Cognition and Hypocognition

With my colleague, Bruce Edmonds, I have finally managed to publish a paper mentioning the ecocyborg. Putting a concept that has, to some extent been something personal, into a scientific article — particularly a co-written one — felt a bit like an ‘exposure’. Was this thought something that could withstand the scrutiny of peer review? Seemingly yes (though not without major revisions…).

How on earth did I end up writing the piece with Bruce? The context is a special issue of Futures on ‘Simulation and Dissimulation’ put together in the Covid crisis, in which various governments from local to national used computer simulations as part of the decision-making process. Though a potential source of consternation, it seemed important to emphasize that decision-making processes not using simulation are no less potentially flawed. After all, in complex systems, whatever makes us think humans necessarily have the cognitive wherewithal to make ‘the right’ decisions? ‘Hypocognition’ is a term apparently coined by social anthropologist Robert Levy in a study of Tahitians. It has been adopted by Kruger and Dunning to describe the psychological phenomenon in which people with insufficient knowledge can overestimate their capability. It is where the Dunning-Kruger effect comes from. It seemed a bit hypocognitive to implicitly assume that humans would definitely make good decisions without computers by raising the issue of dis-simulations in the first place. (Not that we should necessarily trust computer simulations any more than we should trust other humans…)

That’s all very well, but where does the ecocyborg come in? Once we accept that we need to augment our cognition with computer simulations, we have crossed a line. Computers have become embedded in decisions about humans’ relationships with the environment. We think and behave differently in the environment as a result, and the environment itself is then other than it would have been had we not used computers. This isn’t necessarily full ecocyborg yet, but it’s certainly a step on the path.

It felt a bit like a ‘revelation’ that there were no social-ecological systems as such — when microplastics exist at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the top of Mount Everest, and in placentas, technology has embedded itself everywhere. Just as there are no ‘pristine’ ecosystems untouched by humanity, there are no ‘pure’ social-ecological systems untouched by technology. That seems to be a radical claim to make, but I realize as I write this that I believe it.

The surprising bit of the article to me was the conclusion. It was Bruce who wrote the text for the concluding sentence of the article, “An alternative to being prejudiced against these strange new beings is to embrace them and educate them to be well-adjusted and useful members of our society.” This was so different to my instinctive reactions, which I think could be largely characterized as fear and grief. But however much we may be afraid of the power of technology (most major human innovations from agriculture to the internet have been the subject of anxiety) and grieve the loss of Nature, there needs to be an acceptance that we are all, through our daily choices and behaviours, eliminating Nature, changing the climate, and radically altering our relationship with the environment. Wouldn’t it be better to do that mindfully, rather than by ‘accident’ as a by-product of making our lives more convenient and comfortable? And if our minds are not up to the job, is it so wrong to augment our cognition with computation?