An elected official from each nation? A civil rights scholar? No—and excuse me while I am reductive for effect—but it is (or will be)
  some kid who drops his or her Intro to Ethics 101 course to focus on writing code. That...doesn’t make me feel great.
  
  As stated, I’m already not keen on driverless cars because code can’t cover the complexities of the road even a little. But that is the tree, not the forest. What really terrifies me about self-driving cars isn’t the pretense that they have enough knowledge of their surroundings to even get to point where the Trolley Car decision is relevant (
  Ron Howard Voice: “They don’t.”) but the honeybee example:

  No bee has an overall plan for the honeycomb in its head; all it has is an instinct to turn in a circle and spit wax while adjacent bees do the same. The wax lines press against each other to form a hexagon, the polygon with the closest packing ratio, and the honeycomb is the emergent result.
  
  The more intelligent the environment, the less intelligence one needs to put in the heads of the agents in an artificial life simulation, because the environment’s structured specificities make it possible for the agents to evolve emergent complexities through their interactions with it.

  If
  self-driving cars can’t fit the environment, the next step is to make the environment fit self-driving cars. Longer, straighter streets, fewer pedestrian crossings. Closed loops between
  suburb and industrial campus. Sealed streets, funneled bodies. Where, then, do the people without the cars go? Not to the robotic roadways, not to the crosswalks or the curbs, not anywhere that driverless cars have dominion, or even a potential appearance.
  
  Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious brings these concerns into a larger landscape, applies them to the vast curriculum of the humanities, and assuages me that other, smarter people, have wrestled with this fear before:

  ...Many scholars choose to go into the humanities because they do not like the emphasis in the sciences on finding answers to well-defined questions. Indeed, they tend to believe that interesting questions do not have definite answers at all, offering instead endless opportunities for exploring problematics. They fear that if definite answers were established, interpretation would be shut down and further research would be funneled into increasingly narrow avenues...If computer algorithms could establish definite answers (such as whether or not a certain word appeared in a text, and if so how frequently), then for her and like-minded scholars, the open space that the humanities has established for qualitative inquiry as a bulwark against quantitative results was at risk of crumbling, and all that would be left would be studies dominated by quantitative measures.

  Writ large, the fear of the literary theorist being squeezed out by
  value derivatives applies to my worry about driverless cars; if you leave the literary interpretation—or the driving, or the targeted ads, or the music playlists—to quantitative analysis, then every problem must needs be reduced down to its quantitative components. “If all you have is a hammer,” then every problem looks like it can solved with frequency evaluations.
  
  The trouble is, every Pandora channel you make ends up becoming the same songs
  unless you trick the algorithm. The actual world in which we live cannot be reduced down to static rules; we’ve given up on trying to learn both location and velocity, have resigned ourselves to not being able to predict where or how hard the butterfly will flap its wings even for something so banal as choosing songs we like:

  If control in the sense of anticipating all relevant consequences and using this foreknowledge to determine the future has been consigned to the dustbin of history, its demise reveals that the very attempts to render formal (mathematical and computational) systems tractable by rigorous procedures defining boundaries and establishing protocols have confirmed the existence of what lies beyond those boundaries: the incomputable, the undecidable, and the unknowable

  But the dream of perfect math uncovering perfect knowledge of the future hasn’t gone down without a fight—it has just retreated into these little pocket universes where the things that are measurable became the only metric worth caring about. How many clicks, how many app downloads, how many steps, how many calories: Things that can be counted matter more. Society hasn’t been shaped around reality so much as reality has been bent to conform to something that can be counted and controlled by society.
  
  Where does this leave Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious?

  Having invoked the idea of power (most tellingly in the book’s title, and in passing throughout), I will now indicate how power—and its handmaiden, politics, appear in this framework.

  I would love to talk about my joy at seeing a reference to
  Berlant’s insight into The Intuitionist:

  Despite the intelligent criticism [The Intuitionist] has attracted from such outstanding critics as Lauren Berlant...

  Or thrilled to discuss the purposeful, structural attenuation of responsibility inherent in UAVs:

  With technologies capable of significant decision making—for example, autonomous drones—it does not seem sufficient to call them “mediators,” for they perform as actors in situations with ethical and moral consequences

  Or happy to delve into my personal disconnect for new materialism and Deleuze in general—how that an entire chapter slowed me to a crawl, my enjoyment collapsing like a star going supernova as I began to wonder if I even needed this book in the first place. Each or any of these small bits could be spun off into a thousand thoughts; this is a book that incubates a new idea on every page. But new for me, and the thing I cannot stop thinking about, is
  The Chinese Room.
  
