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What is it like to be a bacterium? Umwelten, amoebae and AI

In her forthcoming publication, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts, N. Katherine Hayles unveils a new theory of mind. Could non-human and artificial intelligences qualify as cognitive entities – and what does that mean for our futures?

Hayles recently introduced her theory in a fascinating online conversation and Q&A with Dr Audrey Borowski, hosted by The Philosopher. Here, I’ll outline my understanding of her theory of cognition as she introduced it in the talk, and jot down my initial reactions.

Against human exceptionalism

Anthropocentrism is a dangerous illusion. That’s the thought that motivates Hayles in her her theory of non-conscious cognition. According to her thesis, the temptation to single out humans is mistaken in two important ways:

  • Firstly, she claims, other beings also count as cognitive entities – so we’re not special in that way (although as humans we do have some singular abilities).
  • Secondly, far from being independent and separate, we humans are deeply dependent on the symbiotic relationships we have developed with computational media. Thanks to the interdependent technological world we have created, humans living in cities (not in tribal environments) can no longer actually survive on our own.

So, if humans aren’t special or superior as many of us like to assume, it’s important to consider other forms of knowledge and ways of experiencing the world.

SIRAL: the five criteria for cognitive beings

Some people think that beings can only have meaningful existence (I won’t go so far as to specify personhood or moral significance) where there is consciousness. Others might draw the line at a certain degree of rational ability, or stipulate the capacity for self-awareness. While these differing views have their own individual boundaries, all are likely to rule out single-celled organisms but may admit (in addition to humans) at least some mammals.

But these modes of classification adopt too much of a broad brush to encapsulate an important truth about cognition: even for the most primitive beings, there exists a capacity to absorb, extract meaning from and interact with external stimuli. We don’t always have the language to describe this wide-ranging class of cognitive beings, eager as we are to define things as sentient and non-sentient, or persons and non-persons.

For Hayles, there are five crucial behaviours that qualify a being as a cognitive entity:

  • Sensory perception that provides information from the environment
  • Interpretation of the information, giving it meaning
  • Responding to that information through action
  • Anticipating future events
  • Learning from experience

Under these criteria, both human and non-human beings are admitted as cognitive entities. The bar is low: bacteria pass the SIRAL test, for example, when they move towards a food source or away from a toxin, and GPT models do it when they note correlations in data and change their information hierarchies accordingly.

But not everything that acts in the world can meet the SIRAL stipulations, and to illustrate this, Hayles makes the distinction between agents and actors. Agents, such as chemical reactions or tornadoes, can make big things happen – often outside the scope of what a human could achieve – but they do so without SIRAL. Actors, on the other hand, use SIRAL, and they include all life forms as well as computational media. The broad category of actors is is an integrated cognitive framework that includes non-conscious living beings such as plants and microbes, as well as artificial intelligence.

Getting away from anthropocentrism: Different ways of experiencing the world

We’ve hinted that cognition can come in many flavours: it’s not just limited to what happens consciously. In fact, says Hayles, even human cognition mostly takes place without full consciousness – when we drive a car on autopilot, for example.

Under SINAL, though, cognitive beings, conscious or not, do gain inputs from the world and process them. And what this is like – the experience of interaction with the environment – is strikingly different for all the different types of cognitive entities.

Think about when you take your dog for a walk. You are both experiencing the same environmental stimuli, but the ways in which these reach you are worlds apart. Your dog will be sensing, interpreting and responding to sounds and smells that you cannot discern. Meanwhile, you may be admiring the architecture you come across on your walk, or engaged in conversation with a fellow pedestrian – inputs from the environment that don’t have meaning for your dog.

Similarly, says Hayles, large language models like ChatGPT, have their own sensory input, or umwelt. (She takes this term from the work of biologist Jakob von Uexküll, to describe the unique world experienced by an organism, shaped by its own sensory capabilities, internal needs and capacity to interpret the environment). AI doesn’t sense things as we do, of course, and current computational media are unlikely to possess consciousness. Instead, for AI, external input comes solely from verbal text, in the absence of any embodied knowledge of the world.

