Author: EcO.

How can human cognition take on a more sustainable form?

1. The answer I would like to quickly sketch today is this: Human cognition will take on a more sustainable form when humans realize that what humans call cognition, and what I will call cognitions (so as to encompass words often used interchangeably with cognition like thought, mind, intelligence, thinking, etc.), that these cognitions are the growing tips of processes that started long before humans were around. To say it again–
2. What humans call cognitions are the growing tips of processes that started long before humans, processes that continue in embodied ways that are not only human. ‘Cognition’ (thinking, mind, intelligence, whatever word one prefers) is a human representation, a human word, for something life has been doing for as long as life has been.
3. Today we often try and paint the human word cognition onto other forms of this process—we talk of plant cognition or animal cognition and what most people imagine when they hear such terms, is that these plants and animals have what humans experience as cognition. But plants and animals are different embodiments, so this does not make sense. In fact, they do share the process that humans have come to call cognition–many of their ancestors had it long before ours–but saying they share the process does not mean they experience what humans experience as cognition. Again, human cognition is like the growing tip of something much larger of which all these other beings are part.
4. Still, this means that we are all engaging in the same patterns of action, though they manifest very differently according to our bodies and landscapes (and by landscape, I mean areas of shared space encountered with particular statistical regularity by the embodied being, a ‘niche’ in the loosest use).
5. This is an important nuanced point to be understood if we want human cognition to be more sustainable. Namely: It is not wrong to talk of the intelligences of other embodied creatures, but it is wrong to imagine those intelligences are what humans have understood as human intelligence. Which is why I use the term way-making to point to this expansive multidimensional process that has been going on since life began but that manifests in humans as what we call cognition, so we can begin to understand that the human manifestation is not the beginning, end, or only.
6. Let me try and say it again, but another way now: From its beginning, life has been doing what we humans now call cognitive in ourselves—namely making and finding and sharing better ways of interacting and communicating with itself towards new forms. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call this a process of making way, of way-making.
7. Way-making includes what humans have labeled cognitive, but is not limited to it, because it is not limited to humans.
8. All embodied beings make way through nested landscapes. All beings have a unique trajectory that is traced in a shared, meshed space. All beings must make ways within that space through interaction with it, through communication with it, through participation and problem-solving and presencing, so as to continue as part of it.
9. This is true at all scales of life, and it is what at the human scale we have come to call cognitive or thinking or mind.
10. For humans, cognitions are ways we create and use knowledge, some of it bodily and firsthand and some of it (increasingly more of it) representational and second-hand.
11. By representational here, I do not mean ‘in brains’. I mean things created by humans to interact and communicate with themselves and others–landscapes built with words, images, etc.
12. Humans have created numerous representational “meeting places”, landscapes that are navigated via language or image –landscapes like literature, art, music, social media and the internet.
13. That we have created such representational landscapes is often taken to mean we are special, but as I see it, this creation is a supplement to, not a break from, the ways all beings make in order to be and to continue to be—again ways they make to interact with, communicate with, participate in, problem-solve, and survive this shared space, this existence. If you look for it, there are many examples of other sorts of beings making way –doing what we do with what we call human cognition, though they are not using human representations (like images or words), they are still doing what we use those to do, which is to problem-solve, to communicate, to interact with, to participate, presence, and survive this blooming buzzing confusion.
14. The human version of this, human cognitions, are only special if we do not understand humanity as continuous with and part of other forms of life, who are also doing the same things we do—problem-solving, communicating, presencing, interacting with and participating in this real, shared space—though they do it with their own sorts of bodies and in their own sorts of landscapes, and our second-hand representational landscapes are not ones they often inhabit.
15. The hard thing about understanding this, even for those of us who already feel it is true, is that (at least without the help of tools) only know our human cognition, sense from that position, and default to painting that orientation onto whatever we use words like cognition, intelligence, mind, thinking and thought to describe.
16. I hope that looking at it as way-making allows us to unstick from that mindset and begin to understand our cognitions as growings tips of an expansive process (that has other, non-human trajectories as well).