  It is another hypothetical like Trolley Car, but analogous to computer intelligence:

  Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols. Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese. And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions. The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

  This hypo has wormed its way into my brain, and while it seems settled—the point is that the man doesn’t know written Chinese—Unthought almost casually refutes this. Take the room as a whole—every small component that allows production of comprehensible strings of symbols, man included—and the room does, in fact, “know” written Chinese. This, then, is the major synecdoche for the book; an expansion in what is allowed to be viewed as capable of cognition.
  
  Nothing less than the structure of society’s future depends upon which metaphor—Trolley Car or Chinese Room—we use to explore the mysteries of cognition. Structure and interpretation of analogy and metaphor—standard lessons under the academic banner of the Humanities—will shape our future. So we had better start attending class.
• 
  mucksailor

  You can’t just dismiss the Chinese Room and other concerns about consciousness and mean it. The soul is a queer thing and the deleuzian/antihumanist/posthumanist reflexive dismissal of the “liberal humanist” subject or whatever you want to call it has always struck me as overly corrective. A synthesis is needed, because discrete subjects with discrete egos (I repeat myself) exist despite centuries of protests beginning with, like, Hume. And it seems awfully like souls influence and relate to the world in ways meaningfully and materially distinct from nonconscious “agents”. That’s avoiding the ethical and political questions raised by decentering the “human” (it’s not just humans anyways. Animals have souls), or if those even maintain relevance when you remove human agency from your worldview. If you don’t get what I mean, ask yourself: how would Cthulhu’s existence affect politics?
  
  This doesn’t mean you have to become a primitivist over fears of the machine goddess—father nature is as mean as mother machine, and if you think technology is that uncontrollable then you may as well be conceding there’s nothing to do but despair (Hello Ted K you moron!). Humans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking we don’t live in the Anthropocene, anyways, lest we try to absolve ourselves of responsibility. Climate change and the mass genocide of animals is the result of evil hairless apes, not technogenetic evolution.
  
  God I hope something better comes after speculative realism. It’d be funny if it was just a repeat of enlightenment humanism. Eternal return and all that.
• 
  Trace Reddell

  Synced up with my "Emergent Digital Cultures" class, falling between Kember & Zylinska's "Life After New Media" and Anahid Kassabian's "Ubiquitous Listening," this book has played an instrumental role in introducing my students to media vitalism, affect, attention, and cognition. I found Hayles's material on "cognitive assemblages" to be especially meaningful and useful, as well as the deep dive through awareness into nonconscious cognition (a convincingly portrayed mode that connects humans to other bio-forms, including plants, as well as modes of technical cognition) and on into materiality. Her readings of several literary works were excellent and some of the most compelling parts of the read.
  
  I felt, though, that the ultimate scope of what she was considering never manifested, though her work's advocacy for a nonconscious humanities was appreciated. Several times, Hayles seemed to get off track, as in the mostly useless and uninformative aside on "speculative realism" via Harman and Bogost. She also never really grappled with her oft-used phrase, "planetary cognitive ecology." For more vital information on planetary cognition, those interested would do well to investigate this project:
  https://www.gaian.systems/
  
• 
  Roger Whitson

  There is a lot that this book offers contemporary (digital) humanities: a theory of cognition that can enable both technological and ecological accounts of the relationship between humans and nonhumans; a humanities approach to phenomena like climate change and high-frequency trading; a method for integrating some of the newest research in neuroscience into readings of contemporary literature.
  
  Hayles is at her best when she's showing how her approach adds to the current research. Yet she spends far too much time alienating potential allies like those in the new materialism, actor-network theory, or affect theory. To be sure, neuroscience and philosophy of mind have a lot to contribute to these fields. But in the process of showing why an account of cognition is important, she spends too much time (an entire chapter lambasting new materialism? please) trying to show all the ways previous theories have failed.
• 
  Christopher

  A welcome and thorough investigation of the nonconcious process, human, animal, and synthetic and what it means for the humanities as well as our often consciousness-centered philosophy. And, while it may not necessarily be directly part of the speculative materialist canon yet, I would recommend this work as necessary reading for those like myself that are going down that philosophical path.
• 
  Avery

  Chapter 6 about finance was my favorite. This is a good book on philosophy of cognition, more generally. Anyone interested in psychology, sociology, economics, politics and emergent social complexity will find this an enjoyable read. Hayles prose and word economy are second to none.
  5/5
• 
  DW

  An important work that does a bit too much all at once but succeeds in spite of its scope.