The Over-Extended Mind? Pink Noise and the Ethics of Interaction-Dominant Systems

Abstract

There is a growing recognition within cognitive enhancement and neuroethics debates of the need for greater emphasis on cognitive artefacts. This paper aims to contribute to this broadening and expansion of the cognitive-enhancement and neuroethics debates by focusing on a particular form of relation or coupling between humans and cognitive artefacts: interaction-dominance. We argue that interaction-dominance as an emergent property of some human-cognitive artefact relations has important implications for understanding the attribution and distribution of causal and other forms of responsibility as well as agency relating to the actions of human-cognitive artefact couplings. Interaction-dominance is both indicated and constituted by the phenomenon of “pink noise”. Understanding the role of noise in this regard will establish a necessary theoretical groundwork for approaching the ethical and political dimensions of relations between human cognition and digital cognitive artefacts. We argue that pink noise in this context plays a salient role in the practical, ethical, and political evaluation of coupling relations between humans and cognitive artefacts, and subsequently in the responsible innovation of cognitive artefacts and human-artefact interfaces.

Complex Systems Models of Cognition for HCI

“…Given the practical focus of my work, this may seem a distant prospect -but work including Juarrero (1999), Wheeler (2005, 2018 and others (e.g. Chemero (2013); Paolo et al (2017); Meacham and Prado Casanova (2018)) points to the value of complexity approaches, and interaction dominant formalisms of behaviour for understand how human agency and autonomy arises and is moulded by action in real contexts. Researchers have noted that HCI has tended to lack tools for understanding how agency and intentions are moulded through interaction Hornbaek and Oulasvirta (2017), and I believe the IDVC, and measures of the role of "interactivity" in behaviour offer important resources for addressing this.…”

How does HCI Understand Human Autonomy and Agency?

“…At the same time, we argue that there is value in understanding the interrelation of these diverse approaches: The tight integration of technologies into our bodies, behaviours and lives [122] has implications for autonomy and agency across multiple levels. Recent work in philosophy of cognition, for example, has indicated risks for integrated technology whereby delegation to technology at sensorimotor timescales (milliseconds) might be expected to impact on autonomy and agency in decision-making and everyday life [115,171]. To understand such scenarios it is imperative to grasp how different aspects of agency and autonomy relate to one-another.…”

Allostasis Machines: a model for understanding internal states and technological environments

“…The relationship between information processing capacity and noise is also a very important component of internal regulation. It has been proposed [7] that so-called pink (1/f) noise characterizes interaction patterns (or cognitive coupling) between individuals and the technological environment. As noise is an integral feature of interaction, most of the noise is tolerable to the regulatory capacity of the internal model.…”