There is an old question.
Can machines think like humans? Now that AI can answer my questions and even offer empathy and comfort, the question is fundamentally turned upside down.
Why have we so far taken for granted that only humans can think? Catherine Hayles, a world-renowned posthumanist theorist who has transcended the "human vs. machine" dichotomy and explored their intertwined and coevolutionary relationships, proposes a holistic framework that transcends the anthropocentric perspective on thought and allows us to consider both human consciousness and machine operations.
It provides a new perspective on cognition, leading us toward a more sustainable, enduring, and thriving environment for all living beings and nonhuman others.

Non-thinking can also be captured in recent findings in neuroscience that confirm the existence of non-conscious cognitive processes that are inaccessible to conscious introspection but are essential for consciousness to function.
To fully understand the power of unconscious cognitive processes, we must fundamentally rethink cognition.
Moreover, since the very existence of nonconscious cognitive processes is not well known in the humanities, non-thinking suggests an unknown territory that beckons beyond widely accepted notions of how consciousness operates.
While non-thinking points to the rich possibilities that open up when considering non-conscious cognition, it also points to a powerful force for conceptualizing the interaction between humans and technological systems.
This helps us to understand more clearly the political, cultural, and ethical pillars of life in modern, advanced societies.
--- From the "Prologue"

The notion that consciousness and advanced thinking are necessarily parallel has been a tradition for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, based on anthropocentric predictions.
However, as the limits of consciousness have been widely reassessed in recent years, so too have the functions performed by other cognitive abilities and the crucial roles they play in human neurological processes.
Consciousness occupies a central place in our thinking, not because it is the sum total of cognition, but because it creates the (sometimes fictional) narratives that make sense of our lives and support our basic assumptions about the coherence of the world.
Cognition, on the other hand, is a much broader ability that extends far beyond consciousness to include other neurological brain processes.
Cognition also extends to other living organisms and complex technological systems.
Cognitive abilities that exist beyond consciousness have many names, but I will call them 'non-conscious cognition'.
--- From "01 Unconscious Cognition"

Without consciousness, the anthropocentric biases that have made humans infamous would not be possible, at least not in that sense.
The impression of the embodied self created by higher consciousness goes without saying.
The very function that allows us to perceive ourselves as selves also blinds us, in part, to the complexity of the biological, social, and technological systems in which we are embedded, and easily leads us to believe that we are the most important actors and can control the outcomes of our actions and those of other agents.
But with climate change, ocean acidification, and the greenhouse effect all coming to light, this is becoming increasingly less true.
--- From "02 Interaction between unconscious cognition and consciousness"

New materialists might argue that there are already many discourses, past and present, that emphasize the role of consciousness and cognition, and that it is not their place to repeat or modify these discourses to emphasize materiality in particular.
However, separating materiality from cognition does not make the defense of materiality any stronger.
Rather, it weakens the argument because it erases the crucial role that materiality plays in creating the structures and organizations from which consciousness and cognition emerge.
Creating these structures and organizations is by no means all that the 'liveliness' of materiality can do, but it is a particularly full and important form of material agency.
If we ignore this, we get a very biased and incomplete picture.
Moreover, this erasure leads to overgeneralized analyses, which fail to recognize the core differences between types of material agency.
Perhaps including that difference would weaken the decentralization plan.
From this perspective, it can be said that new materialism confuses the decentralization of humans with the complete erasure of humans.
Given that any decentralized project requires, above all, convincing people why it is beneficial, this confusion is unrealistic and ultimately self-defeating.
--- From "03 Cognitive Unconsciousness and New Materialism"

Tom McCarthy's "The Dregs" and Peter Watts' "Blindsight."
"The Remnants" centers on an unnamed narrator who loses the functions of non-conscious cognition after an accident for which the work is not clearly explained, while "Blindsight" explores the broader context of anomalous forms of consciousness, exploring the stakes involved in the evolutionary path that Homo sapiens (and other life forms on Earth) have taken since they acquired consciousness.
Both novels are heavily influenced by recent neuroscientific research, but they don't simply follow the path that science leads.
Both novels explore the consequences of consciousness far beyond what science has revealed, particularly its phenomenological and cultural dimensions.
"The Remnants" highlights the central importance of unconscious cognition through the loss of unconscious cognition, while "Blindsight" highlights the central importance of unconscious cognition through the portrayal of an alien species that lacks conscious thought entirely but has developed technology far superior to that of Earth.
Both novels show how widely accepted assumptions in traditional Western culture are undermined, even denied, when the supreme status of higher consciousness is called into question.
--- From "04 The Price of Consciousness"

I will use the term 'cognitive aggregate' to describe the ability to mobilize action and material power.
Latour and Deleuze and Guattari (1987) also refer to 'assemblages', but cognitive assemblages have specific characteristics that differ from the way they use them.
In cognitive systems, in particular, the flow of information through the system and the choices and decisions that create, coordinate, and interpret that flow are prominent.
Cognitive ensembles may (and almost always do) include material agents and forces, but it is the perceivers within the ensembles who mobilize these affordances and direct their power to act in complex situations.
--- From "05 Cognitive Set"

High-frequency trading, combined with faster processor speeds, massive increases in computer memory, and fiber-optic cables that allow information to flow at near the speed of light, has created a temporal gap between human and technological cognition, creating a realm of autonomy for technological agency.
Within this space of "punctuated agency," algorithms reason, analyze context, and make decisions in milliseconds.
Ultra-short-term trading emerged when derivatives had already begun to dominate financial trading.
The complex temporality inherent in derivatives interacts with the altered temporality of high-frequency trading, exacerbating the fragility, feedback loops, and self-amplifying dynamics of financial markets.
Analyzing these effects allows us to see how the interpenetration of technological and human cognition redefines the landscape in which human actors move.
--- From "06 Temporality and Cognitive Set"

Cognitive collectives are inherently political.
Cognitive ensembles are composed of human-technology interfaces, multiple levels of interpretation of related choices, and multiple types of information flows, and are influenced by social, technological, cultural, and economic practices that instantiate and negotiate different types of power, stakeholders, and cognitive modes.
In Chapters 5 and 6, we explored how such negotiations take place in urban infrastructure and financial capital, respectively.
Chapter 6 focused on the technological cognition of algorithms and the potential for global change by changing the types of temporality associated with them.
In contrast, this chapter will primarily focus on affective forces within aggregates.
As we will see, this emotional force goes beyond human responses to the supposed reactions of technological artifacts.
This chapter will use African-American writer Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999) as a textbook to examine how this novel creates a richly woven affective, embodied, and interpretive context.
--- From “07 Intuition, Cognitive Collectives, and Political and Historical Affects”

I have always urged the humanities to play a central role in thinking about cognitive ensembles.
Interpretation, meaning, and value are not limited to the humanities.
However, they have always been important areas of exploration within the humanities, including art, literature, philosophy, religious studies, and qualitative history.
You can't add ethics to a system once it's been formed and is in motion.
There is an unfortunate tendency in corporate practice to treat 'ethics' in that way.
Too often, the focus is solely on how to satisfy legal requirements so that no one is sued.
In contrast, effective ethical interventions must be inherent in the functioning of the system itself.
In cognitive ensembles, this means understanding how the interpenetration of human and technological cognition occurs in specific places, and how such analyses can be used to identify inflection points.
Rather than existing in advance as objective realities, inflection points emerge from the interactions/interactions of previous commitments to create new trajectories for collectives, offering a more open, equitable, and sustainable future for humans, non-human life, and technological cognitors (i.e., planetary cognitive ecologies).

--- From "08 The Utopian Potential of Cognitive Aggregation"