AI: The Collective Brain

Taking as a starting point the convergences between neuroscience and broader ideas of intelligence—from plants, fungi, and spirits to digital humans and collective neurons—AI (Ancestral Immediacies): The Collective Brain explores critiques of normative ideas of the individual brain that deem it the proprietor of consciousness, intelligence, and subjectivity. The programme considers how such notions, which 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 and festival asks what other brain metaphors exist and have existed, and how they might inform the social in different ways. Can AI be used to strengthen sociality against pathology, to reconnect minds with bodies, and repair relations to the wounded Earth?