Experiments in Synthetic Logic (A Roundtable)

Description

This roundtable interrogates the politics and paradigms of synthetic sentience across several cosmological frameworks, which, from their rootedness in creative practice, seek to cross or expand the boundaries of dominant epistemologies, challenging binary distinctions and classical logic.

Any attempt to conceptualise synthetic sentience will ultimately reveal that there is a dependency on concepts of life. Ancient Greece had two terms for life: zoe and bios. Zoe is dynamic, connective life common to all living beings. Bios is political, intellectual life. Philosophers from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt have emphasised the importance of the political in human life and thus, synthetic life has typically been framed in opposition to the human-ness of bios. Thinking through practice, we return to zoe as the lens for synthetic sentience through two public art installations that translate mushrooms (in the first case) and discarded objects (in the second case) into sounding landscapes. The conceptual shift from bios to zoe does not merely relink the synthetic to synthesis, or even sympoiesis, but constitutes a gesture, which is, ironically, political even though it challenges foundational Western divisions between human and non-human. Drawing on the practice examples, Gregory Bateson's ecological thought, Gordon Pask's conversation theory, as well as Chinese philosophical traditions, we suggest a conception of synthetic logic as a logic of initiation. It is the foundation for a technology that facilitates transformative conversations, engendering alternative ecologies and enabling new forms of sentience that transcend the human/non-human binary.

The roundtable further explores synthetic logic through the paradigm of more-than-human data sets. We argue that current data infrastructures perpetuate anthropocentric ontologies, erasing non-human subjects and diverse epistemologies. Drawing on Karen Barad's work on agential realism and new materialist perspectives, we examine how joint bank accounts embody the incommensurability between post-capitalist measurement systems and ecological values. In the kin-bank application project, accounts become sites where multiple value systems intersect and conflict, revealing the limitations of purely representational approaches to understanding human-environment relations. By examining how synthetic data might represent interspecies and ecological relationships that conventional data models render invisible, this position demonstrates how relational ontologies might reshape synthetic sentience. Drawing from the concept of Leibnizian compossibilities, we explore how synthetic logic might accommodate multiple possible worlds simultaneously, enabling pluriversal approaches to sentience that upend deterministic, mechanistic paradigms of the Western intellectual tradition.

Exploring alternative taxonomies and logics for more-than-human ecologies this roundtable offers new paradigms for conceptualising synthetic sentience in a pluriversal world. While the roundtable will include short presentations, it will be conversational in format and structured to encourage audience participation.

Requested time: ~60 minutes.

Period	16 Jul 2025 → 18 Jul 2025
Event title	Politics of the Machine 2025: Synthetic Sentience
Event type	Conference
Location	Perth, AustraliaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International