My First Book and Where It Led

This essay traces my research trajectory from my first book, The Cosmic Web (1984) to my latest book, Bacteria to AI (2025a). It begins with what David Beer calls the “articulation problem,” that is, the limitations that arise when one speaks from within the field (physical, social, mathematical, theoretical) in which one is located. These include paradoxes of self-reference and the impossibility of constructing a logical system that is both true and complete (Gödel’s Theorem). In How We Became Posthuman (1999), the articulation problem surfaced within cybernetics in the form of second-order cybernetics, which recognized that the observer himself/herself is located within a system that can be observed in turn. With Science and Technology Studies (STS) well-established by the late 1990s, the articulation problem took a wider significance when STS researchers argued that humans themselves always speak from the human umwelt (world-construction), so that the “laws of nature” science identifies are never about nature as such but about our experience of nature. Thus the articulation problem morphed into the species-construction problem, which I explored in my last three books, How We Think (2012), Unthought (2017), and Bacteria to AI (2025a).