17. Still, even if we accept all this, why should we understand what humans call cognition as way-making, as making way? It is a beautiful metaphor, and one already built into much of our language—get over this challenge, see you on the other side– but what else?
18. If you already understand that human cognition is a matter of solving problems, which is always a matter of finding better ways to interact with, communicate with, presence or participate in shared space, then understanding that thinking is way-making might feel more natural.
19. But we can also explore this through more scientific means and examples. Though I will not go into any data here, I do want to describe some recent developments in the human study of an area of the brain called the hippocampus, especially because its name is derived from the Greek terms for ‘seahorse’.
20. This area of the brain, to over-generalize as a short talk like this demands, is crucial to memory (knowledge acquisition) and navigation and recent papers from reputable neuroscientists have shown that the ways we make in conceptual spaces are comparable to the ways we make in traditionally physical spaces.
21. There are many possible examples, but I will focus on the examples from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences because that is the lab with which I wrote my Master in Neuroscience (while at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain) relative to this subject. This lab is also part of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim and one co-author of the paper that I will be briefly summarizing now is Norweigan Nobel prize winner Edvard Moser.
22. The paper is called Navigating cognition: Spatial codes for human thinking by Bellmund et. al, and it was published in Science in 2018.
23. As we make way through the world, in the hippocampal entorhinal area of our brains, there are two crucial cells types at work, place cells and grid cells. To be fair, there are also many other crucial GPS-like cells there such as head direction cells, but we will focus on place and grid cells here. As a press releases from the Max Planck Institute puts it:“Place cells in the hippocampus and grid cells in the neighboring entorhinal cortex form a circuit that allows orientation and navigation.” The paper I am summarizing allows us to understand this system as possibly more than only a GPS of geographical space; it seems that it is also doing this for other cognitive or conceptual spaces–for spaces of communication, knowledge & thought.
24. This concerns not only geographical data, but also relationships between objects and experience, so we can think of ‘cognitive spaces’ as landscapes of statistical regularity similar to those of other geographical landscapes. When you are reading a book of a certain genre, for example, you are in a cognitive landscape that is likely familiar to you in its patterns even if the book is completely original. This is similar to the way the layouts of streets in many cities are very similar, or, to take an extreme example, the way every Starbucks in the world looks very similar to every other. Environments are built this way so as to be easier to recognize and navigate, and the reason they are easier to recognize and navigate is because of the way the brain’s GPS works—this relation between navigation and memory and knowledge—as our nervous systems tag to regularities and, after having navigated them, are able to link in to those trajaectories, align and adjust as we make our way the next time, and the next time.
25. The less geographical areas of our lives also have properties that can be understood as something like landscapes in this sense, statistically regular landscapes that we move through when we are using language or concepts or other sorts of representational knowledge.
26. The Nobel Prize-winning discoveries of place and grid cells, which were first found in rodents’ brains but were subsequently shown to also be present in humans, show patterns of activity that align or fit the animal’s position in space, to each unique part of its encounter. Each position in space is represented by a unique pattern of activity, but just like every Starbucks is similar and thus easy to navigate, there are significant amounts of statistical regularity that build this process into something that comes with more and more ease. Together, the activity of place and grid cells allows the formation of a mental map of the surroundings, which the paper believes is stored and reactivated during later visits. (I would say, it does not need to be stored in any material sense, because the body reads it like music as it encounters it and the prompts open what nodes and strings come into play, but that is another discussion.)
27. In any case, these regular activation patterns in place and grid cells appear in the brain not only when a being is navigating geographical space, but also when they are learning new concepts or moving through so-called “cognitive spaces”. In experiments testing this, they find that the entorhinal cortex is activated for cognitive or conceptual spaces in much the same way it is activated during navigation of traditional geographical spaces. The paper says this is a sort of GPS, or at least a coordinate system, of thinking, of cognitions, of thoughts.
28. One can imagine these many nested paths through the spaces of our many cognitive dimensions. The point is, we can now begin to envision how we might understand cognitions as processes of way-making. As navigabilities through particular statistically regular landscapes. (Only statistical, by the way, when they are modeled as representations. This need not be thought of as statistical in the ongoing process that is being modelled, but rather as everyday regularities and consistencies).
