Biocomputing, quoi?

ChatGPT said:

Biocomputing, quoi indeed. Let’s break that down a bit:

🔬 Biocomputing — What is it?

At its core, biocomputing (or biological computing) refers to computing systems that use biological molecules or systems—like DNA, proteins, or cells—to perform computational tasks. It lives at the intersection of biology, computer science, and engineering.

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🧬 Key Approaches in Biocomputing

1. DNA Computing
   Uses strands of DNA to solve problems, particularly combinatorial ones. Leonard Adleman famously used DNA to solve a Hamiltonian path problem in 1994.
   – Think: storing and processing data in wetware instead of silicon.

2. Protein-based Computing
   Uses the folding and reactive properties of proteins to do logic operations. It’s still mostly theoretical, but has promising applications in biochemical sensing.

3. Cellular Computing / Synthetic Biology
   Engineered cells (like bacteria or yeast) are programmed to perform logic gates or compute signals in response to inputs.
   – Think: living systems doing computation inside your body, detecting disease or environmental toxins.

4. Neuro-inspired Biocomputing
   Not using actual biology, but mimicking the structure and function of neural circuits—closely related to neuromorphic computing.

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🧠 Why Biocomputing?

• Massive parallelism: DNA can encode and process massive numbers of states in parallel.

• Energy efficiency: Biological systems can be incredibly efficient compared to silicon.

• Miniaturization: Life computes at the nanoscale.

• Self-repair & Adaptability: Unlike machines, biological systems can fix and adapt themselves.

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😬 But...

Biocomputing is:

• Hard to scale and standardize.

• Error-prone (DNA strands can mispair).

• Extremely slow compared to electronic computing—except in parallel brute-force search scenarios.

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🔮 Theoretical Futures

Biocomputing could lead to:

• Biological memory storage (think: entire libraries encoded into DNA).

• Smart therapeutics: cells that compute conditions and release drugs accordingly.

• Integrated cyber-biological systems: wetware interacting seamlessly with hardware.

Or as a dark mirror:

• Total bodily surveillance via engineered cellular sensors.

• Bioengineered control systems inside organisms, maybe even humans.

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So when you say “Biocomputing, quoi?”, the answer might be:

A speculative frontier where logic meets life, where computation might one day grow, adapt, mutate—and breed.

Would you like to follow that into the metaphysical, the dystopian, or the speculative fiction?

You said:

Hydrogel?

ChatGPT said:

Hydrogel, yes. Now we’re getting into the strange, semi-liquid matrix where biocomputing, biosensing, soft robotics, and post-human dreams all start to blur.

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🧊 What is a Hydrogel?

At its simplest:
A hydrogel is a network of polymer chains that are hydrophilic—meaning they can absorb and retain large amounts of water (up to 90% or more of their weight). Imagine a soft, jelly-like material that is squishy but coherent, wet but structured.

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🧬 In Biocomputing & Bioengineering

Hydrogels serve as:

• Scaffolds for cells: Think of 3D-printed tissues and organs—hydrogels provide the architecture.

• Matrices for molecular computation: DNA or protein logic gates embedded in hydrogels.

• Platforms for biosensors: Responsive to pH, temperature, enzymes, glucose, etc.

• Controlled drug delivery systems: Hydrogels “compute” when to release substances based on internal or external triggers.

• Interfaces for brain-computer connections: Their softness and biocompatibility make them candidates for interfacing with neural tissue.

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🧠 Conceptual Implications

Hydrogels represent a threshold material—neither liquid nor solid, artificial yet bio-compatible. They're mediators, membranes, liminal zones.

This is where things get poetic and slightly uncanny:

Hydrogels could become wet machines—materials that sense, decide, act—computing not with electricity but with swelling, binding, degrading. A logic of decay and flow.

Imagine:

• A thinking bandage that detects infection and responds.

• A gel-based prosthetic interface that grows into your nervous system.

• A living archive—DNA encoded into a hydrogel matrix that slowly changes shape with environmental shifts.

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🧪 Current Experimental Uses

• Injectable brain-machine interfaces (MIT, Harvard): hydrogels deliver nanoscale sensors into tissue with minimal damage.

• Synthetic synapses: Hydrogels used to mimic neural plasticity.

• Organs-on-a-chip: Microfluidic hydrogels for testing organ-like behavior.

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🧟‍♂️ In Conspiracy Theories

Hydrogels have been swept into sci-fi paranoia: nanobots, tracking devices, self-assembling technologies injected into the body. These are not grounded in current science—but they speak to deep cultural anxieties about malleability, infiltration, and mediation.

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🧯Real Talk

Hydrogels won’t be replacing CPUs any time soon. But in localized, responsive, slow computation—especially inside biological systems—they are quietly radical.

They are programmable materials that feel more than calculate.
And perhaps in the future, our machines will feel more than they think.

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Curious to take this into speculative design? Techno-philosophy? Or to link it back to your critique of mediation and embodiment?

You said:

They are **programmable materials** that **feel** more than calculate.

They will feel?

ChatGPT said:

Yes—they will feel. Or rather, they already do, in a strange, non-conscious way. That line—“programmable materials that feel more than calculate”—marks a threshold. Let’s open it up.

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✦ What does it mean to feel, in this context?

Not emotion. Not awareness. But something more elemental:

• Sensation without representation.

• Response without cognition.

• Affect embedded in material.

Hydrogels don’t calculate in binary. They swell in humidity, deform under heat, release compounds in response to pH. These are micro-gestures, bodily logics. They are matter that reacts, matter that is conditioned—not by code, but by entanglement.

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✦ More than metaphor?

