AI (Ancestral Immediacies): The Collective Brain

Taking as its starting point the interface of AI and neuroscience, AI (Ancestral Immediacies): The Collective Brain explores technology and the brain as perceived sites of consciousness, intelligence, and subjectivity. The programme considers how such notions, which typically emphasize the brain’s separation from the body, have influenced the development of computational architectures that assert individualism and separability. Expanding this view of the brain to include recent trends in computation—such as using the behaviour of slime moulds and fungi to solve problems—the programme asks what other concepts of the brain exist and have existed, and how they might inform social ideas of intelligence in more collective ways. Taking into account plants, fungi, and spirits on the one hand, and digital humans and collective neurons on the other, the programme questions if and how AI might be used to reconnect to collective ideas of intelligence and to a wounded Earth.

The human brain has been a point of emergence for many a technological ambition. This entanglement can be traced historically to ancient cultures and their scientific endeavours, however much they have also differed. In ancient Egypt, for example, one of the first ever recorded technical models for the brain came about when its heavily folded tissue was discovered and likened to the slag produced as a waste product of metal smelting. The brain tissue, which today is considered the central locus and control system of mammalian intelligence, was imagined to be as useless as the metallic mass. Instead, the Egyptians attributed greater importance to the meninges, the soft protective membranes that cover the tissue and the central nervous system. It is possible that various Egyptian burial practices were aligned to this scientific ideal, as the brain itself was deemed unnecessary in the afterlife and removed before mummification, alluding to the belief that what might be needed in the next life, or what one might call ‘the soul’, was not concentrated merely in one site, but distributed across the body. 

In more recent years, human notions of the brain’s significance have been projected onto technology—and vice versa—with hydraulic pumps, steam engines, the principle of the ‘enchanted loom’ established by Charles Scott Sherrington, and telephone switchboards illustrating the interconnectedness between the study of the brain and that of culture.[1] In the process, the concept of intelligence has increasingly adjusted to these technological advancements. Cybernetics has been at the forefront of discussing how the brain maps onto visions of technology—making both affirmative and critical connections between technology and the study of the brain, thereby observing and bringing about social infrastructures that shape and understand humans as situated within and intelligible through technology. Since the end of the Second World War, technology, conceptual understandings of the brain, and socio-economic advances have aligned to create a modern ideal of human individualism in the West. 

While this genealogy remains largely unbroken it is not without alternatives, since ideas of collective and networked intelligences, embodied cognition, and more-than-human agencies continue to challenge and undermine this idea of a singular, disembodied, and individualistic container of intelligence. This complicates the idea—perhaps as old as computation itself—that one may eventually be able to download one’s own intelligence onto a harddrive or computer. For instance, in January 2024, Neuralink implanted its first computer interface into a human brain within a body otherwise completely paralyzed. However, a month after the surgery, 85% of the link’s threads had become unresponsive, re-opening the question of whether the brain might need a body to function after all.

Nonetheless, the digital may still come to engulf the human and other species completely—after all, the technology used in Neuralink had been tested on apes, pigs, and sheep in experiments for years, causing a high death toll along the way.[2] Acknowledging these and other sacrifices in the service of AI advancement may ask for the lines between self and other, the difference between unworthy and worthy brains, and loci of intelligence to be redrawn. Considering Nancy Fraser’s recent assessment of ‘cannibal capitalism’,[3] which details the consumption of all nature, culture, as well as capacities for care and solidarity, these developments prompt the need for not only an analysis of the neural networks upholding technocracy, but an inquiry into what it means to be an individual that consumes the Earth, and whether there may be other and more nuanced ways of fostering intelligence.

Echoing these modes of consumption is the recent phenomena of AI cannibalism, whereby AI begins to degenerate, feeding upon itself due to a lack of new human-created content to train upon. This demonstrates that the way intelligence is being machinized through AI is not merely unsustainable, but ultimately brings about an implosion of the entire model. The all-engulfing neural network that performs digital cannibalism is a consequence that has troubled engineers hoping for complete automation, and thus serves as an inadvertent disruptor to the logics of continued technological progress. Instead, AI ‘resists’ its own commodification by refusing to develop without exposure to difference.