29. There would be much more to say about that, but I hope you at least begin to see the way the line has now blurred between cognitions and navigations, and how this one area of the brain seems not to register any line there at all.
30. As the MPI press release summarizes it: “Humans think using their brain’s navigation system.”
31. In essence: thinking and navigation are nested patterns of the same process, or thinking is a kind of navigability.
32. We can then widen our notion of landscape to understand that we make way through books, films, conversations, emotions/feelings, and many other spaces that have structure and statistical regularities of structure (when modelled) that can be compared to more traditional landscapes like parks, buildings, and cities.
33. In this way, we can understand how human cognitions (thinking, mind, intelligence) can be understood as ways we make, as navigabilities through representational spaces that have come to be so that we, one of the growing tips of life, can interact with, problem-solve, communicate with, presence and participate in ourselves and all that we encounter. This is what we mean by human cognition, and it is a scale of a process all of life is doing according to its own bodies and landscapes.
34. This makes sense if we model existence as a dynamical, shared space that is itself comprised of many nested forms of beings making their way, of beings navigating. We can also zoom in and see that there are many nested landscapes that these beings navigate at once, be those geographical, social, representational. And we can see that the patterns across all these dimensions are composed of the same sorts of fractal-like trajectories, patterns we can zoom in and out of in multiple dimensions, from the trajectories of cells to insects to plants to humans to cities to communities.
35. And, most importantly, when we talk of cities and communities, we can include the trajectories of all living beings there, not just of the humans.
36. All embodied beings, be those birch trees, dogs, worms or the octopus, are making way through various landscapes according to their bodies and forms of sensing, and these are their versions of what humans have come to understand as human cognitions.
37. We can only know what these other way-makings are like if we develop ways to notice and represent their trajectories such that we take them seriously and begin to better understand their unique bodily navigabilities, and what they need from us such that our own cognition can support and sustain them, for in a way, our cognition is theirs. We are life finding better ways of problem-solving, interacting with and communicating with and for itself.
38. We are now all worried about our existence, and billions of dollars are being spent to simulate and model possible scenarios for the planet, but are we only modeling this as a human path?
39. When we model and simulate earth and possible future scenarios, when we create these so-called Digital Twins, are they digital twins or earth or of the human experience of earth? Perhaps if we can model and simulate the earth from many nested trajectories, trajectories of beings in geographical firsthand spaces, but also in representational, second-hand landscapes, then we will begin to find more sustainable ways to use human cognition. If we really could understand the human scale as a nested part of life, this would be the obvious necessity, that we learn how to see ourselves a bit like growth buds that have suddenly become aware of ourselves as part of the trees we depend upon.
40. How can we create and model the many nested landscapes and trajectories of our shared ecological mesh? And how can we do this from the point of view of as many beings as possible?
41. Perhaps this is what we are trying to do in building our microscopes, our telescopes and all the other tools we build to try and understand the world from other positions. And so it should also be in our simulations of the Digital Twin.
42. Cognitions are human forms of making way through encounters, and we mostly use this term when we are using representational or representationally-tagged landscapes.
43. All embodied beings make way—in other words, they problem solve, connect, interact, and participate in the blooming buzzing confusion of our real, shared space.
44. Each body makes way differently.
45. And each body makes way through multi-dimensional landscapes.
46. When it comes to sustainability, could we begin to take landscapes like literature and art and music as seriously as landscapes such as cities and offices?
47. Can we begin to take the way-makings and trajectories of the vegetal as seriously as the animal? And all animals as seriously as the human? What about insects? What about the planet itself?
48. All of it structures our knowledge landscape equally, and all of it is nested into a larger trajectory that is existence.
49. I hope we can simulate possible existences from more than just the human perspective, and from more than just the geographical (after all, our knowledge landscapes will likely play a very big role in what actions we take environmentally and our actions and outcomes).
50. This is one way human cognition might become more sustainable.

The above is partial transcript from Sustainability and Modes of Existence/Lifeforms, Oslo, March 19th, 2024