Despite this lack of embodied experience, language models are nevertheless capable of constructing meaning for themselves, detecting correlations in a neural net which they then develop into hierarchies. These associations, argues Hayles, constitute a form of meaning.

In the living world, bacteria can discern differences in environmental stimuli and construct an umwelt that simply decrees: “food: good; toxin: bad.” And as we move up the biological hierarchy to more sophisticated forms of life, the umwelten become more complex. Hayles gives the example of non-human animals engaging in games – a form of activity that requires a high level of SIRAL cognitive computation.

Living in harmony with our symbionts: an increasingly intermingled future

Emergence is an important theme in Hayles’s posthuman philosophy. It’s something that has a long and seminal history: it may be said, for example, that humans as a species are the emergent result of interactions between early hominids and primitive technology.

For a long time in our civilisation, says Hayes, there have been three first-order emergences:

  • Micro – quantum phenomena are emergent with measuring apparatus
  • Evo(lutionary) – multi-cellularity is an emergent phenomenon in biology
  • Techno – the emergence of humans from interactions with technical objects

But in today’s society, with the arrival of an unprecedented cognitive revolution characterised by the development of computational media and AI, these three categories of emergence are crossing boundaries and interacting with each other. This can be seen, for example, in gene editing, where evolutionary and technological emergence are combined.

This type of intermingling is accelerating the level of symbiosis that humans today experience. Increasingly, as technology develops, we will live in symbiotic co-existence with both biological and non-biological beings.

Reflections, thoughts and questions on Hayles’s theory

For me, this talk was a timely event: in the midst of reading and researching for my MA in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence dissertation, I am actively looking around for thinkers who compare and contrast human capabilities with those of animals and machines. The precise details of my thesis are still fuzzy – I haven’t had my first supervision yet – but I know that I will argue against human exceptionalism, and will explore the potential for personhood (or another, perhaps less stringent standard of sentience or cognition) in non-human beings such as animals and AI.

So, hearing Hayles speak on exactly these issues was a fascinating experience, and many of her arguments chime with my own intuitions. I’ve long been enthralled by popular science books like The Hidden Life of Trees and How to Speak Whale, for example, that point to whole cultures, communities and modes of intelligence outside the scope of human experience. At the same time, I don’t believe there’s anything so special about biological matter that the inner life and intelligence it sometimes manages to embody could never be artificially reproduced in other materials. Bit by bit, we are discovering that the things we thought were exceptional about humans do actually occur – sometimes alongside things we can’t do or conceive of – in other beings. Speciesism – the assumption that we’re better just by virtue of our genus – seems to be a lingering, socially acceptable prejudice that, I think, nonetheless depends for its credibility on the same type of thinking as racism and sexism.

The concept of symbiosis is not one I’ve considered until now, and I think it’s instructive for us to acknowledge our place in the ecosystem (and now, in the world of computational media) as just one interdependent species of many. It scares me a little to think how dependent we are already on computational technology – Hayles holds that 90% of us would perish within six months in a world where computers suddenly disappeared, a startling statement I would like to explore and evaluate further. I’d also like to know more about what Hayles thinks are the specific dangers of anthropocentrism – in her talk, she mentioned that it has “planet-level risks” but did not expand on what these risks represent.

The SINAL framework, and the concept of an agent, is one I find helpful to describe a wide-ranging class of beings that nevertheless all have meaningful agency in common. It’s refreshing to divorce that conversation from debates about consciousness and simply describe what is self-evident: that all of these beings do, without doubt, gain input from the world, derive meaning from it, and act on that meaning. Nevertheless, I think there is some unpacking to be done here in relation to consciousness: what does it mean, for example, for a being like a bacterium or an AI to have sensory input, without having conscious knowledge of this?

After hearing the talk, I wanted to get stuck in straight away and read more, but disappointingly, the new book is not available in the shops until January 2025. It will certainly be on my reading list – and may even serve as significant inspiration for my dissertation (due in August 2025) – when it does come out next year.

Further reading

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  2. Susan Tilley's avatar

    And it’s very good to have you back Catherine! Sounds very grim but no doubt you treated it all in…

  3. Pytho Black's avatar
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