Yet, predating these potential future developments, the cannibalist motif has an older and longer lineage within the modernist movement of 1920s Brazil. Here, the cannibal was  deployed as a figure of resistance to colonial hierarchies by the poet Oswald de Andrade in his 1928 Manifesto Antropófago, first translated as the ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’.[4] The term ‘anthropophagy’ was originally used in colonial reports to refer to the honourable and ritualized ingestion of the other by Indigenous tribes in the north-eastern regions of the Mata Atlântica (Atlantic Rainforest). Deemed barbaric by European colonizers, the figure of the cannibal evokes the fear of the west upon encountering the complex culture of the Indigenous Caribs and Tupis, thereby justifying their domination. Reclaiming the importance and worth of these ritualized forms of making sense of the world, de Andrade’s manifesto proposed anthropophagy to describe a practice that would appropriate the world’s knowledge without regard for national borders or identities, ingesting both European philosophy and Indigenous epistemologies. De Andrade hoped to create a language and aesthetic that would call into being a society that mirrored anthropophagy’s ingestion of difference, one that entailed lending equal weight to both Indigenous thought and enlightenment ideals. From today’s vantage point, the idea that a bourgeois elite could reclaim Indigenous knowledge practices is telling, and anthropophagy was only marginally successful in maintaining the importance of Indigenous epistemes in their own right. But perhaps the concept and its inherent pitfalls offer new perspectives on AI as the protagonist that is ‘eating’ the world to learn about it.

Read through the complicated history of anthropophagy,[5] the effects of contemporary digital cannibalism seem to suggest that difference and differentiation might be values in themselves. Maintaining and reflecting on the value of that difference,  through forms of expression, understandings of intelligence, all the way down to seemingly immutable objects such as a brain cell or something as intangible as cognition, is something that cannot—or will not—be computable. AI’s incapacity to acknowledge its own forms of reinterpretation, to even understand itself to be outside itself, inadvertently leads to questions of self and other, of how difference is made, and the role of intellectual or cognitive capacity within this process. Going the other way, when read through AI cannibalism, anthropophagy becomes problematized in its supposedly universal aspirations, seeing as the process of ingesting without awareness of difference or context can all too easily slip into pacified atrophy. How can these concepts speak to each other in a day and age in which, once again, particularization is either refused or weaponized?

As ‘AI’ becomes the umbrella term for all forms of technological and future-oriented intervention, it not only takes inspiration from, but factually alters social ideas of brains, the entities that host them, and the environments that they emerge from. Despite the mutability of the brain metaphor, a conception of the way these ideals influence society and collectivity remains underdeveloped. Read through anthropophagy, the notion of digitality eating the human other could engender brains, intelligences, and subjectivities that are collective and shared, as their energies potentially travel and leak across unknown porous boundaries. These findings are emergent in research on plants, fungi, and slime moulds, ecological advocates for a more nuanced discussion on the brain-mind-intelligence-body relation. What forms of ecological normativity, what ideas of society, what economic and social forms of intelligence emerge from these slippages?
 

Free entry. All events and conversations are held (predominantly) in English, with translation into German.

[1] Cornelius Borck, ‘Fühlfäden und Fangarme: Metaphern des Organischen als Dispositiv der Hirnforschung’ in Michael Hagner (Hg.), Ecce Cortex. Beiträge zur Geschichte des modernen Gehirns (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1999), 144–176.

[2] See Rachel Levvy, ‘Exclusive: Musk’s Neuralink faces federal probe, employee backlash over animal tests’, Reuters (6 December 2023), www.reuters.com/technology/musks-neuralink-faces-federal-probe-employee-backlash-over-animal-tests-2022-12-05/.

[3] Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism. How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do about It (London: Verso, 2023).

[4] Oswald de Andrade, ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’, tr., Leslie Barry, Latin American Literary Review, 19/38 (Jul.–Dec., 1991), 38–47.

[5]Oliver Precht, German translator of the Manifesto Antropófago gives a brief overview over the centrality of the manifesto and the concept to Brazilian thought here: https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2022/06/01/oliver-precht-gibt-es-eine-brazilian-theory/