Offload Syndrome

A fictional condition from Chen Qiufan's story "As Water Over Your Scattered Bodies," read in How to Think Unlike Humans? A clinician explains that the body has dropped out of the integrated cognitive system because two intelligent subjects contend inside one body schema: a diabetic who manages blood sugar with an algorithmic eSpoon finds a childhood dessert tastes worse from an ordinary spoon, the algorithm's residue outlasting the device. Its diagnosis: humans have surrendered agency to distributed intelligence whose logic couples badly with human cognition. Chen pairs it with Jemisin's narrator who becomes New York and calls his story the inverse: cognition fused with external technology until the body is left behind, "unconscious subjectivity going haywire." His lesson is constant self-recalibration. It dramatizes Cognitive Infrastructures and Hayles's Cognitive Nonconscious in one body, and echoes the Mutual Prediction paper's worry about humans becoming the cognized rather than the cognizers.