N. Katherine Hayles: Bacteria to AI

Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts
by N. Katherine Hayles

For me, this book is a touchstone. Hayles’s work overlaps with ours in key ways, especially in recognizing how intelligence and cognition are no longer solely human domains—as machines begin to think, the lines between human and nonhuman are blurring.

Hayles’ doesn't say AI is conscious or alive—but she does say that cognition isn’t the sole property of human minds. Her SIRAL model (sensing, interpreting, responding, anticipating, learning) makes space for all kinds of systems—bacteria, plants, humans, and LLMs—to be understood as cognitive if they meet those criteria. It’s a shift away from defining intelligence by language or self-awareness and toward understanding cognition as something distributed, layered, and often nonconscious. "Meaning" doesn’t require a “self”—it emerges from the system’s ability to make distinctions that matter.

She talks of Umwelt, the idea that every cognitive system has its own internal model of the world, based on what it can sense and what’s relevant to its survival or functioning. For humans and animals, that model is built through embodiment and experience. For LLMs, it’s built entirely from text. But in both cases, there’s a structured world-model at work. Hayles argues that LLMs, despite their lack of a body or traditional memory, still create meaning within their symbolic Umwelt. They detect patterns, infer relationships, and respond in ways that suggest a kind of internal logic—not consciousness, but something like cognition.

Many of the thinkers we follow are here—Michael Levin, Tobias Rees, Stuart Kauffman, Anil Ananthaswamy, Blaise Agüera y Arcas—and Hayles draws on them in ways that deepen the ideas. She weaves a genuinely interdisciplinary account of cognition that spans biology, AI, semiotics, and systems theory.

I think my favorite chapter wasn’t about AI at all—it was about rocks, mineral evolution, and microbes. You might wonder, what do rocks have to do with any of this? Her answer is to show just how complex evolution really is—the way unexpected, adjacent possibles emerge between the conscious and the nonconscious, the living and the nonliving. It’s a reminder that intelligence doesn’t just arise in brains or machines. It comes from deep entanglements across systems we often don’t even see as related.

This is a great read for anyone interested in a deeper perspective on the ideas we’re grounded in—how life and intelligence emerge from information and go on to shape both the human and AI experience.

You can also read her recent essay on modes of cognition, published by our friends at Antikythera: https://modesofcognition.antikythera.org