Today’s question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We c...

Complexity sciences have become famous worldwide thanks to several popular books that served as echo chambers of their promises. These consisted in departing from “classical science” defined as deterministic, reductionist, analytic and mono-disciplinary. Their founders and supporters declared that complexity sciences were going to give rise (or that they have given rise) to a post-Laplacian, antireductionist, holistic and interdisciplinary approach. By taking a closer look at their content and practices, I argue in this article that, because of their physics-oriented, computationalist, (...) and mathematical assumptions, complexity sciences have paradoxically produced knowledge at odds with these four tenets. (shrink)

The article focuses on the ability of some animals and plants to respond to changing environmental conditions by temporarily suspending metabolic processes. In contemporary biology, this state between life and death is commonly labelled ‘cryptobiosis’, combining the Greek kryptos (hidden, concealed, secret) with biōsis (mode of life). I argue that the notion of ‘cryptobiosis’ does not account sufficiently for the processual and relational dimensions of ametabolic life. The article advances a related but different concept, which better addresses this liminal state (...) of biological organisation: s uspended life. While cryptobiosis still nurtures the imaginary of some latent life, suspended life stresses the liminality of the neither-nor life and death. The notion also grasps the dynamic and ongoing transfer between the biological and the technological. While the debate on cryptobiosis has so far remained confined to the description of natural processes, suspended life (or limbiosis) promises to account for contemporary technological practices of cryopreservation. (shrink)

The most recent tool for acting on the world, the exosomatization of cognitive activities, is often considered an autonomous and objective replacement of knowledge construction. We show the intrinsic limits of the mechanistic myths in AI, from classical to Deep Learning techniques, and its relation to the human construction of sense. Human activities in a changing ecosystem – in their somatic and sensible dimensionalities proper to any living experiences – are at the core of our analysis. By this, we stress (...) the key role of the knowing subject, far away from any allegedly objective big collections of data. The production of organized structures of physics, biology and in societal analysis will be compared and distinguished by trying to set on more robust grounds the constructive as well as the disruptive roles of entropic, negentropic, anti-entropic dynamics that are different concepts in different domains, to be handled with care: the use of machine learning and optimization methods as tools and models to analyse and manage human activities in view of their scientific and political ideology of technoscientific governance. They suppose that which they try to produce is objective, that is, standardized and controllable behaviours. In this dialogue we stress a mirror symmetry between the lack of theoretical interpretation of scientific data and the lack of democracy in this fiction of neutrality. Moreover, bad analogies constitute an obstacle to grasp the anteriority of biological and ecological constraints which enable and limit all artificial products of human intelligence. We will thus stress biological specificity, the role of normativity and constraints in evolution, of labour in structuring the human historical construction of sense by common activities. (shrink)

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This (...) paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog). (shrink)