Distributed Cognition
The framework, pioneered by Edward Hutchins, holding that cognition is not the exclusive property of individual human minds but is distributed across socio-technical systems, material environments, and social networks. Hutchins’s foundational 1995 paper “How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds” demonstrates that “the classical cognitive science approach can be applied with little modification to a unit of analysis that is larger than an individual person” — that socio-technical systems “may have cognitive properties in their own right that cannot be reduced to the cognitive properties of individual persons.”
Distributed cognition (also called cognitive ecology) “cracks open the humanist paradigm to reveal a host of social agencies in the panorama — no mere metaphors, but distinct creatures.” From this base, a cascade of radical empirical claims follows: Arthur Koestler’s holonic interparticipatory social fabric; Lynn Margulis’s human body as symbiotic superorganism of heterogeneous minds; James Shapiro’s “all living cells are cognitive”; Michael Levin’s research into basal cognitions and “surprising competencies” of non-neural systems; and the possibility of agential, disembodied minds in a “latent” non-physical space.
In the Noöpunk frame, distributed cognition becomes the scientific grounding for an economic and aesthetic program: if minds are distributed across organisms, ecosystems, and socio-technical networks, then economic systems that recognize only the individual human subject as an agent are empirically false — and the development of contextual, intersubjective monies that can engage diverse intelligences is both necessary and possible.