Cognition With and Beyond the Brain: Assemblages, Endosomatization, and AI-Driven Sensory Technologies

This paper explores the potential for reconceptualizing cognition beyond brain-centered and anthropocentric readings, highlighting the entanglement between the body, the environment, and emerging technologies. Critiquing the limitations of computationalist and reductionist perspectives as well as rejecting any possible unifying definition of the phenomenon of cognition, I advocate for a relational, entangled, and process-oriented ontological standpoint to examine cognition as a multilayered process dependent on complex cognitive assemblages. Drawing on the 4E cognition framework (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended), I integrate insights from Hayles’s theory of cognitive assemblages to emphasize how cognition is dynamically shaped and extended through interactions with nonhuman agents and technical objects. Further, building on Stiegler’s reflection on human technogenesis and the relationship between exosomatic organisms and endosomatic processes, I propose a speculative framework to envision forms of artificial endosomatization. Specifically, I discuss the case of AI-driven sensory technologies, imagining how some cognitive processes are not merely extracted but reintegrated into human thought through advanced sensory feedback systems.