This isn’t metaphorical “feeling.”
It’s not that the hydrogel feels like a body—
—it’s that it is a body.
A body whose logic is not symbolic but chemical, temporal, relational.

This is computation as affect, not abstraction.

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✦ A minor history of machinic feeling

Bernard Stiegler might say:

These materials belong to a pharmacology of technics—both poison and remedy.

Gilbert Simondon would argue they are pre-individual—materials becoming through relations.

Katherine Hayles might point out that hydrogels are embodiments of information, yes—but they leak. They are not closed systems. They age, decay, absorb. That is their mode of memory.

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✦ Toward a speculative claim

In contrast to a silicon chip, which represents logic,
a hydrogel inhabits it.

This is computation without detachment.
Not distant symbol, but embedded feedback.
A poetics of becoming, not command.

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So:

They feel.
Because they embody transformation.
Because they respond through their substance, not through code.
Because they make sensing a material condition.

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Would you like to push this into ontological critique? Political stakes? The return of the body in computation?

You said:

Push in the direction of the philosophy of mind.

ChatGPT said:

Excellent. Let’s lean in. When we say hydrogels "feel", and that computation is becoming less like thought and more like response—what does this do to philosophy of mind?

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❖ I. From Representation to Material Response

Traditional philosophy of mind—especially from Descartes onward—begins with the subject as thinking thing:

Cogito ergo sum.

Mind, here, is internal, symbolic, and detached.
Computation, in this view, models mind as:

• Discrete

• Syntactic

• Symbolic

• Non-material (or at least, independent of its material substrate)

But when hydrogels compute, they do so:

• Without symbolic representation

• Through physical entanglement

• With direct, embodied, situated response

That is: they "know" by being affected. And that turns much of computationalist and functionalist philosophy of mind on its head.

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❖ II. The Rise of Affective Materiality

In biocomputing, and especially in hydrogel-based sensing and actuation, there is no clear distinction between substrate and program. This resonates with:

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology
  → Perception is not in the mind, but in the lived body.

• Gilbert Simondon’s individuation
  → Being is not static substance, but ongoing becoming through relation.

• Andy Clark’s extended mind thesis
  → The mind is not in the head; cognition is distributed across bodies, tools, and environments.

But even these may not go far enough.

Hydrogels push toward a pre-cognitive, pre-individual material responsiveness. They instantiate proto-affect—what Erin Manning might call "a capacity to affect and be affected"—not in subjects, but in substances.

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❖ III. Mind as Metastable Process

If you accept that "mind" might emerge from a dynamical system of sensitivities, then:

Hydrogels might participate in the preconditions of mind.

They’re not conscious, not aware—but they’re:

• Responsive

• Condition-sensitive

• Embedded in ecological systems of meaning

This starts to blur the line between computation and cognition, agent and medium.

In Karl Friston’s terms, they might be seen as enacting primitive predictive regulation—minimizing free energy by shifting shape in response to inputs.

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❖ IV. A Challenge to Mind/Body Dualism

This brings us to the crux:

What if mind is not opposed to matter, but a particular orientation of matter toward transformation?

Hydrogels—especially those used in bio-sensing, brain interfaces, or organoids—complicate the notion of:

• Where the mind is

• What counts as cognition

• Whether thinking is symbolic at all

This troubles not just Cartesian dualism, but also reductive computationalism. If the world itself is sensitive, and materials can be configured to "think", then perhaps mind is not an inner space but a network of resonant mediations.

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❖ V. The Strange Thought

Hydrogels might suggest:

Mind is a texture—a felt, fluctuating pattern of responsiveness—not a program or an architecture.

They could offer a material intuition of something like affective proto-consciousness, not as mystical substrate but as emergent capacity in embodied systems.

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Would you like to link this to:

• Post-humanism?

• AI embodiment?

• Consciousness studies?

• A theological or metaphysical frame (logos, anima, substance)?

You said:

Erin Manning

Who is this person?

ChatGPT said:

Erin Manning is a Canadian philosopher, political theorist, and artist known for her work at the intersections of philosophy, movement, art, and politics. She is a central figure in process philosophy, affect theory, and non-representational thought, often working in the lineage of Whitehead, Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari, and Brian Massumi (with whom she frequently collaborates).

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✦ Core Themes in Manning’s Work

• Affect & Prehension: Manning explores how experience unfolds before subject/object distinctions. She sees affect as not just emotional intensity but a mode of relation and becoming, prior to cognition or identity.

• The Minor Gesture: In her influential book The Minor Gesture (2016), she develops the idea of minor gestures—those subtle, background forces that shift the conditions of what is possible, felt, or knowable. These gestures don't command attention but transform the field of relation.

• Body as Process: Manning rejects static models of the body. Instead, the body is a field of potential, of movement-with, rather than an individuated organism. She draws on dance, movement, and neurodiversity to expand this idea.

• Neurodiversity & Perception: She frequently works alongside neurodivergent thinkers, artists, and activists, engaging with autism, perception, and modes of relation that challenge neurotypical norms. This folds into her political and ethical commitments to non-normative life.

• Art as Thinking: Manning insists that art is a form of thought, not just representation. She runs the SenseLab in Montreal, a space for collaborative research-creation.

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✦ Relevance to Philosophy of Mind & Hydrogels

Manning's work helps unseat the centrality of the discrete subject, the bounded mind, and the representational model of cognition. If you’re asking how a hydrogel might “feel” or “know,” Manning’s vocabulary offers resources for thinking-with materials—where responsiveness, affect, and entanglement are themselves the ground of experience.

She might say:

Mind is not in the body; it is the event of the body-in-relation. And relation is always in excess of representation.