# LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 1 (w/ N. Katherine Hayles)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disintegrator-6686019/longue-dur-e-ii-pt-1-w-n-katherine-hayles
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/disintegrator-6686019/longue-dur-e-ii-pt-1-w-n-katherine-hayles.md
Podcast: [Disintegrator](https://stenobird.com/podcast/disintegrator-6686019)
Published: 2026-02-18T14:57:42+00:00
Episode link: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/longue-duree-ii-pt-1-w-n-katherine-hayles--70133235
Audio file: https://api.spreaker.com/download/episode/70133235/hayles.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/disintegrator-6686019/episodes/longue-dur-e-ii-pt-1-w-n-katherine-hayles
Duration seconds: 3529

## Resource

We're joined by N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor in English at UCLA, to think through cognition in the broadest and most scaled sense. Hayles is among the foundational thinkers of posthumanism in its Anglophone register, and this conversation tracks her intellectual trajectory from the question of how we became posthuman to her most recent project: an integrated cognitive framework that extends from bacteria to AI. The opening provocation is one she has been developing since large language models appeared as a genuinely literary phenomenon, the claim that LLMs do not speak natural language but produce a computational simulation of it. The umwelt of an LLM (its 'operative world-horizon,' in Uexküll's sense) overlaps with the human umwelt enough for communication to occur, but the divergences are large and consequential. This leads to the question of cognition itself. Against definitions that make consciousness the threshold of cognitive status, Hayles proposes the SIEPAL framework: Sensing, Interpreting, Responding, Anticipating, Learning, under which bacteria, algorithms, and ecosystems all qualify as cognitive. The non-conscious, on this account, isn't pre-cognitive but is in many ways more cognitively capable: faster, closer to environmental noise, less committed to the narratives of coherence that consciousness requires. The final section breaks genuinely new ground with Hayles's turn to analog computation: the argument that digital computation is a historical blip, that biological life has always operated on analog principles, and that the future of computation (neuromorphic chips, organoid computers, hybrid analog-digital architectures) represents not a departure from but a return to what life has always done. She proposes the analog humanitie…

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